How the MIC and the Neocons Keep America Losing
It is painfully apparent to anyone of sound mind and judgment that there’s something gravely wrong with America’s current military capacity and our ability to project power in the world. The WWII-era fighting force composed of fourteen million GIs with a muscular industrial base backing them up is almost unimaginable today. In the last three years, five different US embassies have been hastily evacuated: Sudan, Afghanistan, Belarus, Ukraine and Niger. Americans are held hostage in Gaza; commercial shipping traffic is blockaded and our ground and naval forces are shot at daily with impunity. How did America go from winning the Cold War and becoming the sole global superpower in the 90s to the state of disarray that we find ourselves in now?
One reason is financial. All warfare has an underlying economic basis and a nation’s military power reflects its economic structure. Today in America the “exorbitant privilege” of the US dollar and the unlimited printing press of fiat currency it enables means current US defense spending is essentially covered by debt: indeed at least 30% of the current national debt consists of military overspend from the so-called Global War on Terror. This reality has created an absence of strategic discipline, and a military policy that prioritizes a tiny guild of contractors feeding an obese top-heavy structure rather than winning wars.
The roots of the current situation reach back to the election of Reagan in 1980. Reagan started a pivot from 35 years of containment to a more aggressive approach, covered by deficits. Channeled economically, politically, culturally, socially and through covert action these measures helped to bring an end to the Soviet Union, but at a critical strategic cost. Partly as a consequence of the central economic role that the USSR had come to play for the US defense industry, the opportunity to positively engage with Russia after 1991 was rejected by the dominant neoconservative faction and their military-industrial complex allies in Washington. Originally Trotskyites, the Neocons had taken root in the corporatist wing of the Republican Party and gradually increased in influence, to eventually become dominant in the Washington Beltway foreign policy and emblematic of its mentality of continuous warfare funded by an unlimited fiat printing press.
The so-called “Peace Dividend” that followed the end of the Cold War was redirected into expanding NATO instead of ending it. The goal was to enrich the military-industrial complex by creating more clients to buy US weapons, at the expense of the opportunity to partner with Russia. Promises of not expanding NATO eastward into former Warsaw Pact countries were broken and NATO troops were deployed on Russia’s border.
The priorities of Neocon Washington were also projected into US policy in Africa. After Liberian warlord Charles Taylor sponsored the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone in the late ’90s, the RUF quickly captured most of the country, particularly the diamond-rich areas of the north. In the process they committed atrocious acts of savagery against Sierra Leone’s civilian population. Into this maelstrom entered Executive Outcomes (EO), a South African PMC. EO initially deployed 60 ex-South African Special Forces personnel fresh from ending a civil war that had raged for years in Angola, and eventually expanded to around 200 well-trained personnel. Using mostly equipment abandoned by Sierra Leone’s disintegrated army, within 6 months they’d retaken the country and restored peace and order to the extent that free and fair elections could be held 3 months later.
Executive Outcomes was sponsored by an association of diamond miners who wanted their mines back. This group was willing to sponsor an ongoing 30-man EO presence to retrain a new Sierra Leone armed forces while providing a backstop in case the rebels returned. Susan Rice, then Bill Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, vetoed this proposal: “We don’t want any white mercenaries in Africa,” she declared. The result? Within months the RUF and a new group called the West Side Boys had returned, killing, looting and pillaging the country. 11,000 UN Peacekeepers at a cost of $1B+ per year in 1990s US dollars were now deployed. But they didn’t solve the problem, and not until the British SAS killed hundreds of rebels during a large hostage rescue mission of Irish Peacekeepers did the country start to stabilize.
This debacle in West Africa occurred on the heels of an even greater catastrophe further East. In the spring of 1994, after decades of simmering ethnic hatred in Rwanda, the Hutus launched a program of manual genocide. Over a four-month period they killed almost 1,000,000 of their Tutsi neighbors, a murder rate exceeding 8,000 per day, mainly using machetes and farm tools. Here as well EO made a formal proposal to the UN and the US government to intervene and prevent further slaughter. The proposal was also rejected by Rice in Washington. EO stayed out and the carnage continued unabated until Paul Kagame’s exiled Rwandan Patriotic Front invaded from Uganda and retook the country.
By the late 90s, with Washington engaged in combat in the former Yugoslavia, a new kind of enemy was emerging: jihadist Islam. In 1993 a poorly conceived and badly executed nation-building exercise in Somalia had already supplied a foretaste when the Battle of Mogadishu resulted in the death of 18 US Special Operations personnel and 73 wounded after repeated requests for air support were rejected by an indecisive Clinton administration. By 1999, unanswered attacks in Nairobi, Dar As Salaam, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and New York had claimed hundreds of lives and mauled a US Destroyer, USS Cole. Finally, on Sept 11th, 2001, this series of body blows reached its spectacular culmination.
In the aftermath of 9/11, President Bush met with his War Cabinet to plan a response to the costliest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor. As the Pentagon smoldered, the Department of Defense recommended a bombing campaign and a Ranger raid against an Al Qaeda-linked farm, but wanted to wait at least six months before beginning combat operations in order to avoid the Afghan winter. The CIA, for their part, recommended an Unconventional Warfare campaign. They wanted to supercharge the Northern Alliance, who’d been fighting the Taliban for a decade, with US airpower directed by SOF advisors. The CIA plan was adopted. The Taliban and their guests Al-Qaeda were routed in weeks by a highly aggressive SOF targeting cycle which gave them no quarter.
The US response to 9/11 should have resembled a Scipio Africanus-style Roman punitive raid, killing all Taliban and Al-Qaeda remnants within reach, including those sheltering in the tribal areas of Pakistan, and then withdrawing. Instead, the Neocons saw a lucrative opportunity to ‘nation build.’ Because the Pentagon runs on the bureaucratic principle of budget cycles and the internal war for promotion rather than the principle of victory, a vastly inflated occupational army ultimately comprising 120,000 soldiers was deployed to the country. This force represented a repetition of the failed Soviet plan of the 80s, to the extent of occupying the same bases.
Ignoring every historical lesson of successful counter-insurgencies, experienced soldiers were rotated on 6-12 month intervals with fresh units, losing all continuity and local intelligence. The top commander spot rotated 18 times in 20 years. Concerned as per usual with marketing for their defense contractor clients, the Neocons dragged dozens of largely unwilling NATO members to Afghanistan, producing a dysfunctional chaos of individual national mandates. Many nations wouldn’t patrol at night or engage in offensive combat missions. When the German army arrived in Kabul in the spring of 2002, among their concerns was finding appropriate housing for all the gay couples deployed in the Bundeswehr.
The Neocon plan for Afghanistan, or at least the story, was to impose a centralized Jeffersonian democracy on a largely illiterate, semi-feudal tribal nation by throwing infinite money at a paper-thin civil society. The result, unsurprisingly, was corruption, not infrastructure. Meanwhile, the military operation remained chaos incarnate. Not only was there never a truly empowered supreme commander, but authorities were split between the US Ambassador, CIA Station chief, the current 4-star US General, the CENTCOM Commander and their staff residing in Qatar or Tampa and various representatives from NATO. This committee from Hell produced predictable results.
In the 1980s the US provided lethal aid to the Mujahedeen fighting the Soviets running to $1B a year including state-of-the-art Stinger missiles, which knocked down an average of one Soviet aircraft per day. Nobody provided this kind of aid to the Taliban: not one NATO/Coalition aircraft was lost to a guided missile. But air supremacy wasn’t enough. The Taliban were a self-funded insurgency composed of mostly illiterate fighters using weapons designed more than 70 years earlier. Although they lacked the techno-wizardry of the Pentagon forces, their budget grew to approximately $600mm per year from tolling narcotics and the import of fuel used to feed a thirsty Pentagon presence. Fuel logistics alone cost the Pentagon tens of billions per year, despite the fact that a vast reserve of crude – Amu-Darya Field in Balkh Province Afghanistan – had been drilled, proven and properly cemented by Soviet forces before they left in 1989. But what could have supplied the entire Afghanistan operation with low-cost, reliable hydrocarbon energy was ignored in favor of paying, by the time the fuel reached the vehicles, an operational cost of $250 per gallon.
It’s fair to compare the longevity of the Soviet-built Afghan forces, holding on for years after the Soviets left, versus the Pentagon-built Afghan forces collapsing only weeks after the American withdrawal. Today of course the Taliban rule Afghanistan with an iron sandal. The trillions of dollars and thousands of lives expended by America’s youth were completely wasted – and nobody has ever been held to account. The Taliban have not become more moderate – they are exactly the same group as before and hosting more terror groups than ever. Al Qaeda is resident once again in Kabul, and now known to be gathering means to enrich uranium in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan wasn’t even the worst US military failure over the last twenty years. Almost exactly the same Neocon fever dream also played out in Iraq. Here again the fantasy of deposing a dictator in the name of installing democracy in a country with a culture with no history of representative democracy followed its inevitable course. After an initial phase of 24/7 war porn of the US invasion, broadcast by the network media through “embedded journalists,” the Pentagon was quickly dragged into an urban counter-insurgency quagmire involving a Sunni faction rebranded as Al Qaeda in Iraq, Saddam regime holdovers, and Shia insurgents, armed, trained and sometimes led by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
This development was not inevitable. I still recall a sliding door moment early in the conflict when the Director of the Iraqi National Intelligence Service came to see me with his CIA liaison officer in early 2004. He described the scale of the efforts by the IRGC Quds Forces to infiltrate Iraqi society and establish a proxy capability similar to Hezbollah in Lebanon and requested that we develop a joint program to locate and eradicate the Iranian presence. Unfortunately, the program was blocked by then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, on the grounds that Iran was not our enemy and that the US must support the political process in Iraq. In the event, this political process spun into a vicious civil war, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. Meanwhile, our ‘non-enemy’ Iran flooded the country with thousands of lethal EFP roadside bombs, to shred armored vehicles with American soldiers inside.
Today Iraq is subjugated by Iran with Tehran making key decisions and approving all key ministry appointments, including who becomes Prime Minister. Their power is backed by the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) or Hashd al Shabi – an Iranian-controlled proxy mirroring Hezbollah in Lebanon. The PMUs are paid for by the Iraqi Government, armed in most cases with American weapons, and led either by Iranian-appointed commanders or by serving IRGC officers directly.
America continues to wage futile forever wars of convenience because Washington believes we are immune to reality and evolved beyond history. The grand strategy of the so-called Global War on Terror was conceived on a false premise promoted by Neocon think tanks and the Military-Industrial Complex that American drone technology could revolutionize counter-insurgency warfare through surgical strikes targeting only the leadership of terror organizations. This delusion produced sclerosis in the military by stripping authority away from field commanders concerning when to shoot and when to hold fire. A fixation on large orbiting cameras likewise devolved into high-tech voyeurism with lawyers, not commanders making battlefield decisions even when friendly troops were in peril and requiring urgent air support.
Ultimately, the paradigm flies in the face of the realities of war. Leaders are replaceable. There’s always another ambitious jihadi looking to wear the crown of command. What actually ends wars is destroying enemy manpower, finance, logistics, and ability to resupply. Every relevant historical example tells the same story, from the wars of ancient Greece to continental European and Napoleonic wars to the American Civil War and the world wars of the 20th Century. In the course of losing WWII Germany lost 5.3 of 17.7 million men aged 15-44 years old, or 30% of their male population. This brutality is the reality of winning wars – as the recent US track record of failure shows. The “measured and proportional response” crowd wants a war without war. It’s a fantasy that only seems plausible to people who have never experienced war and are insulated from its consequences; their first-born children should be drafted into frontline combat units to relieve them of this problem.
After the Roman Empire lost a crushing defeat at the Battle of Cannae, the Roman Senate immediately became 40% undermanned, because the Roman leaders actually served in the defense of their Republic and risked their lives in battle for it. Today, America’s elites instead spend their time on Wall Street or in think tanks gathering degrees and attending conferences. The old concept of noblesse oblige has gone missing from our national culture and so has the concept of accountability.
Despite the failures of Iraq and Afghanistan, there have been zero lessons learned or course corrections made. Consequently, the failures keep coming. When Hamas unleashed thousands of rockets, missiles, paragliders, and ground assaults across 30 breach points into Israel on October 7 of last year, they showed how dangerous complacency can be. Clearly Hamas had plotted their operation for years. Their network of 300 miles of tunnels spanning all of Gaza was built with one goal in mind: to suck the IDF into an urban quagmire in order to maximize carnage and casualties, of both Palestinian civilian and Israeli soldiers. But why not flood the tunnels with seawater using Texas precision drilling technology? The tactic would have obviated the need to bomb urban areas containing civilians and the terrible suffering that this tactic entails. Flooding the tunnels would have destroyed all underground weapons storage, prevented maneuver, and would have forced Hamas to move or lose their hostage human shields.
In fact, an entire package of drilling/pumping and technical support for precisely this tactic was offered by donors to the IDF. Yet the IDF – under pressure from the Pentagon diktats – instead chose bombing. The result has seen a wave of global sympathy generated for the Palestinian cause and left Hamas in charge of uncleared southern Gaza: a double nightmare scenario far from being resolved.
In 2011, Hillary Clinton, chief Neocon of the Obama Administration, proudly declared of Libya’s US-sponsored revolution: “We came. We saw. He died.” Colonel Qaddafi may not have been perfect but Libya under him was politically stable. Now? For 13 years the country has been wracked by civil war and chaos. Rife with Russian and Turkish PMCs fighting for regional hegemony, the country is now a major exporter of weapons and one of the biggest channels to Europe for drugs and human trafficking.
Further east, Iran, with Hamas, Hezbollah, Hashd al shaabi (Iraq), and the Houthis in Yemen, have built a powerful network of regional proxy forces, now extending even into South America through the Lebanese diaspora in the narcotics and weapons trade. In Yemen, the Houthis have developed into effective pirates, shutting off Red Sea shipping traffic with long-range anti-ship weapons hidden in Yemen’s rugged terrain. As a result, an already economically struggling Egypt – a key American ally – has suffered a 40% blow to their GDP from lost Suez transit fees of $800mm/month and everyone else has seen punishing supply chains inflation from dislocated transit routes and runaway insurance premiums.
Why are Iranian surrogates in Iraq and Yemen being permitted to fire hundreds of precision drones, cruise and ballistic missiles at US forces on land and sea, largely without meaningful response from Washington? What response there has been has mainly consisted of announcing a coalition named ‘Prosperity Guardian’ to protect shipping which collapsed almost immediately after multiple vessels were struck and destroyed. Why are US policymakers and the Pentagon unable to innovate effective military solutions?
It doesn’t have to be this way. In the 1960s, Egypt, then a Soviet client, seized half of Yemen and deposed the Yemeni monarch. In response, Britain and Saudi Arabia hired SAS founder David Stirling’s PMC Watchguard International. Within months they had sufficiently amplified the Yemeni Tribesman fighting capabilities to force Egypt to withdraw. Stirling actually received a medal from the IDF for engaging so many Egyptian troops that it assisted the IDF victory in the 1967 Six-Day War. Fast forward to 2017, Saudi Arabia and the UAE were trying to battle Iranian surrogate Houthis who seized control over half of Yemen. They request PMC support to replicate the successful Stirling model from the 1960s, and once again they are blocked, this time by Neocon Secretary of Defense Mattis serving under President Trump. The Houthis remained unchecked and ascendant, and eventually strong enough to shut off one of the world’s major trade routes.
Meanwhile this same approach is still failing in Africa. There have been a staggering nine coup d’etats across Africa in the last 4 years, mainly in ex-colonial French regions, where decades-long insurgencies have exploded following the destruction of Libya. The looting of massive Libyan state arsenals following the overthrow of Qaddafi flooded the region with weapons. Long insufficient COIN operations by France and their USG partners reached the end of the road; local militaries ousted their Paris-sponsored leadership. The current US humiliation in Niger and Chad where US forces are being forced to vacate new multi-billion dollar facilities built to support drone operations across Africa is the result.
Compare this to Russia. Having embraced PMC capabilities, Russia is currently running a successful playbook in Africa against ineffective Western-friendly governments by showing a firmer hand against jihadists. This cycle will continue unabated so long as the State Department and the CIA restrict their thinking to coming up with PR strategies while America’s rivals implement military solutions.
The Central African Republic, rich in buried mineral wealth, suffered a descent into civil war in 2014 and the empowerment of criminal gangs; the Seleca and Anti Balaka. In 2017, the CAR government requested Western PMC assistance to build a robust mining police force in order to choke out the gangs. Contracts were even signed and funding-ready. But once again this solution was blocked by the NeoCons at the State Dept and their pet, the UN, refusing to waive their sanctions against CAR for the purchasing of small arms to equip police. But Russia had no such issues and sent 400 Wagner personnel immediately. Now multiple Wagner units run mines that net the Russian PMC billions of dollars per year, funding many of their other operations across Africa.
Somalia has been a geopolitical problem since the early 90s, sucking up tens of billions in ineffective foreign aid, killing hundreds of thousands, exporting terrorism, sheltering pirates, and flooding America with hundreds of thousands of migrants. In the spring of 2020, Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta reached out for private sector assistance to finally tourniquet this endless bleeding. Every terror attack in Kenya costs Kenya more than $1B in tourist revenue. The PMC offer was made, and Kenyatta asked President Trump for financial assistance to run this private sector solution. Trump agreed and funding was passed into law by Congress. But Team Biden took over before the already-appropriated funds were released. As a result, they were used instead on the same failed approach – the surgical decapitation strategy which has repeatedly failed globally for 20+ years. Today, Somalia still bleeds and still drains funds, while America is stuck with culturally incompatible migrants that we “cannot deport” because Somalia remains a failed state.
When does Western incompetence end?
The Syrian Civil War saw Neocons funding a radical Sunni insurgency to depose Bashar Al Assad. This force quickly morphed into ISIS and promptly conquered half of Iraq by appealing to a Sunni population repressed by Iranian Shia proxies. The point is worth repeating. ISIS emerged directly from Neocon meddling in the Syrian Civil War. Today, in the aftermath, US forces occupy eastern Syria as some sort of ill-defined buffer between various Kurdish factions, Turkey, and the Syrian government, at a cost of billions per year and for no tangible benefit to American citizens.
Cui Bono? Who benefits? And who is benefiting from the ongoing tragedy of the war in Ukraine? Since historical perspective in conflicts is always useful, I invite readers to consider the staggering costs in manpower borne by the USSR to defeat the Wehrmacht: over 22 million lives lost compared to US losses of 250,000 troops. While the US was invading North Africa in a warm-up to the invasion of Europe, the Soviets were killing 1.2 million Axis soldiers at Stalingrad, while losing almost twice that number themselves. That loss is genetically imprinted on surviving generations, and strategically imprinted in the thinking of the Russian state.
The effect of the eastward expansion of NATO culminating in a proposal to include Ukraine despite clear red-line language expressed by the Kremlin was highly predictable. Yet the Neocons kept pressing the issue, even after assisting in the overthrow of a pro-Russian President. One should take note of how upset the US Government was when the USSR began emplacing missiles in Cuba during the early 1960s.
At the outbreak of WWII, in Britain’s greatest hour of danger, America sent them 50 surplus Navy destroyers, combat aircraft, and weaponry. Meanwhile, in the Chinese theater, combat aircraft were purchased by a Nationalist government which needed American Volunteer Group Contractor support to stop the Japanese from bombing Chinese cities. Similarly, as tensions rose in Ukraine in late 2021 and a Russian invasion looked imminent, a combination of Lend Lease and the Flying Tigers was offered to the White House. For fiscal year 2022, 200+ fully functional combat aircraft including 50 F-16s, 50 F-15s and 42 A-10s explicitly designed for destroying Soviet tanks were set to be retired, flown to the desert, and parked forever.
These are not state-of-the-art aircraft but entirely adequate when flown by well-trained contract pilots filling the gap for 18 months while Ukrainian crews could be readied. Team Biden could have made a grand announcement before the invasion stating Ukraine would never join NATO but would have the means to defend itself. This airwing deployment with weapons crews and fuel would have cost less than $800mm compared to the hundreds of billions and incalculable deaths on both sides. Announcing no NATO expansion and instant deployment of a robust air wing could have prevented the largest war in Europe in eighty years. Or did the Neocons want a war?
Which brings us to Taiwan. Taiwan, and China’s claim on it, remains the flashpoint in the ultimate cold war in the final stages of warming. Clever deterrence measures have been offered and rejected. The Pentagon wants to fight by our own playbook, but as always in war, the enemy gets a vote. A hot war between China and the USA would see US cities annihilated and a death toll in the tens of millions, at minimum. This apocalyptic carnage can only be averted by looking back through history at what has worked and what hasn’t worked in the conveyor belt of failed Washington foreign policy approaches which have dominated the last thirty years. We owe it to our children to get this right but course changes must be made immediately, before it is too late.
What we should do?
The current policy model of US security assistance is broken and counterproductive. The US military is the most expensive organization in 3,000 years of human history and has degenerated into an instrument for selling or grifting overpriced military hardware to countries that struggle to use it, let alone maintain it. The US military mows the lawn with Lamborghinis, when Kubota tractors is what our allies need.
The dozens of developing countries that suffer from narco crime, gangsterism and chaos urgently need real help. When troops are sent for advisory missions too many are sent and they don’t stay long enough to provide real assistance; while they are there they are hamstrung by lawyers into ineffectiveness.
Building lasting capability in countries takes time. Doing a three-week exercise while delivering new gifted equipment is a waste of energy and money every time. Send experienced advisors to dwell long term – for years, not months. Give advisors a path to really learn a region and culture.
The Russians are not ignorant of history and the Wagner group has stepped into the void created by US incompetence. In the Sahel and other parts of West Africa they’ve quickly become the power behind the throne. The best way to beat Wagner is to outcompete them. The same principle also applies to reforming Washington more generally. Policymakers must allow competition to flourish.
The military does not need to be so inherently governmental. If, in 1969, during the summer of Woodstock and Apollo 11, someone said that in 50 years the only way the USG would be able to get people into space would be on a SpaceX rocket, you’d be laughed out of Johnson Space Center. Before the creation of FedEx, a politician would have proclaimed government as the only entity robust enough to deliver packages overnight globally, yet today “FedEx” is a verb. It hasn’t totally replaced the US Postal Service, but it has made it run more efficiently. The same logic can be applied to the military.
The American taxpayer is paying far too much for much too little. The cozy cartel of defense contractors must be broken up, and the military made competitive again. Anti-trust enforcement and competitive tenders will stop the corruption of the thousands of lobbyists in Washington milking congress like a cow while delivering overpriced and ineffective products. The current status is unacceptable. The more consolidated the defense base, the more it behaves like the Pentagon bureaucracy: exactly what America cannot afford.
Our Founding Father’s instincts for empowering market capacities in military power are explicitly articulated in the Constitution. Before discussing “Congress shall raise a Navy” in Art 1 Sec 8 it directs Congress to mandate the private sector with a letter of Marque and Reprisal – effectively a hunting license for private contractors to interdict enemy shipping.
The litany of failures listed above supplies ample evidence that the current military status quo is ineffective. A “government-only” approach abroad is calamitous and undermines US credibility and deterrence. The foreign policy of the United States should be that our friends love us, our rivals respect us, and our enemies fear us. Instead, our friends fear our self-immolation while our rivals consume us and our enemies fire upon us without consequence.
America’s private sector has always outperformed government in solving problems. It is time to unleash America’s entrepreneurs in foreign policy to cut costs and restore American credibility.
Republished from IM—1776.
AUTHOR
Erik D. Prince is a former Navy SEAL officer and the founder of private military company Blackwater. Among his current projects is the Unplugged phone, a privacy-focused smartphone. He can be followed @realErikDPrince.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.
EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.
Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes
/in Commentary, Culture War, Education, Elections, Hot Topics, National Security, News, Policy, Politics, Social Issues, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Kenneth R. TimmermanEvery now and then you see a headline that makes you smile. This one made me laugh out loud:
“Iranian university offers scholarships to U.S. students expelled over protests.”
The president of Shiraz University, a major religious center in Iran, is offering all-expenses paid scholarships to U.S. students expelled for anti-Semitic, pro-terrorist protests, so they can “pursue their studies” in Iran. The Shirazis are so generous they are offering similar stipends to college professors fired for taking part in the same protests.
So now those students and professors who have been chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” can go home to the regime that invented the slogans.
What a wonderful opportunity for all those screaming and incoherent female pro-Hamas supporters to go home again to the birthplace of female liberty! I bet they must be lining up right now!
I imagine every gay, lesbian, and trans pro-Hamas fruitcake is scouring the Internet, trying to find out where they can get their free ticket to the Iran. This great new offer from Shiraz University comes as a relief to my fellow conservatives who have been offering free tickets to Iran to these folks in recent weeks.
Going to Iran shouldn’t be much of a culture shock, either. They will just have to trade the masks they have been wearing to hide from the police and their black bloc tactical gear for the full-length Islamic hijab. (Sorry, ladies: you can’t wear a facemask with the hijab in Iran, because the regime wants to track your movements).
We learned recently from the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal that George Soros’s Open Society Foundation has been funneling millions of dollars to pro-Palestinian groups in the United States, both directly and through the Tides Foundation of Teresa Heinz-Kerry.
These Soros and Heinz-Kerry funded groups have names like Students for Justice in Palestine, the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, and Education for Just Peace in the Middle East. Several of them pay stipends between $2000 to $3000 per week to student activists who spend eight hours a week organizing pro-Hamas protests.
Democrats in Congress are whining that anyone suggesting George Soros is funding anti-Israel protests is an anti-Semite, since Soros was born Jewish.
Soros admitted in a now-famous interview with CBS Sixty Minutes that during the Holocaust in Budapest, he helped the pro-Nazi regime identify Jews living in hiding with Christian families and feels absolutely no remorse for helping send them to the death camps.
The Open Society Foundation is now run by his oldest son, Alexander Soros, whose domestic partner is Huma Abedin, the former chief of staff to Hillary Clinton who separated from husband Anthony Wiener after he was caught sexting an underage girl.
Huma and her family have long-standing ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is the Palestinian emanation. As I wrote in the Hill during the 2016 presidential campaign, Huma is “nothing short of a Muslim Brotherhood princess, born into an illustrious family of Brotherhood leaders.”
And Soros and Heinz are not alone in funding these anti-American, anti-Semitic groups. The Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation have given them grants as well.
President Biden this week condemned the anti-Israel protests, and in the very next sentence equated them to Islamophobia, an invention of the anti-Semitic, pro-terrorist Left.
Congress established an office in the State Department to track anti-Semitism abroad. It’s time federal and local prosecutors enforced existing hate-crimes legislation to prosecute the anti-Semitic and anti-American campus hooligans, some of whom are professional agitators and not even students.
But for the rest of them, I say: bon voyage! Next year in Shiraz.
I discuss this, as well as Chinese President Xi’s upcoming trip to Europe, allegations that China is preparing to hack the 2024 election, and Putin’s long and murderous reach against Russian dissidents living abroad in this week’s Prophecy Today Weekend.
As always, you can listen live at 1 PM on Saturday on 104.9 FM or 550 AM in the Jacksonville, Fl, area, or by using the Jacksonville Way Radio app. If you miss us live, tune in later to the podcast here.
Yours in freedom.
©2024. Kenneth R. Timmerman. All rights reserved.
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Thousands of Illegal Aliens Tracked To Over 21 Pro-Terror, Jew Hating Protests Across America
/in Courts & Law, Elections, Hot Topics, Immigration, Must Read, National Security, News, Policy, Politics, Social Issues, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by The Geller ReportTony Seruga, “Remember all of those criminal illegal invaders we’ve been tracking from the caravans to our borders and into the interior of the U.S., today, over 1,000 of the same devices (cell phones, iPads, tablets, watches, fitness trackers, etc., etc.) are present at over 21 protests and growing across America.”
This is asymmetric warfare.
We Are At War!
The Republicans pretending this is some aberration of party politics, or politics as usual, are as dangerous as the jihad migration.
AUTHOR
Pamela Geller
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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.
‘Election Interference’: Bragg Case Gag Order Puts Unprecedented Limitations On Trump Campaign
/in Courts & Law, Election Fraud, Elections, Featured, Hot Topics, News, Policy, Politics, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by The Daily CallerAllies close to former President Donald Trump are furious with the gag order imposed on him and his campaign by New York State Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, telling the Daily Caller it is hamstringing his campaign like no other has been before.
On Tuesday, the start of week three of Trump’s Manhattan trial, Merchan held the 2024 Republican presidential nominee in contempt of court and issued a $9,000 fine for repeatedly violating a gag order. Merchan has also threatened jail time if Trump continues to violate the order.
Trump and his campaign have been barred from speaking about Matthew Colangelo, a lead prosecutor in the case who spent two years serving in the Biden administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) as acting associate attorney general. After working near the top of the DOJ under Attorney General Merrick Garland, Colangelo joined the Manhattan District Attorney’s office as senior counsel in December 2022.
Many have raised questions about Colangelo’s move from DOJ to work in the Manhattan DA’s office at the same time District Attorney Alvin Bragg was investigating Trump for a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.
Bragg, who ran for office on convicting Trump as Manhattan District Attorney, indicted Trump on 34 counts of falsifying business records, all of which the former president plead not guilty to.
Trump and his campaign are also not allowed to speak about his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, or the jury. Cohen, who is a key witness in the case, has come under fire for discussing the case on TikTok while raising money for himself.
These limitations apply to the entire campaign, tying the hands of the Trump political operation to fight back on a critical issue in the presidential race, one source familiar with the situation told the Caller.
“The gag order says it applies to the president himself, and then it prevents him from instructing or ordering anybody else to do it. So, legally, that basically applies to anybody who works for him. And since he is considered basically the chairman of the campaign or the top dog on the campaign, the campaign applies to everybody who is on campaign staff.”
The source also said they know Democrats are watching Trump’s every move, including his social media posts and campaign website, and described the gag order as “probably the most explicit example of campaign interference, where you’re actually telling your campaign … what they can and can’t say.”
“The Democrats are following very closely, whatever is said on TRUTH social, whatever is posted on the campaign website, and then it’s immediately getting filtered up to Alvin Bragg who has very easy channels of communication, which are pretty firmly established between the Democrats and in his office,” the source familiar said.
The restrictions are unlike any placed on a presidential campaign before in American history and put Trump on the back foot, Mike Davis, founder and president of the Article III Project, told the Daily Caller.
“This unconstitutional and un-American gag order is yet another weapon used by Biden and his henchmen to silence his chief political rival, President Trump. Michael Cohen and others can go make money trashing Trump, yet he can’t respond due to this illegal gag order,” Davis said. “So as a result, all of Trump’s opposition can run roughshod over him without worrying about what Trump will say to counter their arguments. This gag order sets a dangerous precedent moving forward.”
The source familiar echoed that sentiment, stating the order “greatly prohibits” the ability of the campaign to fight back.
“The campaign can’t go out there and defend him from those attacks. The campaign can talk about the case, sure, but they can’t respond to the direct attacks against him, which is totally outrageous,” they said. “So it does not only violate the president’s First Amendment rights, but it’s a direct assault on the campaign and their ability to fight this trial in the middle of the election.”
The source familiar added that the gag order should embolden Trump’s supporters and allies who are not tied to the campaign to stand up for him, since Trump and his campaign legally cannot.
Garrett Ventry, a Republican strategist, said Democrats cannot beat Trump at the polls so they are now interfering with the election instead. He also mentioned that Merchan donated to Biden, and that Bragg campaigned on putting Trump in jail.
“Judge Merchan’s gag order against President Trump is wildly unconstitutional and it is the peak of election interference. The entire campaign they’re running against President Trump has been lawfare. They can’t beat him at the polls,” Ventry said. “Joe Biden’s numbers are tanking and we’re even seeing collusion, with the former number three at Joe Biden’s DOJ being one of the prosecutors on this case in the Manhattan DA’s office.”
“Think about this, too. Alvin Bragg ran his entire entire campaign on putting Donald Trump in jail even before these charges ever happened. So you have an unfair prosecutor, you have a Democrat judge who donated to Joe Biden, you have a pretty much Democrat jury pool all going after President Trump. People who hate him,” he continued. “He can’t expect a fair trial now and now he’s not even allowed to and his campaign is not even allowed to speak back and fight out against the Democrat law fair.”
The source familiar with the situation explained that a key part of the gag order is on the “potential participation” of witnesses, because it’s unclear to the campaign if and when certain witnesses will be called.
Another source told the Caller that it’s “a pretty firm bet” that Cohen is going to be called as a witness, saying “he’s the only ‘eyewitness’ to this entire case. Without him, they don’t have a case.”
“Judge Merchan’s unconstitutional gag order is an egregious violation of President Trump’s First Amendment rights and a direct assault on our campaign in the middle of the election. Unfortunately for Joe Biden and his corrupt Democrat cronies, their unprecedented weaponization of our government is backfiring, Americans see the truth about this sham show trial, and President Trump will ultimately win on November 5th,” Karoline Leavitt, National Press Secretary for the Trump campaign, told the Caller in regards to the gag order.
Ventry also said that Republicans in Congress “need to step up” and “use every tool and measure they have” to defend Trump and hold these “rogue judges and prosecutors accountable for blatant election interference and an unconstitutional gag order.”
House Judiciary Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan sent a letter Tuesday to Attorney General Merrick Garland, regarding Colangelo, requesting documents and communications from Colangelo’s tenure at the Biden DOJ.
The Caller obtained a copy of the letter before it was sent. Jordan demanded a number of personnel files related to Colangelo’s hiring, employment and termination at the DOJ, a number of documents and communications from January 2021 to December 2022, and documents and communications related to Trump or his organization.
AUTHOR
HENRY RODGERS
Chief national correspondent. Follow Henry Rodgers On Twitter
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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.
ERIK PRINCE: Neocons Almost Killed America. Here’s How Patriots Can Fix It
/in Elections, Hot Topics, National Security, News, Policy, Politics, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by The Daily CallerHow the MIC and the Neocons Keep America Losing
It is painfully apparent to anyone of sound mind and judgment that there’s something gravely wrong with America’s current military capacity and our ability to project power in the world. The WWII-era fighting force composed of fourteen million GIs with a muscular industrial base backing them up is almost unimaginable today. In the last three years, five different US embassies have been hastily evacuated: Sudan, Afghanistan, Belarus, Ukraine and Niger. Americans are held hostage in Gaza; commercial shipping traffic is blockaded and our ground and naval forces are shot at daily with impunity. How did America go from winning the Cold War and becoming the sole global superpower in the 90s to the state of disarray that we find ourselves in now?
One reason is financial. All warfare has an underlying economic basis and a nation’s military power reflects its economic structure. Today in America the “exorbitant privilege” of the US dollar and the unlimited printing press of fiat currency it enables means current US defense spending is essentially covered by debt: indeed at least 30% of the current national debt consists of military overspend from the so-called Global War on Terror. This reality has created an absence of strategic discipline, and a military policy that prioritizes a tiny guild of contractors feeding an obese top-heavy structure rather than winning wars.
The roots of the current situation reach back to the election of Reagan in 1980. Reagan started a pivot from 35 years of containment to a more aggressive approach, covered by deficits. Channeled economically, politically, culturally, socially and through covert action these measures helped to bring an end to the Soviet Union, but at a critical strategic cost. Partly as a consequence of the central economic role that the USSR had come to play for the US defense industry, the opportunity to positively engage with Russia after 1991 was rejected by the dominant neoconservative faction and their military-industrial complex allies in Washington. Originally Trotskyites, the Neocons had taken root in the corporatist wing of the Republican Party and gradually increased in influence, to eventually become dominant in the Washington Beltway foreign policy and emblematic of its mentality of continuous warfare funded by an unlimited fiat printing press.
The so-called “Peace Dividend” that followed the end of the Cold War was redirected into expanding NATO instead of ending it. The goal was to enrich the military-industrial complex by creating more clients to buy US weapons, at the expense of the opportunity to partner with Russia. Promises of not expanding NATO eastward into former Warsaw Pact countries were broken and NATO troops were deployed on Russia’s border.
The priorities of Neocon Washington were also projected into US policy in Africa. After Liberian warlord Charles Taylor sponsored the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone in the late ’90s, the RUF quickly captured most of the country, particularly the diamond-rich areas of the north. In the process they committed atrocious acts of savagery against Sierra Leone’s civilian population. Into this maelstrom entered Executive Outcomes (EO), a South African PMC. EO initially deployed 60 ex-South African Special Forces personnel fresh from ending a civil war that had raged for years in Angola, and eventually expanded to around 200 well-trained personnel. Using mostly equipment abandoned by Sierra Leone’s disintegrated army, within 6 months they’d retaken the country and restored peace and order to the extent that free and fair elections could be held 3 months later.
Executive Outcomes was sponsored by an association of diamond miners who wanted their mines back. This group was willing to sponsor an ongoing 30-man EO presence to retrain a new Sierra Leone armed forces while providing a backstop in case the rebels returned. Susan Rice, then Bill Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, vetoed this proposal: “We don’t want any white mercenaries in Africa,” she declared. The result? Within months the RUF and a new group called the West Side Boys had returned, killing, looting and pillaging the country. 11,000 UN Peacekeepers at a cost of $1B+ per year in 1990s US dollars were now deployed. But they didn’t solve the problem, and not until the British SAS killed hundreds of rebels during a large hostage rescue mission of Irish Peacekeepers did the country start to stabilize.
This debacle in West Africa occurred on the heels of an even greater catastrophe further East. In the spring of 1994, after decades of simmering ethnic hatred in Rwanda, the Hutus launched a program of manual genocide. Over a four-month period they killed almost 1,000,000 of their Tutsi neighbors, a murder rate exceeding 8,000 per day, mainly using machetes and farm tools. Here as well EO made a formal proposal to the UN and the US government to intervene and prevent further slaughter. The proposal was also rejected by Rice in Washington. EO stayed out and the carnage continued unabated until Paul Kagame’s exiled Rwandan Patriotic Front invaded from Uganda and retook the country.
By the late 90s, with Washington engaged in combat in the former Yugoslavia, a new kind of enemy was emerging: jihadist Islam. In 1993 a poorly conceived and badly executed nation-building exercise in Somalia had already supplied a foretaste when the Battle of Mogadishu resulted in the death of 18 US Special Operations personnel and 73 wounded after repeated requests for air support were rejected by an indecisive Clinton administration. By 1999, unanswered attacks in Nairobi, Dar As Salaam, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and New York had claimed hundreds of lives and mauled a US Destroyer, USS Cole. Finally, on Sept 11th, 2001, this series of body blows reached its spectacular culmination.
In the aftermath of 9/11, President Bush met with his War Cabinet to plan a response to the costliest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor. As the Pentagon smoldered, the Department of Defense recommended a bombing campaign and a Ranger raid against an Al Qaeda-linked farm, but wanted to wait at least six months before beginning combat operations in order to avoid the Afghan winter. The CIA, for their part, recommended an Unconventional Warfare campaign. They wanted to supercharge the Northern Alliance, who’d been fighting the Taliban for a decade, with US airpower directed by SOF advisors. The CIA plan was adopted. The Taliban and their guests Al-Qaeda were routed in weeks by a highly aggressive SOF targeting cycle which gave them no quarter.
The US response to 9/11 should have resembled a Scipio Africanus-style Roman punitive raid, killing all Taliban and Al-Qaeda remnants within reach, including those sheltering in the tribal areas of Pakistan, and then withdrawing. Instead, the Neocons saw a lucrative opportunity to ‘nation build.’ Because the Pentagon runs on the bureaucratic principle of budget cycles and the internal war for promotion rather than the principle of victory, a vastly inflated occupational army ultimately comprising 120,000 soldiers was deployed to the country. This force represented a repetition of the failed Soviet plan of the 80s, to the extent of occupying the same bases.
Ignoring every historical lesson of successful counter-insurgencies, experienced soldiers were rotated on 6-12 month intervals with fresh units, losing all continuity and local intelligence. The top commander spot rotated 18 times in 20 years. Concerned as per usual with marketing for their defense contractor clients, the Neocons dragged dozens of largely unwilling NATO members to Afghanistan, producing a dysfunctional chaos of individual national mandates. Many nations wouldn’t patrol at night or engage in offensive combat missions. When the German army arrived in Kabul in the spring of 2002, among their concerns was finding appropriate housing for all the gay couples deployed in the Bundeswehr.
The Neocon plan for Afghanistan, or at least the story, was to impose a centralized Jeffersonian democracy on a largely illiterate, semi-feudal tribal nation by throwing infinite money at a paper-thin civil society. The result, unsurprisingly, was corruption, not infrastructure. Meanwhile, the military operation remained chaos incarnate. Not only was there never a truly empowered supreme commander, but authorities were split between the US Ambassador, CIA Station chief, the current 4-star US General, the CENTCOM Commander and their staff residing in Qatar or Tampa and various representatives from NATO. This committee from Hell produced predictable results.
In the 1980s the US provided lethal aid to the Mujahedeen fighting the Soviets running to $1B a year including state-of-the-art Stinger missiles, which knocked down an average of one Soviet aircraft per day. Nobody provided this kind of aid to the Taliban: not one NATO/Coalition aircraft was lost to a guided missile. But air supremacy wasn’t enough. The Taliban were a self-funded insurgency composed of mostly illiterate fighters using weapons designed more than 70 years earlier. Although they lacked the techno-wizardry of the Pentagon forces, their budget grew to approximately $600mm per year from tolling narcotics and the import of fuel used to feed a thirsty Pentagon presence. Fuel logistics alone cost the Pentagon tens of billions per year, despite the fact that a vast reserve of crude – Amu-Darya Field in Balkh Province Afghanistan – had been drilled, proven and properly cemented by Soviet forces before they left in 1989. But what could have supplied the entire Afghanistan operation with low-cost, reliable hydrocarbon energy was ignored in favor of paying, by the time the fuel reached the vehicles, an operational cost of $250 per gallon.
It’s fair to compare the longevity of the Soviet-built Afghan forces, holding on for years after the Soviets left, versus the Pentagon-built Afghan forces collapsing only weeks after the American withdrawal. Today of course the Taliban rule Afghanistan with an iron sandal. The trillions of dollars and thousands of lives expended by America’s youth were completely wasted – and nobody has ever been held to account. The Taliban have not become more moderate – they are exactly the same group as before and hosting more terror groups than ever. Al Qaeda is resident once again in Kabul, and now known to be gathering means to enrich uranium in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan wasn’t even the worst US military failure over the last twenty years. Almost exactly the same Neocon fever dream also played out in Iraq. Here again the fantasy of deposing a dictator in the name of installing democracy in a country with a culture with no history of representative democracy followed its inevitable course. After an initial phase of 24/7 war porn of the US invasion, broadcast by the network media through “embedded journalists,” the Pentagon was quickly dragged into an urban counter-insurgency quagmire involving a Sunni faction rebranded as Al Qaeda in Iraq, Saddam regime holdovers, and Shia insurgents, armed, trained and sometimes led by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
This development was not inevitable. I still recall a sliding door moment early in the conflict when the Director of the Iraqi National Intelligence Service came to see me with his CIA liaison officer in early 2004. He described the scale of the efforts by the IRGC Quds Forces to infiltrate Iraqi society and establish a proxy capability similar to Hezbollah in Lebanon and requested that we develop a joint program to locate and eradicate the Iranian presence. Unfortunately, the program was blocked by then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, on the grounds that Iran was not our enemy and that the US must support the political process in Iraq. In the event, this political process spun into a vicious civil war, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. Meanwhile, our ‘non-enemy’ Iran flooded the country with thousands of lethal EFP roadside bombs, to shred armored vehicles with American soldiers inside.
Today Iraq is subjugated by Iran with Tehran making key decisions and approving all key ministry appointments, including who becomes Prime Minister. Their power is backed by the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) or Hashd al Shabi – an Iranian-controlled proxy mirroring Hezbollah in Lebanon. The PMUs are paid for by the Iraqi Government, armed in most cases with American weapons, and led either by Iranian-appointed commanders or by serving IRGC officers directly.
America continues to wage futile forever wars of convenience because Washington believes we are immune to reality and evolved beyond history. The grand strategy of the so-called Global War on Terror was conceived on a false premise promoted by Neocon think tanks and the Military-Industrial Complex that American drone technology could revolutionize counter-insurgency warfare through surgical strikes targeting only the leadership of terror organizations. This delusion produced sclerosis in the military by stripping authority away from field commanders concerning when to shoot and when to hold fire. A fixation on large orbiting cameras likewise devolved into high-tech voyeurism with lawyers, not commanders making battlefield decisions even when friendly troops were in peril and requiring urgent air support.
Ultimately, the paradigm flies in the face of the realities of war. Leaders are replaceable. There’s always another ambitious jihadi looking to wear the crown of command. What actually ends wars is destroying enemy manpower, finance, logistics, and ability to resupply. Every relevant historical example tells the same story, from the wars of ancient Greece to continental European and Napoleonic wars to the American Civil War and the world wars of the 20th Century. In the course of losing WWII Germany lost 5.3 of 17.7 million men aged 15-44 years old, or 30% of their male population. This brutality is the reality of winning wars – as the recent US track record of failure shows. The “measured and proportional response” crowd wants a war without war. It’s a fantasy that only seems plausible to people who have never experienced war and are insulated from its consequences; their first-born children should be drafted into frontline combat units to relieve them of this problem.
After the Roman Empire lost a crushing defeat at the Battle of Cannae, the Roman Senate immediately became 40% undermanned, because the Roman leaders actually served in the defense of their Republic and risked their lives in battle for it. Today, America’s elites instead spend their time on Wall Street or in think tanks gathering degrees and attending conferences. The old concept of noblesse oblige has gone missing from our national culture and so has the concept of accountability.
Despite the failures of Iraq and Afghanistan, there have been zero lessons learned or course corrections made. Consequently, the failures keep coming. When Hamas unleashed thousands of rockets, missiles, paragliders, and ground assaults across 30 breach points into Israel on October 7 of last year, they showed how dangerous complacency can be. Clearly Hamas had plotted their operation for years. Their network of 300 miles of tunnels spanning all of Gaza was built with one goal in mind: to suck the IDF into an urban quagmire in order to maximize carnage and casualties, of both Palestinian civilian and Israeli soldiers. But why not flood the tunnels with seawater using Texas precision drilling technology? The tactic would have obviated the need to bomb urban areas containing civilians and the terrible suffering that this tactic entails. Flooding the tunnels would have destroyed all underground weapons storage, prevented maneuver, and would have forced Hamas to move or lose their hostage human shields.
In fact, an entire package of drilling/pumping and technical support for precisely this tactic was offered by donors to the IDF. Yet the IDF – under pressure from the Pentagon diktats – instead chose bombing. The result has seen a wave of global sympathy generated for the Palestinian cause and left Hamas in charge of uncleared southern Gaza: a double nightmare scenario far from being resolved.
In 2011, Hillary Clinton, chief Neocon of the Obama Administration, proudly declared of Libya’s US-sponsored revolution: “We came. We saw. He died.” Colonel Qaddafi may not have been perfect but Libya under him was politically stable. Now? For 13 years the country has been wracked by civil war and chaos. Rife with Russian and Turkish PMCs fighting for regional hegemony, the country is now a major exporter of weapons and one of the biggest channels to Europe for drugs and human trafficking.
Further east, Iran, with Hamas, Hezbollah, Hashd al shaabi (Iraq), and the Houthis in Yemen, have built a powerful network of regional proxy forces, now extending even into South America through the Lebanese diaspora in the narcotics and weapons trade. In Yemen, the Houthis have developed into effective pirates, shutting off Red Sea shipping traffic with long-range anti-ship weapons hidden in Yemen’s rugged terrain. As a result, an already economically struggling Egypt – a key American ally – has suffered a 40% blow to their GDP from lost Suez transit fees of $800mm/month and everyone else has seen punishing supply chains inflation from dislocated transit routes and runaway insurance premiums.
Why are Iranian surrogates in Iraq and Yemen being permitted to fire hundreds of precision drones, cruise and ballistic missiles at US forces on land and sea, largely without meaningful response from Washington? What response there has been has mainly consisted of announcing a coalition named ‘Prosperity Guardian’ to protect shipping which collapsed almost immediately after multiple vessels were struck and destroyed. Why are US policymakers and the Pentagon unable to innovate effective military solutions?
It doesn’t have to be this way. In the 1960s, Egypt, then a Soviet client, seized half of Yemen and deposed the Yemeni monarch. In response, Britain and Saudi Arabia hired SAS founder David Stirling’s PMC Watchguard International. Within months they had sufficiently amplified the Yemeni Tribesman fighting capabilities to force Egypt to withdraw. Stirling actually received a medal from the IDF for engaging so many Egyptian troops that it assisted the IDF victory in the 1967 Six-Day War. Fast forward to 2017, Saudi Arabia and the UAE were trying to battle Iranian surrogate Houthis who seized control over half of Yemen. They request PMC support to replicate the successful Stirling model from the 1960s, and once again they are blocked, this time by Neocon Secretary of Defense Mattis serving under President Trump. The Houthis remained unchecked and ascendant, and eventually strong enough to shut off one of the world’s major trade routes.
Meanwhile this same approach is still failing in Africa. There have been a staggering nine coup d’etats across Africa in the last 4 years, mainly in ex-colonial French regions, where decades-long insurgencies have exploded following the destruction of Libya. The looting of massive Libyan state arsenals following the overthrow of Qaddafi flooded the region with weapons. Long insufficient COIN operations by France and their USG partners reached the end of the road; local militaries ousted their Paris-sponsored leadership. The current US humiliation in Niger and Chad where US forces are being forced to vacate new multi-billion dollar facilities built to support drone operations across Africa is the result.
Compare this to Russia. Having embraced PMC capabilities, Russia is currently running a successful playbook in Africa against ineffective Western-friendly governments by showing a firmer hand against jihadists. This cycle will continue unabated so long as the State Department and the CIA restrict their thinking to coming up with PR strategies while America’s rivals implement military solutions.
The Central African Republic, rich in buried mineral wealth, suffered a descent into civil war in 2014 and the empowerment of criminal gangs; the Seleca and Anti Balaka. In 2017, the CAR government requested Western PMC assistance to build a robust mining police force in order to choke out the gangs. Contracts were even signed and funding-ready. But once again this solution was blocked by the NeoCons at the State Dept and their pet, the UN, refusing to waive their sanctions against CAR for the purchasing of small arms to equip police. But Russia had no such issues and sent 400 Wagner personnel immediately. Now multiple Wagner units run mines that net the Russian PMC billions of dollars per year, funding many of their other operations across Africa.
Somalia has been a geopolitical problem since the early 90s, sucking up tens of billions in ineffective foreign aid, killing hundreds of thousands, exporting terrorism, sheltering pirates, and flooding America with hundreds of thousands of migrants. In the spring of 2020, Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta reached out for private sector assistance to finally tourniquet this endless bleeding. Every terror attack in Kenya costs Kenya more than $1B in tourist revenue. The PMC offer was made, and Kenyatta asked President Trump for financial assistance to run this private sector solution. Trump agreed and funding was passed into law by Congress. But Team Biden took over before the already-appropriated funds were released. As a result, they were used instead on the same failed approach – the surgical decapitation strategy which has repeatedly failed globally for 20+ years. Today, Somalia still bleeds and still drains funds, while America is stuck with culturally incompatible migrants that we “cannot deport” because Somalia remains a failed state.
When does Western incompetence end?
The Syrian Civil War saw Neocons funding a radical Sunni insurgency to depose Bashar Al Assad. This force quickly morphed into ISIS and promptly conquered half of Iraq by appealing to a Sunni population repressed by Iranian Shia proxies. The point is worth repeating. ISIS emerged directly from Neocon meddling in the Syrian Civil War. Today, in the aftermath, US forces occupy eastern Syria as some sort of ill-defined buffer between various Kurdish factions, Turkey, and the Syrian government, at a cost of billions per year and for no tangible benefit to American citizens.
Cui Bono? Who benefits? And who is benefiting from the ongoing tragedy of the war in Ukraine? Since historical perspective in conflicts is always useful, I invite readers to consider the staggering costs in manpower borne by the USSR to defeat the Wehrmacht: over 22 million lives lost compared to US losses of 250,000 troops. While the US was invading North Africa in a warm-up to the invasion of Europe, the Soviets were killing 1.2 million Axis soldiers at Stalingrad, while losing almost twice that number themselves. That loss is genetically imprinted on surviving generations, and strategically imprinted in the thinking of the Russian state.
The effect of the eastward expansion of NATO culminating in a proposal to include Ukraine despite clear red-line language expressed by the Kremlin was highly predictable. Yet the Neocons kept pressing the issue, even after assisting in the overthrow of a pro-Russian President. One should take note of how upset the US Government was when the USSR began emplacing missiles in Cuba during the early 1960s.
At the outbreak of WWII, in Britain’s greatest hour of danger, America sent them 50 surplus Navy destroyers, combat aircraft, and weaponry. Meanwhile, in the Chinese theater, combat aircraft were purchased by a Nationalist government which needed American Volunteer Group Contractor support to stop the Japanese from bombing Chinese cities. Similarly, as tensions rose in Ukraine in late 2021 and a Russian invasion looked imminent, a combination of Lend Lease and the Flying Tigers was offered to the White House. For fiscal year 2022, 200+ fully functional combat aircraft including 50 F-16s, 50 F-15s and 42 A-10s explicitly designed for destroying Soviet tanks were set to be retired, flown to the desert, and parked forever.
These are not state-of-the-art aircraft but entirely adequate when flown by well-trained contract pilots filling the gap for 18 months while Ukrainian crews could be readied. Team Biden could have made a grand announcement before the invasion stating Ukraine would never join NATO but would have the means to defend itself. This airwing deployment with weapons crews and fuel would have cost less than $800mm compared to the hundreds of billions and incalculable deaths on both sides. Announcing no NATO expansion and instant deployment of a robust air wing could have prevented the largest war in Europe in eighty years. Or did the Neocons want a war?
Which brings us to Taiwan. Taiwan, and China’s claim on it, remains the flashpoint in the ultimate cold war in the final stages of warming. Clever deterrence measures have been offered and rejected. The Pentagon wants to fight by our own playbook, but as always in war, the enemy gets a vote. A hot war between China and the USA would see US cities annihilated and a death toll in the tens of millions, at minimum. This apocalyptic carnage can only be averted by looking back through history at what has worked and what hasn’t worked in the conveyor belt of failed Washington foreign policy approaches which have dominated the last thirty years. We owe it to our children to get this right but course changes must be made immediately, before it is too late.
What we should do?
The current policy model of US security assistance is broken and counterproductive. The US military is the most expensive organization in 3,000 years of human history and has degenerated into an instrument for selling or grifting overpriced military hardware to countries that struggle to use it, let alone maintain it. The US military mows the lawn with Lamborghinis, when Kubota tractors is what our allies need.
The dozens of developing countries that suffer from narco crime, gangsterism and chaos urgently need real help. When troops are sent for advisory missions too many are sent and they don’t stay long enough to provide real assistance; while they are there they are hamstrung by lawyers into ineffectiveness.
Building lasting capability in countries takes time. Doing a three-week exercise while delivering new gifted equipment is a waste of energy and money every time. Send experienced advisors to dwell long term – for years, not months. Give advisors a path to really learn a region and culture.
The Russians are not ignorant of history and the Wagner group has stepped into the void created by US incompetence. In the Sahel and other parts of West Africa they’ve quickly become the power behind the throne. The best way to beat Wagner is to outcompete them. The same principle also applies to reforming Washington more generally. Policymakers must allow competition to flourish.
The military does not need to be so inherently governmental. If, in 1969, during the summer of Woodstock and Apollo 11, someone said that in 50 years the only way the USG would be able to get people into space would be on a SpaceX rocket, you’d be laughed out of Johnson Space Center. Before the creation of FedEx, a politician would have proclaimed government as the only entity robust enough to deliver packages overnight globally, yet today “FedEx” is a verb. It hasn’t totally replaced the US Postal Service, but it has made it run more efficiently. The same logic can be applied to the military.
The American taxpayer is paying far too much for much too little. The cozy cartel of defense contractors must be broken up, and the military made competitive again. Anti-trust enforcement and competitive tenders will stop the corruption of the thousands of lobbyists in Washington milking congress like a cow while delivering overpriced and ineffective products. The current status is unacceptable. The more consolidated the defense base, the more it behaves like the Pentagon bureaucracy: exactly what America cannot afford.
Our Founding Father’s instincts for empowering market capacities in military power are explicitly articulated in the Constitution. Before discussing “Congress shall raise a Navy” in Art 1 Sec 8 it directs Congress to mandate the private sector with a letter of Marque and Reprisal – effectively a hunting license for private contractors to interdict enemy shipping.
The litany of failures listed above supplies ample evidence that the current military status quo is ineffective. A “government-only” approach abroad is calamitous and undermines US credibility and deterrence. The foreign policy of the United States should be that our friends love us, our rivals respect us, and our enemies fear us. Instead, our friends fear our self-immolation while our rivals consume us and our enemies fire upon us without consequence.
America’s private sector has always outperformed government in solving problems. It is time to unleash America’s entrepreneurs in foreign policy to cut costs and restore American credibility.
Republished from IM—1776.
AUTHOR
ERIK PRINCE
Erik D. Prince is a former Navy SEAL officer and the founder of private military company Blackwater. Among his current projects is the Unplugged phone, a privacy-focused smartphone. He can be followed @realErikDPrince.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.
EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.
Experts and Polls Agree that Dems’ Lawfare Campaign against Trump Isn’t Helping Biden
/in Courts & Law, Election Fraud, Elections, Featured, Hot Topics, News, Policy, Politics, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Family Research CouncilDemocrats are waging a “lawfare” campaign against former President Donald Trump, but it may actually be hurting Joe Biden’s reelection efforts. According to the latest Harvard CAPS/Harris poll, voters will be largely split if a jury convicts the former president of crimes. If Trump were to be convicted either “of crimes related to his handling of classified presidential documents” or “for RICO in trying to influence the 2020 election results in Georgia,” voters would be split 50% to 50% between Trump and Biden. However, if Trump were to be convicted “for inciting the Capitol riots of January 6th,” he would beat Biden 52% to 48%.
Interestingly, the January iteration of the same poll showed that Trump would win if convicted in the first two cases but lose if convicted in the last. Those numbers shifted seemingly sporadically over the course of February and March, though in neither month did the survey predict a Biden victory. Of note, the number of registered Democrats voting against Trump if convicted “for inciting the Capitol riots of January 6th” dropped from 92% in January to a steady 86% over the past several months.
Mike Davis, founder of originalist constitutional think tank Article 3 Project, spoke on Monday’s episode of “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” about Biden’s “lawfare” campaign against Trump. “President Biden’s fingerprints are directly on all four of these criminal prosecutions,” Davis claimed. “This is a criminal conspiracy by President Biden, his White House staff, his attorney general, his Justice Department, and these Democrat AGs in New York and Arizona, and these Democrat [district attorneys] in New York City and Fulton County, Georgia.” He continued, “They are violating the civil rights of President Trump, his co-defendant Walt Nauta, his 18 co-defendants in the Georgia case, these defendants in Arizona — this is a criminal conspiracy to violate their civil rights for the purpose of interfering in the election.”
“They waited 30 months to bring these unprecedented indictments. They timed — they tried to time — these trials back-to-back-to-back in 2024 during the heat of the presidential campaign. They wanted President Trump stuck in a courtroom like they’ve done in New York City,” Davis explained. Referring to how the “lawfare” campaign has impacted the Biden campaign, he added, “Now the rats are swimming back to the ship because it looks like this lawfare is backfiring spectacularly on these Democrats, including President Biden. It’s going to propel President Trump back into the White House, and I don’t think that’s what the Democrats intended.”
According to April’s Harvard CAPS/Harris poll, a majority of voters agreed that the prosecutions leveled against Trump are biased, unfair, and politically-motivated. Fifty-six percent of voters (including 57% of Independent voters and over a quarter of Democrats) said that the prosecutions against Trump are “politically motivated,” up from a steady 54% throughout March, February, and January.
A survey from McLaughlin and Associates, published in March, found that nearly 70% of Americans agree that the indictments and prosecution leveled against Trump are politically motivated, with almost 60% of voters (including almost 40% of Democrats) saying that Biden has played a role in the Trump prosecutions, 52% of voters saying that the “lawfare” campaign is designed to keep the 45th president from returning to the White House, and 56% of voters (including a third of Democrats) saying that Biden is trying “to stop President Trump from winning the election by putting him in jail…”
Other polls suggest that this may be true, with Trump taking a significant lead over Biden. For example, an Emerson College/The Hill survey released on Tuesday shows Trump besting Biden in seven swing states. Trump leads Biden in North Carolina by five points, in Arizona by four points, in Georgia by three points, in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by two points, and in Michigan and Nevada by one point. The survey also found that a plurality of voters across all seven swing states believe the trial being conducted against Trump in New York City “is a witch hunt.” In only one state, Nevada, a narrow majority (51%) of voters said that the trial “is appropriate to hold Trump accountable.” The survey also found that if Trump were convicted in that trial, it would either have “no impact” on voters’ support for Trump or else make them “more likely” to vote for him. One third or fewer of voters responded that they would be “less likely” to vote for Trump if convicted.
Davis predicted that the New York City case, under Democratic District Attorney Alvin Bragg, would be the only case against Trump not tossed out by the courts. “The bottom line is this New York City Bragg case, this dog of a case in New York, may be the only case that gets to trial before the election,” Davis opined, adding, “This is their weakest, dumbest case.” Davis anticipated that the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on January 6-related cases would result in the cases that Special Counsel Jack Smith is prosecuting against Trump being dropped, and that the court would further rule that Trump could not be prosecuted for official acts during his presidency.
“The American people are going to put President Trump back in the White House on November 5, 2024,” Davis concluded. “And come January 20, 2025, when he is sworn in, there are going to be severe legal, political, and financial consequences for this Democrat lawfare and election interference. These are republic-ending tactics by the Democrats — and there must be consequences.”
AUTHOR
S.A. McCarthy
S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.
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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.
The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.
More Than 1,600 Pro-Hamas Activists at 33 Schools Arrested Since Gaza Encampments Began
/in Culture War, Education, Hot Topics, National Security, News, Policy, Politics/by Family Research CouncilCollege campuses escalated their efforts to root out pro-Hamas occupations on Tuesday, with police arresting more than 430 people on nine different college campuses. Police have made more than 1,600 arrests in connection with the disruptive, illegal campus occupations since the first one began at Columbia University on April 19, according to an investigation by The Washington Stand. Disturbingly, some universities are beginning to cave to protestors’ demands to restore order to campus, even as campus protests become increasingly dominated by non-students.
The sheer number of campus protests and arrests can be a bit bewildering to keep track of them all. As of Wednesday, there were at least 1,641 arrests and counting at 33 colleges and universities in 23 states, with at least three more schools threatening to make arrests and more pro-Hamas encampments cropping up daily.
Since so much media coverage obscures this point, it bears repeating that universities have not called in police to arrest protestors simply for exercising their right to free speech, or even for the vile, anti-Semitic content of that speech. After asking law enforcement to intervene on two separate occasions, the University of Texas at Austin on Monday issued this representative statement: “Protests are allowed at the University of Texas. Since October and prior to April 24, no fewer than 13 pro-Palestinian free speech events were held on the UT campus, and four more demonstrations have been held since Thursday, largely without incident.”
No, protestors were arrested for deliberately breaking the rules: flouting curfews, setting up tents where no tents were allowed, intimidating other students and impeding their free access and education on campus, and defying orders from law enforcement. In some instances, protestors broke into campus buildings and then barricaded them against campus authorities, declaring that the buildings had been “liberated.” Thus, when protestors were arrested for trespassing, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest, they had no one to blame but themselves.
If anything, universities have been reluctant to arrest demonstrators, often waiting days before calling in police, repeatedly pleading with the lawless mob before authorizing arrests, and only arresting a fraction of those involved in the illegal encampments. Thus, the 40 incidents in which campus demonstrators have been arrested represent only the small fraction of anti-Semitic activity on college campuses that has been met by a law enforcement response. With that said, here is a timeline of campus arrests since April 19:
Friday, April 19:
Monday, April 22:
Tuesday, April 23:
Wednesday, April 24:
Thursday, April 25:
Friday, April 26:
Saturday, April 27:
Sunday, April 28:
Monday, April 29:
Tuesday, April 30:
Wednesday, May 1:
There are several noteworthy trends in this progression: 1) universities are acting more quickly to disperse illegal encampments; 2) more universities are calling in police to make arrests; 3) the numbers of those arrested is dwindling; and 4) increasing attention is being drawn to the presence of outside agitators.
These trends suggest a number of developments. First, university administrators are watching what is happening at other universities. They are witnessing the recalcitrance of pro-Hamas activists, as well as the headaches and monetary damages they have caused at places like Columbia or Cal Poly Humboldt where they were not dealt with quickly. They have also witnessed the example of the University of Texas at Austin and other schools that have successfully prevented a campus occupation through vigilant policing. These factors motivate university administrators to put an end to the illegal occupation tactics.
Second, the force of the pro-Hamas wave has dwindled as it has expanded. Protests at elite, radically progressive schools had high energy and significant student involvement. But protests at smaller or less elite schools have seen less student enthusiasm. Arrests have been in higher numbers, and there has been a larger proportion of unaffiliated agitators.
Third, even the most radical protestors can behave rationally. Essentially, they would rather not face consequences for their actions — to the point that they are now begging for amnesty from the same administrators they just poked in the eye. It seems that students are making a risk calculation based upon how they believe law enforcement will respond. Police have made the most arrests in progressive (that is, anti-law-enforcement) jurisdictions such as New York, Massachusetts, and California. But protests have been smaller across the South and Midwest, suggesting that fewer students are willing to risk arrest and prosecution for the thrill of camping on the university lawn. This suggests that government officials should consider the incentives they create in how they respond to protests.
Fourth, outside agitators have become involved to an alarming extent. Police made arrests at 22 universities from Saturday to Tuesday; and, in 11 out of 12 instances where the numbers are known, they arrested more outsiders than students. In multiple instances, these outside agitators even participated in illegally occupying campus buildings. It is unacceptable that a handful of activists, with no connection to a university, can seize its property and hold it hostage to absurd demands.
Circumstances on many universities are developing rapidly, and more arrests could follow at any time. Johns Hopkins University has threatened police action against an illegal encampment on its Baltimore campus. Purdue University has threatened ringleaders of an illegal encampment there with disciplinary action. Portland State University in Oregon has closed its campus due to protestors illegally occupying the campus library for two straight days.
As these will not be the last campus arrests related to pro-Hamas protests, neither were they the first. At Brown University, 41 students were arrested in December when they refused to leave a campus building. In March, four students at Vanderbilt University and 22 students and two faculty at Cornell University were also arrested for refusing to leave campus buildings.
But pro-Hamas, anti-Semitic protests on campus exploded in mid-April around Passover. The illegal occupation at Columbia gained the most attention, and campus occupations have expanded ever since. But the activists have gone too far, and universities are fighting back with mass arrests, which have now reached more than 1,600 and counting.
AUTHOR
Joshua Arnold
Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.
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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.
The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.
DHS Data Shows Biden Regime ‘Targeted Florida’ with Flights of Illegals from Outside U.S. To Turn State Blue
/in Culture War, Elections, Hot Topics, Must Read, National Security, News, Policy, Politics, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by The Geller ReportThis is a seditious regime working at warped speed to destroy this country and our freedoms along with it.
We are careening towards destruction or liberation.
New DHS data reveals Biden targeted Florida with flights of illegals from outside U.S.
AUTHOR
Pamela Geller
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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.
Careful What You Wish For
/in Commentary, Culture War, Elections, Hot Topics, News, Policy, Politics, Religion, Social Issues/by The Catholic ThingDavid Warren: The Western peacenik believes peace can be advanced by dialogue “between the faiths.” We might have hoped this notion would have perished on October 7th, rather than so many women and children.
For many years, according at least to the U.S. State Department and other Western diplomatic agencies, the “Palestinians” were wishing for a separate state. This is the “two-state” solution to the “Israeli” problem, said to be otherwise intractable. (I will be placing my scare quotes carefully.)
Most Americans, and probably most Catholics, have been willing to concede this as a diplomatic fix; it gives us something glib to say. Most Israelis are, also, willing to be glib. They offer, or used to offer, “land for peace.” This never worked for them.
I do not have the space or patience to rehearse the whole history of the Arab response to “Zionism,” from Ottoman times to the present. Since 1948, it has often been expressed with murderous violence, through aggressive wars and acts of terrorism. Repeatedly, neighboring Arab states have tried to wipe the “new” entity off the map.
This was unwise, on the part of the Arabs, because they lost every war, to an Israel fighting valiantly for survival; including at the beginning when the odds were entirely on the Arab side.
A fecund people, the Arabs in and around the old British mandate of Palestine had essentially two options. They could stay and become citizens (there are two million Arab Israelis now), or they could flee and become refugees. Half fled: voluntarily, unlike the Jews who were evicted from almost every Muslim country.
These hard facts will not be accepted by the enemies of Israel. They continue to wish Israel would go away; yet it won’t, and the genocidal fantasy has led them to a terrible fate.
Of course, the “Palestinian” leaders have earned the greatest punishment for this, because they established a vile, psychopathic “education” system over their refugees, with much supplementary propaganda. They have in effect brainwashed this population, to entrap their loyalties. That they have been successfully brainwashed can be demonstrated, for “Palestinian” views are not shared by the larger Arab world, who are even less welcoming to “Palestinians” than to Israelis.
It takes some effort to create a class of fanatic Jew-killers, such as we saw on October 7th. It is morally worse even than the corruption with which these leaders have enriched and armed themselves; and even than the specific acts of hostage-taking, savage torture, and gratuitous killing done to whoever comes their way. They have delivered their own people into the Hell that is Gaza.
By the concept of Intifada, they have spread their scheme of violent chaos wherever Arab emigrants can be found, and who have children who can be radicalized. For Muslims living away from the traditional Ummah are easily infected with the Islamist bacillus, a disease that invades and spoils Arab life and religion.
This is the reason why conversion to Christianity has become the only practical alternative for Muslims who find themselves at a dead end. For Christianity provides a path out of the quagmire (whereas atheism negates even Islam’s merits).
The Catholic Church could help, by welcoming the Muslim convert and caring particularly for his needs, in the spirit of a Holy Crusade. Her present attitude, of avoiding trespass into Muslim territory and showing timid, artificial “tolerance” for the very Islamic doctrines that are used to oppress Christians, is a failure of our obligation to the Muslim neighbor, and an abandonment of Christ.
Instead, let’s grow spines.
The excuse for spinelessness is mostly fear. We think the Muslims might kill us if we make an evangelical approach, and sometimes they will. But Saint Francis did not hesitate in his journey to Damietta, or in his approach to the Sultan of Egypt, when he lovingly presented the basic Catholic truths.
(If God is on our side, who can be against us?)
From what I could follow in the news this week, events on the campuses of Columbia, Fordham, UCLA, and so on suggest a reversal of our pusillanimity in the face of Hamas rioting. We begin to see that a large majority of Americans – about three-quarters of those polled – understand the points I was making above, and that they believe the “Palestinians” are not victims, but have often got what they deserved.
The “beatdown” administered by blue-state police is thus a hopeful sign that Americans are not incurably stupid. Moreover, developments in the Sunni Arab world give hope, too, that they will stand with Israel in opposition to Iran and its proxies. Certainly, their sympathy with the “Palestinians” evaporated long ago.
We must be careful what we wish for. Under terrorist leadership for many decades, the “Palestinian” wish for freedom, “from the river to the sea,” and thus for the extinction of Israel, created a situation for them in which their only friends are malevolent crazies.
It is not just a question of prayer, for prayer is not always beneficial. As Christians ought to know, it matters what you pray for. Praying for peace, while setting conditions, is praying to the Devil. And it gets worse when the Devil sets out to reward our prayers.
We do not love with CONDITIONS. God makes His answers indifferently to them, and He helpfully ignores what is not good for us.
The Western peacenik thinks that peace and all good things can be advanced by dialogue, and in this case dialogue “between the faiths,” under rules written by those who have no religion at all. It is one of many propositions we might have hoped would have perished on October 7th, rather than so many women and children.
“Peace talks” have generally contributed to the occasion for war, and all the peace talks in which Israel ever participated, have ended poorly. The most promising, such as Oslo, cost them most dear.
Hamas was the anfractuous reward for the painful Israeli evacuation of Gaza in 2005, the product of some “peace process.”
For Israel has something to learn, too: that glib wishes bring the opposite result, in every case.
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AUTHOR
David Warren
David Warren is a former editor of the Idler magazine and columnist in Canadian newspapers. He has extensive experience in the Near and Far East. His blog, Essays in Idleness, is now to be found at: davidwarrenonline.com.
Surviving Life: Character is Built in Hardship
/in Commentary, Hot Topics, News, Social Issues/by Lyle J. Rapacki, Ph.D.If you choose to remain in your self-built bubble attempting to be immune from the growing unease becoming rampant across our country, if you choose to work at being comfortably numb so you have no need to prepare and face the myriad of assaults stealing what was once the American way of life the world envied, then skip the remainder of my article, as my words will have no meaning to you. Or grab a cup of coffee, maybe a glass of wine or Makers Mark, and allow me to challenge you out of care and concern for you, not to insult or degrade.
Our beloved United States is deliberately under attack by diabolical forces who loathe our founding principles and have worked to reshape our nation into a New-World Order. The economic, social and political assaults coming, and already underway, shall prove to be most sobering, very trying, and quite sadly successful in many ways. Shall we survive as a nation delivered to us as a gift by our Forefathers? Shall we collectively come to our senses and submit (means cooperate) to God’s Will and purpose for this nation? Shall we individually and collectively stand and shout, “ENOUGH!” All of this will be seen sooner rather than later. But I want to challenge you now to stand and not faint; to run toward the battle and not away; to find your true character as you navigate some dark passages about to come to our nation that once shined like a city on a hill.
Our founders individually came to a personal decision to place God’s Will ahead of their own no matter how good theirs may have appeared. They each knew such a decision would signal a death warrant by the tyrannical force of that day to them, and those who joined. They each knelt and prayed prior to coming forward and placing their name on the Declaration of Independence…this act of prayer was not theatrical or for the camera or political posturing; each knelt at their desk as their name was called to come forward because they knew well the result of their act. Each of their unselfish act took inner courage they called forth so they could stand, and this courage brought forth the character of the man who placed his name and life on that parchment for you and for me. You see…character creates courage. Truly when you observe a person’s behavior, you are also observing a person’s character.
There was once a mouse terrified of cats until a magician agreed to transform the mouse into a cat. This act resolved his fear until he met a dog, so the magician changed him into a dog. The mouse-turned-cat-turned-dog was content until he met a tiger. Once again, the magician was asked to change him into a tiger. But when the now tiger came fearing that he met a hunter, the magician refused to help. “I will make you into a mouse again, for though you have the body of a tiger, you still have the heart of a mouse.”
How many people do you know who have built a formidable exterior, only to tremble inside with fear? How many people do you know who have built a stockpile of wealth or sought security in things and titles or positions? So very many have sought fame or status but remain merely a shell. Many work tirelessly to cultivate fame and position, to seize power but remain similar to the mouse described herein.
Courage is an outgrowth of who we are truly inside. Our exterior ways and behaviors may temporarily sustain us, but only inward character creates courage. We are about to witness those who have true inward character and true courage much similar to that demonstrated by the founders of our exceptional nation. Where are you in this regard?
©2024. Lyle J. Rapacki, Ph.D. All rights reserved.
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Washington’s Troops, Today’s Protesters
/in Commentary, Culture War, Elections, Hot Topics, News, Policy, Politics, Religion, Social Issues/by Jerry Newcombe, D. Min.Many of the anti-Israel protesters at Columbia and other college campuses are dwelling in cushy tents on the quad. These tents look pretty modern and uniform; one could only wonder who is paying for all this?
In 1754, an advertisement for Columbia (then known as King’s College), promised, “The chief thing that is aimed at in this college is to teach and engage children to know God in Jesus Christ.”
How far Columbia et al have strayed from the Christian faith that gave them birth.
Are today’s aggressive pro-Palestinian protests in line with what our forebears sacrificed to give us here in America?
George Washington was pleased, as were the other founders, that Jews here in America, whom he called “the children of the stock of Abraham,” would be free and not harassed for their religion. Washington viewed this land as a place described in his favorite Bible verse, Micah 4:4, where “every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and Figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
Alas, there are many today to “make him afraid” on these campuses of higher learning, where, for example, the tuition per year is $75,000 for Columbia. A lot of these protesters not only denounce Israel as a colonialist, white supremacist country, but they often denounce America in the same way.
Contrast these future leaders of society (!) with young people of the founding generation of this nation. Those committed to American independence, young and old, underwent many sacrifices as they fought hard for their (and our) liberties.
Speaking of the young dwelling in tents, imagine spending months in tents in the freezing, open fields of Pennsylvania. Beginning around December 1, 1777, thousands of America’s rag-tag army spent the brutal winter in Valley Forge.
Many of them were hungry and poorly equipped. It was said you could see where the troops had trod by the bloody footprints left in the snow. About 2,000 soldiers died—not from battle, but typhus, typhoid, influenza, pneumonia.
They slept in tents (not supplied by a camping goods superstore) until they were able to complete building the many wooden huts for their shelter.
It is reported that George Washington, their commander-in-chief, chose also to sleep in a tent until the log cabins were finished. Only then did this servant leader move into his headquarters there at Valley Forge.
Recently, I got to visit Valley Forge, Pennsylvania again. I was impressed by how incredible was the sacrifice that the early Americans went through for our freedom.
Visiting Valley Forge was a part of a faith and freedom tour of Coral Ridge Ministries, and our host was the head of the ministry, Dr. Rob Pacienza. Providence Forum, for which I serve as executive director, is a division of the ministry. The goal of Providence Forum is to teach Americans about our nation’s rich Judeo-Christian roots.
Our tour guide was Dr. Peter Lillback, the founding president of Providence Forum. He and I co-wrote a big thick book on the true faith of George Washington. It was the Christian faith of the father of our country that sustained him during trials like Valley Forge. He repeatedly and publicly thanked Providence (a reverent reference to God) for His help in our becoming an independent nation.
Why did the troops hunker down in Valley Forge? The British defeated the Americans at Brandywine on, what Dr. Lillback called, “our nation’s first 9/11.” September, 11, 1777.
What this fiasco for the fledgling new nation meant to the discerning eye of General Washington was that Philadelphia, our nation’s capital at the time, had become indefensible.
Soon the Congress and other government officials would have to flee. The Continental Congress ended up in York, Pennsylvania, and Washington led thousands of his troops to a defensible place called Valley Forge. Through months of hardship, the troops were forged into a stronger, more effective army.
Washington prayed fervently. God provided. The troops were drilled regularly and learned soldierly discipline there in Valley Forge. The many who went through the tribulation of Valley Forge came off battle ready.
On May 2, 1778, after their time of testing and sharpening, Washington wrote his troops from his Valley Forge headquarters, “To the distinguished character of a Patriot it should be our highest glory to add the more distinguished character of a Christian.”
Modern protesters at elite universities, endowed with some of the greatest privilege the world has ever known, sit in expensive tents eating readily-available food in fashionable protest against Israel. But George Washington, one of the Jewish peoples’ greatest supporters, led men (by personal example) through the roughest of times and conditions, to sacrificially lay the foundation for the freest nation on earth—a nation despised by the pampered protestors. Let us have more true leaders and fewer spoiled children.
©2024. Jerry Newcombe, D. Min. All rights reserved.
Lawsuit filed on behalf of American and Israeli Victims of Hamas Oct. 7th Terrorist Attack Against AJP Educational Foundation, Inc. a/k/a American Muslims for Palestine and National Students for Justice in Palestine
/in Courts & Law, Culture War, Elections, Hot Topics, Must Read, News, Policy, Politics, Social Issues, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Dr. Rich SwierNEW YORK, NY – Representing a group of victims of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attack on Israel, global law firm Greenberg Traurig, LLP, the National Jewish Advocacy Center, the Schoen Law Firm, and the Holtzman Vogel law firm have filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern Division of Virginia, Alexandria Division, against AJP Educational Foundation Inc. a/k/a American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) and National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP).
The lawsuit, which seeks compensatory damages for nine American and Israeli victims of the attack in which Hamas killed 1,200 people and took 240 people hostage, alleges that AMP and NSJP work in the United States as collaborators and propagandists for Hamas. Hamas is a United States designated Foreign Terrorist Organization. The suit also notes that AMP and NSJP are merely the current version of several prior entities that were already determined by the U.S. government to be supporters of Hamas.
“I couldn’t be prouder of our firm for taking on this important representation. It is an honor to lend our voice and resources to this fight in support of plaintiffs who have suffered greatly at the hands of terrorists,” said Richard A. Rosenbaum, Executive Chairman of Greenberg Traurig. “We have assembled a formidable team who will make certain that the strong evidence showing the defendants have violated the rule of law is presented in an American courtroom. Our team will work tirelessly to hold these organizations accountable for their actions carried out in concert with terrorists.”
The suit alleges AMP and NSJP responded on Oct. 8, 2023, the day after the horrific atrocities perpetrated by Hamas, by participating in the terrorist’s propaganda to justify its appalling brutalities. AMP and NSJP answered Hamas’s “call for mass mobilization” by disseminating a manifesto and plan of attack. This manifesto confirms that “AMP and NSJP are not merely organizing to assist Hamas’s ongoing terror campaign abroad—they are intentionally extending their aid to fomenting chaos, violence, and terror in the United States.” In this manner, the groups acted to support and further the goals and directives of Hamas.
Further, the lawsuit states that “Plaintiffs—survivors of Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack, family members of those murdered by Hamas, civilians still under fire from Hamas’s ongoing terrorism, and persons displaced by Hamas’s ongoing terrorism—have been, and continue to be, injured because AMP and NSJP knowingly provide continuous, systematic, and substantial assistance to Hamas and its affiliates’ acts of international terrorism. AMP and NSJP are thus liable to Plaintiffs for the damages they incurred because AMP and NSJP aid and abet Hamas’s terrorism.”
“Since Oct. 7, our country has witnessed a shocking rise in anti-Semitism, verbal and physical threats against Jews on our campuses and in our streets, vandalism, blockades, economic disruption, illegal encampments, and hostile takeovers of academic buildings—largely and concertedly directed by Hamas and its collaborators, American Muslims for Palestine and National Students for Justice in Palestine. Until now, they have seemingly operated in a world without consequence. With this lawsuit, we will hold Hamas’s collaborators accountable for their actions and show them and those in sympathy with them that no one is above, or beyond, the rule of law. As the son of one of the youngest survivors of Auschwitz, I am proud to be part of the team seeking vindication for our clients. We look forward to presenting the evidence to the judge and jury,” said Scott J. Bornstein, Senior Vice President of Greenberg Traurig.
Richard A. Edlin, Vice Chair of Greenberg Traurig, notes: “It is deeply ironic that the same people carrying signs saying ‘Death to America’ and ‘Death to Jews’ claim they are protected by free speech. They are not. Free speech has never included the active support of terrorism, and it has never protected the destruction of private property or the brutalization of innocent men, women, and children of many faiths, not just Jews. In the defendants, we confront an American problem, as well as a Jewish problem. We cannot—and through this lawsuit, we are saying we will not—allow the infiltration of Hamas-directed hatred, violence, and intimidation anywhere we can prevent it. If the defendants believe they can set up operations in America to create a mass culture of fear, threats, violence, and intimidation to undermine our cherished educational institutions, affect our governmental policies, and force Hamas’s evil ideology on American or Israeli soil, they are about to find out how mistaken they are.”
“As a lawyer with a long history of fighting antisemitism, I am proud to sign my name to this important lawsuit,” said Brad Kaufman, Co-President of Greenberg Traurig.
According to Mark Goldfeder, the CEO and director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, “This case is very simple: When someone tells you they are aiding and abetting terrorists—believe them.”
Jason Torchinsky, a partner at Holtzman Vogel who also represents the victims, emphasized that “[t]he chaos we are seeing at American colleges and universities has been well planned and organized, and National SJP’s work to support the end goals of Hamas needs to be exposed and stopped. We hope this lawsuit sees justice for our clients.”
The group of American and Israeli victims have experienced a wide spectrum of physical and emotional injuries.
“It is time that Hamas and all of its agents, like AMP and NSJP, be held responsible for their horrific actions,” the victims said in a joint statement. “We want to go on record to expose these groups for the terrorists they are and make certain that they are stopped from operating in the United States and other countries they infiltrate.”
Professor Anat Alon-Beck’s decision to join the lawsuit was motivated by personal experiences of harassment as an Israeli American corporate law professor. She wants to prevent this from happening to others on campuses. She is concerned about the alarming rise in antisemitism, demonization, delegitimization and dehumanization of Israel and the United States.
About Greenberg Traurig
Greenberg Traurig, LLP has more than 2750 attorneys in 47 locations in the United States, Europe and the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia. The firm is a 2022 BTI “Highly Recommended Law Firm” for superior client service and is consistently among the top firms on the Am Law Global 100 and NLJ 500. Greenberg Traurig is Mansfield Rule 6.0 Certified Plus by The Diversity Lab. The firm is recognized for powering its U.S. offices with 100% renewable energy as certified by the Center for Resource Solutions Green-e® Energy program and is a member of the U.S. EPA’s Green Power Partnership Program. The firm is known for its philanthropic giving, innovation, diversity, and pro bono. Web: www.gtlaw.com.
About the National Jewish Advocacy Center
The National Jewish Advocacy Center, Inc. is a nonprofit organization committed to our mission to advocate for the Jewish nation and the Jewish state as prisms through which people from all walks of life can learn about the dignity of difference, the power of coexistence, and the strength that comes from tolerance. NJAC is a thought leader in the field of combatting antisemitism with a demonstrated ability to innovate creative legal solutions and substantively support them. Web: https://jewishadvocacycenter.org/.
About Schoen Law Firm
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The Appeal of Anti-Establishment Politics is a Symptom of a Broken Political System
/in Commentary, Culture War, Elections, Hot Topics, News, Policy, Politics, Social Issues/by MercatorNet - Navigating Modern ComplexitiesThe past few years have seen the steady rise of populist, anti-establishment politics across a broad swathe of the West. In the mouths of its defenders, populism is liberation from the yoke of global domination. In the mouths of its critics, it is cheap demagoguery and the greatest threat to rule of law we have seen in generations. A true diagnosis requires a form of analysis that digs beneath the slogans of both populists and their critics.
Let’s start with a simple definition of populism: Populism could be understood, broadly speaking, as a style of politics whose leaders, instead of simply criticising the policies of political adversaries, align themselves, at least in their rhetoric, with the interests of the “real people” against an allegedly corrupt, arrogant and out-of-touch political establishment.
Populist leaders, whether Trump, Milei, Farage, Le Pen, Orban or Meloni, claim a new kind of moral high ground: whereas traditional politicians promise better policy outcomes, using rhetorical strategies that seem to assume something like “politics as usual”, populists, tapping into a growing wave of voter discontent, rail against the “system” and its cronies and are not afraid to paint themselves as political saviours who will restore the integrity of a corrupt system (this promotional video of Trump, laced with messianic tropes, is an extreme example).
Two rival perspectives on populism
One generally encounters two rival perspectives on the significance of populism for Western democracy: first, that of populists themselves, who view populism as a long overdue “shock treatment” designed to oust arrogant political elites and bring politics back in touch with “the people”; and second, that of critics of populism, who view populist movements as menacing the values of liberal democracy, undermining rule of law, and peddling exclusionary and simplistic narratives of national identity.
Both of these viewpoints are partially correct, but neither grasps the true depth of the political crisis now confronting most Western democracies.
Critics of populism are right to condemn certain elements of populism, such as its tendency to advance exclusionary narratives of national identity, which artificially screen out the fact that many Western nations, like it or not, are now constituted by an amalgam of diverse cultures, religions and ethnicities.
However, in condemning populism as a looming threat to liberal democracy, anti-populists seem to assume that what is under threat – our democratic institutions – are otherwise more or less in good shape, that is, more or less participatory, inclusive and responsive to the public interest.
Chronic dysfunctionality
But this is a breathtakingly optimistic assessment. Populists, though their political solutions often leave a lot to be desired, are right to point out the chronic dysfunctions of our technocratic political institutions, which seem to operate quite aloof from ordinary citizens’ interests, on a range of issues, from hate speech laws and transgender ideology to climate policy and immigration.
It is hard to deny that the European Union suffers from a deep-seated democratic deficit, and that “party discipline” in many Western democracies is a euphemism for the blind subservience of career politicians to party bosses. And it is painfully obvious that a lot of mainstream parties are losing touch with their voter base, as evidenced by increasing defection by Western voters from party-endorsed candidates, the disillusionment of many Americans with their two-party system, and the steady consolidation of support for anti-establishment parties across Europe.
Indeed, representative democracy in most parts of the world today would be more accurately described as a centralised oligarchy – the rule of a few, ruling on many matters in the interests of a few – rubber-stamped by periodic elections. For most Western democracies delegate power to highly centralised institutions, where it is easily captured and manipulated by elite actors, be they government ministers, legislators, corporate lobbyists or party bosses.
This situation is not remedied by periodic elections of representatives, which give most citizens very little say over the content of legislation, public spending and government priorities. Not to mention the fact that government policy is often executed through large-scale bureaucracies with limited legislative oversight and little or no genuine democratic accountability. The predicament we find ourselves in is not just caused by bad or irresponsible actors. It is also the fruit of political systems that are not fit for purpose.
Even if political elites wished to address citizens’ problems, their hands would frequently be tied, for at least two reasons.
First, highly centralised governments, insofar as they rely on generalised rules and policies, cannot effectively adapt themselves to the intricate needs of large-scale, complex and rapidly evolving societies and economies. For example, centralised governance of healthcare seems unable to tackle the challenges of ageing populations and the conspicuous dysfunctions of national healthcare systems.
Second, national governments are not their own masters. On the contrary, they are deeply dependent on international sources of public finance and monetary regulation, such as the Federal Reserve in the United States and the European Central Bank in Europe.
In Europe, national sovereignty is subordinated on many issues to European laws and regulatory frameworks. In the United States, State autonomy has been steadily eroded by the ever-expanding prerogatives of the national Congress and federal government.
Addressing pathologies
Thus, modern polities as currently constituted, apart from facilitating the concentration of power in the hands of a few privileged citizens, are disabled by their clumsy scale and their chronic dependency on external actors like international financiers and central banks from competently and effectively discharging their conventional governmental and welfare-providing functions.
Until such pathologies are addressed, we can expect the cycle of voter frustration and popular discontent to continue, whether it takes the form of populist styles of politics, strikes, protests, online and offline abuse of elected officials, or confrontations between citizens and police officers on the ground.
The problem is, even if populists rise to power, as we have seen them do in places like the USA under Trump and Italy under Meloni, this is no guarantee of sustainable institutional reform.
In the short term, a populist victory might limit some of the damages of unaccountable centralised governance. But it also risks replacing the pathology of centralised technocracy with damaging forms of demagoguery, holding out the unrealistic promise that a quasi-messianic leader will cut through all the red tape and fix our problems with the wave of a magic wand.
Even if populism suffers political setbacks or makes limited gains in some places, the appetite for anti-system or anti-establishment politics has been gaining momentum in many Western countries and is unlikely to subside anytime soon. For the basic problem we confront is not a handful of troublesome politicians, but a political system that is no longer fit for purpose.
Quite possibly, the type of reform Western democracies require is more radical than anything either populists or their critics are willing to contemplate. For what is required is far-reaching decentralising reforms that anchor political and economic power not in a centralised state, but in a federal pact among municipal and regional governments and grassroots institutions such as local citizen assemblies, professional associations and worker co-operatives. Under such reforms, the old national political establishment would lose much of its power. But so would national populist leaders and movements.
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AUTHOR
DAVID THUNDER
David Thunder is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Navarra’s Institute for Culture and Society in Pamplona, Spain.
This article has been republished with permission from his Substack.
EDITORS NOTE: This Mercator column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.
FLORIDA: Hispanic Republican Club Showing Film ‘Plantadas’ at ‘Stopping Marxism’ Event on May 18, 2024
/in Elections, Hot Topics, Must Read, News, Policy, Politics, Social Issues, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Dr. Rich SwierThe new Hispanic Republican Club of Collier will be having its first event, the showing of the movie Plantadas, a film by revered Cuban filmmaker Lilo Vilaplana. Lilo is known for several movies including Plantadas, a movie about the men who fought the Castro regime and lost their lives or spent many years in prison.
WATCH: “Plantadas” by Lilo Vilaplana official trailer.
But the new film, Plantadas, has only had limited releases in Miami.
People can see it May 18th, 2024 at 5:00 p.m. at our event in Naples, Florida.
Also we will be having Lilo present in person, as well as some of the actors from the movie and some former political prisoners. All speakers, etc. will be in both English and Spanish, so all will understand what is being said.
This new movie, Plantadas, is about the women who fought against Fidel Castro. Many believed Fidel at first, but then he turned out to be a communist and imprisoned or executed any who disagreed. Tickets to the event are $20 and proceeds go to the families of Cuban political prisoners.
Now the United States has its own political prisoners – the J6ers and pro-Lifers. We can learn a lot from what happened in Cuba, and be warned.
This is a good event to bring teens and young adults to.
Most have never met someone who was imprisoned by the communists, but they need to know the truth.
For more information, contact the Vice President of the Hispanic Republican Club of Collier, Ana Perez, at her email perezpremiererealty@outlook.
CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS FOR $20 EACH TO THE MAY 18 EVENT
CLICK HERE TO BECOME A SPONSOR
The Hispanic Republican Club of Collier is an officially chartered club of the Collier County Republican Executive Committee and the Republican Party of Florida.
©2024. Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.
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President Trump Reacts to Recording of CIA Program Manager Saying ‘Higher-Ups Kept Info From Trump’
/in Courts & Law, Election Fraud, Elections, Featured, Hot Topics, National Security, News, Policy, Politics, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by O'Keefe Media GroupPresident Trump reacts to bombshell recording of Program Manager at CIA describing how higher-ups at Langley withheld information from him.
“It’s shocking to see how stupid somebody can be. If this guy’s for real, you want to get rid of him. C.I.A. Central Intelligence Agency…This is not an intelligent guy, to be openly talking to a woman that walks up and starts asking him questions and talking that way. So he may be bragging or showing off to some young lady, I have no idea the conditions under which he spoke. But I’d get rid of him real fast. If he’s for real, get rid of him.”
Watch:
CIA Press Secretary Gives Statement to O’Keefe About Program Manager Caught On Tape
Spokesperson at CIA gives me a statement saying that the Program Manager at the Chinese Mission Center caught on tape talking about the higher-ups withholding information from the President, is no longer working at the CIA.
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Office Loan Defaults At Highest Point In More Than A Decade
/in Budget and Finance, Economy, Elections, Hot Topics, News, Policy, Politics, Regulation, Social Issues, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by The Daily CallerHigh interest rates and low demand have led to the number of U.S. office buildings threatened by default reaching its highest point since the fourth quarter of 2012, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
Around $38 billion worth of office buildings are currently facing defaults, foreclosures or another form of financial distress, according to data from finance firm MSCI acquired by the WSJ. The defaults are part of a larger commercial real estate crisis, as high interest rates set by the Federal Reserve to combat elevated inflation and a slump in demand due to a rise in work-from-home policies have left office owners with huge debts and struggling to find tenants.
The payoff rate for commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) in 2023 was at its lowest point since data began being collected in 2007, with only 35% of office owners paying back their loans at the end of their term, according to the WSJ. In 2021, more than 90% of office owners with a CMBS did so.
“The problem you have in office is, in many instances, there is no cash flow at all,” Bill Demchak, PNC Chief Executive, said on an earnings call, according to the WSJ. “It is really a unique animal at the moment.”
Only interest is typically paid for CMBS during the term of the loan, with the full amount being paid at maturity, or it has to be refinanced with current interest rates. Refinancing could pose an issue for commercial real estate owners due to a jump in interest rates as a result of the Federal Reserve setting its federal funds rate in a range of 5.25% and 5.50%, the highest level in 23 years.
The Fed set its rate to its current level in an effort to decelerate inflation, which peaked at 9% in June 2022 and is currently at 3.5% as of March, far higher than the Fed’s 2% target.
Around $18 billion in office loans that were converted to CMBS in the past are set to come to term in the next 12 months, twice as many that matured in 2023, according to the WSJ. Office vacancy rates are also up to a record 13.8%, as opposed to 9.4% at the end of 2019.
Office owners are resorting to bolstering the amenities offered in their buildings to lure wary tenants who don’t necessarily need office space, driving up costs to obtain renters, according to the WSJ.
Defaults in commercial real estate pose a particularly big issue for small- and medium-sized banks that hold an outsized portion of CMBS. The mid-sized New York Community Bancorp experienced a massive drop in its stock earlier this year after posting a $252 million loss in the fourth quarter of 2023, largely due to commercial real estate loans, leading a group of investors, including former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, to bail out the bank.
AUTHOR
WILL KESSLER
Contributor
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