Early in her first term as Prime Minister, the Soviets moved short range nuclear missiles into Eastern Europe where they were positioned to erase London and various European capitals in a flight time of mere minutes. During this intense stand-off between the Soviet Union and the West, and despite massive protests by capitulationist leftists inside Britain and around Europe, Lady Thatcher agreed to station US nuclear cruise missiles at Greenham Common as a counterforce to the menacing Soviet SS-20’s.
Lady Thatcher partnered with Ronald Reagan in the struggle to end the evil empire that was the Soviet Union. She instinctively understood the dangers of appeasement and that her country’s struggle was much larger. It was the struggle to preserve human freedom. She famously remarked “the enemy within is more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty than external enemies.”
News from the Front – Some Observations and Updates
For those who are new to this column, it is the ongoing description of the new developments, positive and negative, in the war between the West and resurgent militant Islam (my term for our enemy, misnamed as Islamic “extremists”). This column emanates from the research I did for my book, Lessons from Fallen Civilizations, and from my contention that there is nothing extreme about Islamic terrorists. For most Americans, this war began with 9/11/01 and resulted in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. But I contend that it is actually a resumption of the fourteen-hundred year war that began in the 7th century when the soldiers of Allah rode out of Arabia and conquered two-thirds of Western Christendom including Spain, Greece, and the Balkans.
This column also emanates from the observation that the Euro and American progressives’ response to nearly any attack by an outside power, large or small, is to ignore it or even legitimize it as a perfectly predictable reaction to American or Western imperialism. A perfect case in point is Benghazi (see update below). Secondly, progressives like Presidents Clinton and Obama never want to admit that we are at war because that unifies the country into a common purpose and distracts from the progressives’ primary objective which is to divide the country into groups, those who are favored and subsidized by government and those who must be vilified and more greatly taxed. Finally progressive politicians hold on to a long-held belief that American military strength makes war more likely when the exact opposite is true. This week’s remembrances of Lady Thatcher’s enormous accomplishments have made western progressives queasy precisely because they were and continue to be her “enemies within.”
Benghazi Update – Could it be a Watergate?
I’ve written a number of pieces on the Benghazi attack and hope that the readers of this column will understand both its meaning in the context of the overall war on terror and that it still has Watergate-like “legs” for this president. Dana Rohrabacher, Republican Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee is still pursuing this administration for its efforts to subvert congressional oversight. In a recent op-ed, he made clear that his committee, along with Lindsey Graham in the Senate is still pursuing the truth on many fronts.
Rohrabacher has also disclosed that it is now believed that a number of those terrorists who attacked the embassy in Libya last September were also involved in the attack this January on the gas plant in Algeria where 37 hostages were killed including three Americans. If this is true, this would mean that because this President refused to acknowledge that al Qaeda had attacked us in Benghazi and did nothing to apprehend and or kill the attackers; they were emboldened and free to kill more westerners.
Secondly, both Graham and Rohrabacher are going public with the fact that there are approximately 30 American survivors of the attack, some hospitalized, whose names are being withheld from Congress by the State Department and who are being intimidated into silence. Kudos to Rohrabacher who writes, “This case is worse than Watergate. This cover-up and stonewalling is about the murder of American heroes.”
Obama, Hillary and America’s Collapsing Influence
For those of you who may be still laboring under the impression that it was wise to elect our first mixed-race president with no foreign policy experience, just for the sake of doing so, the military historian, Mark Helprin forcefully dispels that naïve delusion. Regarding Benghazi, he writes that, in the Obama Administration’s rush to paper over its inability to protect and then to rescue our embassy personnel, ‘…its failures were fundamental rather than merely anomalous.”
Since the end of World War II, the US Sixth Fleet had protected American interests in the Mediterranean, armed with among other assets, Marine Expeditionary Units (MEU’s). These are amphibious ready groups with 2,000 Special Forces personnel which would have been easily capable of smashing the Benghazi attackers. But dating back to a directive of 2008, Obama had disbanded so many there simply wasn’t an MEU available anywhere in the area. Here Helprin is exposing one of the likely reasons for the Benghazi cover-up—malfeasance.
Additionally, Helprin gives a neat synopsis of how the Hillary/Obama team has presided over the collapse of American influence in the region and how that vacuum resulted in the destruction of our embassy and is now reaping chaos, “… the Muslim brotherhood watching over the Egyptian powder keg, terrorist warlords murdering our diplomats in Libya, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb reaching up from the Sahel in the Mediterranean littoral, instability in Tunisia, Bedouin kidnappers in the Sinai, Hamas rockets streaming from Gaza, Lebanon riding the Hezbollah tiger, Jordan imperiled, and a civil war in Syria raging—what possible reason could there be for a powerful Sixth Fleet?”
We are beginning to learn that an American electorate which votes for disarmament is one which simply does not know the lessons of history. If Thatcher and Reagan were running England and America now, Brits and Americans would certainly know better.
