The Day of Reckoning by Richard Fernandez

Posted: 2014-06-17

6-16-14 (reprinted with permission from Gila Watch)

I almost never, ever, do this.  I'm going to publish another person's work in its entirety.  It's too important.  You must read it.  

First, an update as of June 16, 2014.  The militant group ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) is advancing on Baghdad.  See Iraq Falling Apart as Militants March Towards Baghdad:  U.S. Begins Embassy Evacuation.

The following article was written by Richard Fernandez.  It contains photos and videos not published below.  SeeThe Day of Reckoning.

The article begins.....

Ernest Hemingway observed that people went broke gradually at first then all of a sudden.  Barack Obama’s career, for so long without visible means of support, has now moved onto the “all of sudden stage” of bankruptcy.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, an al-Qaeda affiliated front of Muslims, have followed up their lightning seizure of Mosul by taking Tikrit, the former stronghold of Saddam Hussein.

In Mosul and surrounding areas, more than 150,000 troops fled their posts as the militants advanced, leaving behind thousands of weapons, including tanks and helicopters, that are now in ISIL’s possession, said Jabbar Yawer, a spokesman for ethnic Kurdish armed forces in Erbil.

The speed with which ISIL and its allies have advanced after their seizure on Tuesday of Mosul – a city of two million people – has sent alarm bells ringing not only in Baghdad but in western capitals.

The Tweets tell of a monumental collapse.  ”Jesus. “30,000 men – simply turned and ran in the face of the assault by an insurgent force of just 800 fighters … Surreal scenes in #Mosul, #Iraq as US trained troops leave behind their uniforms and flee from #ISIS to #Kurdistan. ”

Michael Yon Tweets: “Mosul: Iraq Crumbling before our eyes”. The Internet is rife with pictures of al-Qaeda triumphantly inspecting millions, perhaps billions of dollars worth of captured, American made military equipment.  It’s like Vietnam all over again, except this time the NVA are continuing the attack all the way to New York.

Unless the rot is stopped, ISIS will soon be at Baghdad’s gates and al-Qaeda’s affiliates will soon possess one, perhaps two major Middle Eastern countries plus trillions of dollars in oil resources. Libya, Iraq, perhaps Syria. They will be on the border of Saudi Arabia, able to credibly menace the energy lifeline of the Western world, a fact that can only play to Putin’s advantage.

The dangers of abandoning such a vital region were always obvious. Those who have not read my 2010 post, The Ten Ships, might take the time to do so now. It’s good for a laugh, not because it is so “brilliant” but because it’s so obvious. It explains how Obama’s political petulance made him ignore fundamental military strategy by ignoring the obvious center of Islamic militant gravity the Middle East in favor of redeploying the ground forces to a PR fantasy campaign in Afghanistan.

There’s nothing in place available to stop al-Qaeda. The forces that might have are locked up in the Southwest Asia, sustained at the mercy of Russia and Pakistan. Obama has been faked out; the AQ have gone around him for a layup to the basket. He may lose Iraq and its border with Syria before the year ends. Afghanistan’s fall will follow almost immediately thereafter, behind the last American troops, whose safe exit from the landlocked country is now by no means guaranteed.  The Russians lost more than 500 men going out in 1989 — and they only had to cross a land border a short distance away.

The only way things could be worse is for US troops in Afghanistan find themselves trapped, denied passage by Pakistan or Russia. Of course that could never happen because the press never considers the possibility and it considers Obama too “respected” for that to occur.

When you add in the Eastern European crisis and the growing expansion of China to the Middle Eastern collapse, it is not hard to see the obvious. Unless a miracle saves Obama, the nation will be facing a global and existential security crisis within a short time.  America will face a supercharged Islamic terrorism with thousands of recruits in the West available as a 5th Column, supplied with vast amounts of money and in potential possession of most of the world’s oil. For how long until Saudi Arabia’s Islamic children eat its parents?

And then the real price of Obama’s campaign to stuff the voter rolls with “undocumented aliens” will soon have to be paid. Like a child throwing a tantrum, president Obama has deemed it clever to throw open the southern border, ascribing what any sane person would regard as territorial suicide to high-minded humanitarianism. It has somehow become cool to encourage the invasion of America and racist to even consider that might be bad idea.  But through that portal, what might come? Well, Bienvenido y Allah Akbar.

And that’s just part of his legacy. Obama has presided over the destruction of American influence in the Middle East, the hollowing out of the US economy, the perversion of American intelligence assets and the maltreatment of American veterans.

The shield has been thrown away, the sword has been melted down, the senses dispatched on a leave of absence.

Whether in fulfillment of some childhood psycho-drama, in the service of some bizarre obsession or in pursuit of an imbecilic strategy, Obama has basically made every bad move it is possible to make. For a long time the press covered up this perverted process out of admiration for the creases in his trousers; and so it appeared Obama was going gradually bust. Now we’re in the “all of a sudden” part of the curve.  The check’s come back from the bank, bounced.

The accumulated weight of Obama’s errors are now too great to escape.  There is no soft landing.  It’s crunch time. America waits on its ill-defended beaches behind Obama’s Cash-for-Clunkers, Solar Panel, Carbon Trading Certificates and Obamacare sandbags, though it still has no Keystone XL pipeline.

The nation has been issued with these little plastic steering wheels with which it is expected to dodge the coming crisis. One might look for what Obama called “unproven missile defense systems” and unnecessary “future combat systems”. One might pine wistfully for its missing ships and non-transgendered  soldiers. But look in vain. They were sent away because we were assured they would never be needed by people much smarter than ourselves.

In their place there are doughty legions of Occupy protesters with Obamaphones all ready to join the enemy. That is Obama’s answer to whatever the question is in his mind.  And yet it all depends on him. What makes the routs like that in Iraq so dangerous is that staunching the hemorrhage vitally depends discovering leadership qualities that have heretofore been missing. In Iraq, we expect Maliki, at the 11th hour, to become the man he never was. But America is in no better case. For on a much more titanic scale the Democrats have bet the farm on Obama rising to an occasion he’s never been able to rise to before.

See him as Clint Eastwood saw him.  An empty chair; the man who failed at everything including his stint at the Annenberg Foundation and as Illinois legislator; who probably even had his “books” ghostwritten for him. A blank screen, on which he proudly declared everyone could project their fantasy. His inability to think a new thought is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in his unshaken desire to release even more hardened terrorists from Gitmo.  He is marching to some invisible drummer, pursuing a vision of greatness some once believed was visionary but which turns out to be merely delusional.

The most vital requirement in stopping a crisis is changing leadership. While companies fire CEOs and generals are relieved in defeat and some presidents with decency tender their resignations in shame when faced with failure,  the Republic is stuck with Barack Hussein Obama, the man for whom all problems are somebody else’s fault; whose basic instinct is to sit down on a stump with his head and his hands and whine bitterly about Ted Cruz.

The Democratic solution to the Obama problem can be found in one word: Hillary.  Hillary: the life raft of the great progressive movement; the reserve chute; the fire-axe, the break-glass-in-case Obama fails solution.  That fact alone is more alarming that all of Obama’s mistakes. If you were never worried before, despair now.  A nation can survive any mistakes in its pasts provided it is willing to learn, but it cannot survive willful mistakes in its future because it is unable to admit error. If Hillary has been described as Barack Obama’s Third Term, then she is proof of what we everyone distressingly knows: the only error progressives ever admit is not trying their ideology hard enough.

It will be double-down until the end.

http://www.gilacountywatch.com/index.cfm/blog/the-day-of-reckoning-by-richard-fernandez/

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