We are no longer funding ISIS, al-Qaeda and al-Nusra in Syria!

Sundance reports at The Conservative Treehouse,

The Washington Post might be claiming today that President Trump is discontinuing a covert CIA plan that armed “moderates”. But we know, if Trump is actually canceling this program, the actual recipients of the covert weapons plan were ISIS, al-Qaeda and al-Nusra in Syria – By their own damned admissions.

There simply is no doubt of that truth. The Washington Post is lying, and despite their earnest efforts we can actually prove their framework is a substantive and factual falsehood.

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al-Qaeda has reestablished terrorist training camps in Afghanistan:

Even as the Obama administration scrambles to confront the Islamic State and a resurgent Taliban, an old enemy seems to be reappearing in Afghanistan: Qaeda training camps are sprouting up there, forcing the Pentagon and American intelligence agencies to assess whether they could again become a breeding ground for attacks on the United States.

A noose near a former Qaeda base in Afghanistan in 2001. New Qaeda camps have appeared, apparently catching American and Afghan officials off guard. Credit Andrew Testa for The New York Times
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Toward an understanding of the Islamic State

Graeme Wood writes in The Atlantic:

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse.

...Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been its leader since May 2010, but until last summer, his most recent known appearance on film was a grainy mug shot from a stay in U.S. captivity at Camp Bucca during the occupation of Iraq. Then, on July 5 of last year, he stepped into the pulpit of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, to deliver a Ramadan sermon as the first caliph in generations—upgrading his resolution from grainy to high-definition, and his position from hunted guerrilla to commander of all Muslims. The inflow of jihadists that followed, from around the world, was unprecedented in its pace and volume, and is continuing.

That is the only time he has appeared on camera since assuming the role of commander of all Muslims. Wood continues...

In fact, much of what the group does looks nonsensical except in light of a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse.

The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.

Bernard Haykel, the foremost secular authority on the Islamic State’s ideology, believes the group is trying to re-create the earliest days of Islam and is faithfully reproducing its norms of war. “There is an assiduous, obsessive seriousness” about the group’s dedication to the text of the Koran, he says. (Peter Murphy)

Did you know this:

An anti-Messiah, known in Muslim apocalyptic literature as Dajjal, will come from the Khorasan region of eastern Iran and kill a vast number of the caliphate’s fighters, until just 5,000 remain, cornered in Jerusalem. Just as Dajjal prepares to finish them off, Jesus—the second-most-revered prophet in Islam—will return to Earth, spear Dajjal, and lead the Muslims to victory.

This is the guy who has been declared caliph.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was declared caliph by his followers last summer. The establishment of a caliphate awakened large sections of Koranic law that had lain dormant, and required those Muslims who recognized the caliphate to immigrate. (Associated Press)

Wood continues:

One way to un-cast the Islamic State’s spell over its adherents would be to overpower it militarily and occupy the parts of Syria and Iraq now under caliphate rule. Al‑Qaeda is ineradicable because it can survive, cockroach-like, by going underground. The Islamic State cannot. If it loses its grip on its territory in Syria and Iraq, it will cease to be a caliphate. Caliphates cannot exist as underground movements, because territorial authority is a requirement: take away its command of territory, and all those oaths of allegiance are no longer binding. Former pledges could of course continue to attack the West and behead their enemies, as freelancers. But the propaganda value of the caliphate would disappear, and with it the supposed religious duty to immigrate and serve it. If the United States were to invade, the Islamic State’s obsession with battle at Dabiq suggests that it might send vast resources there, as if in a conventional battle. If the state musters at Dabiq in full force, only to be routed, it might never recover.

Given everything we know about the Islamic State, continuing to slowly bleed it, through air strikes and proxy warfare, appears the best of bad military options.

...It sees enemies everywhere around it, and while its leadership wishes ill on the United States, the application of Sharia in the caliphate and the expansion to contiguous lands are paramount.

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"We may need ground forces just to rescue our ground forces."

Andrew McCarthy points out that

less than 24 hours after Obama suggested that Congress should forbid him from using ground troops against Islamic State terrorists, Islamic State terrorists were busy capturing a western Iraqi town just 13 minutes away from the base where 320 U.S. Marines are on the ground, training hapless Iraqi forces. Forget ground forces to defeat ISIS; the way Obama is managing things, we may need ground forces just to rescue our ground forces.

...In our constitutional system, therefore, Congress is not permitted to command the armed forces. It has no more power to direct the president to deploy or not deploy ground forces than it does to tell the president to “take that hill” or capture this enemy combatant.

...Or, as he has done in Iraq and is doing in Afghanistan, he can withdraw even as the enemy is on the rise — a command decision known, in less politically correct parlance, as surrender. But whatever command decisions the president makes, they are his decisions. He is politically accountable for them.

...Obama has made a career of ducking accountability, whether by voting present, leading from behind, or cynically condemning the predictable damage wreaked by his own policies (and relying on the press not to call him on it). The effort to gull Congress into passing an AUMF that purports to forbid military commands that this commander-in-chief has already, and irresponsibly, decided not to give is not just the usual Obama blame-shifting; it is unconstitutional.

...More to the point, ISIS is not close to being the totality of the enemy. Because of his own ideological blinders, the president will not recognize that we are confronted by a global jihad united by the ideology of sharia supremacism. Besides ISIS and al-Qaeda (its Sunni forbear and, for now, rival), the enemy includes Iran and its Shiite terror axis. While battling the Sunni jihadists in Iraq and Syria for the moment, Iran has long colluded with those selfsame Sunnis in the jihad against the U.S., Israel, and the West.

An American strategy that focuses only on ISIS, pretends that al-Qaeda has already been “decimated,” and regards Iran as a potential ally rather than a mortal enemy is doomed to fail. When it does, Obama wants congressional Republicans to share in the ignominy.

Obama’s second rationale involves his legacy hunting. Uniquely in American history, Obama is building a presidential legacy that is not about his contributions to the United States but his place in the movement Left as the man who tamed America.

...I’ve contended several times over the years that the AUMFs currently in effect need overhauling. The objective of overhaul, however, should be to define our jihadist enemies more clearly and encourage the president to vanquish them — without geographical or temporal limits. Still, even with all their imperfections, the current AUMFs, as they’ve been interpreted over the last 13 years, empower the president to use any appropriate military force against al-Qaeda, ISIS, and their sponsors, wherever on earth they operate.

Congress would be wise to improve on the current AUMFs. Obama’s unconstitutional proposal, to the contrary, is the roadmap to defeat.

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It's al-Qaeda

Andrew McCarthy reiterates:

It was all al-Qaeda. Khorasan, al-Nusra, and al-Qaeda are one and the same.

The administration does not like to admit that al-Qaeda is still a formidable enemy because President Obama has made a habit of falsely claiming to have defeated it. That is why we are hearing about the “Khorasan Group.”

the administration had a motive to exaggerate the threats as “imminent.” A president is not required to seek congressional authorization in order to respond militarily to threats of imminent attack. Obama did not want to ask Congress’s approval. Doing so would have launched a potentially embarrassing examination of (a) the president’s claims to have defeated al-Qaeda, and (b) the fact that the “moderate rebels” Obama proposes to aid in Syria work arm-in-arm with al-Qaeda.

By claiming to act against an imminent threat, the president sidestepped that problem. Of course, there could still have been an imminent threat — that an assertion is politically convenient does not necessarily make it untrue. However imminent the threat, though, its source is al-Qaeda.

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The breathtaking depth of the president’s Benghazi cover-up.

Andrew McCarthy writes that

the Obama administration’s “Blame the Video” story was a fraudulent explanation for the September 11, 2012, rioting in Cairo every bit as much as it was a fraudulent explanation for the massacre in Benghazi several hours later.

“Blame the Video” was an Obama-administration–crafted lie, through and through. It was intended, in the stretch run of the 2012 campaign, to obscure the facts that (a) the president’s foreign policy of empowering Islamic supremacists contributed directly and materially to the Benghazi massacre; (b) the president’s reckless stationing of American government personnel in Benghazi and his shocking failure to provide sufficient protection for them were driven by a political-campaign imperative to portray the Obama Libya policy as a success — and, again, they invited the jihadist violence that killed our ambassador and three other Americans; and (c) far from being “decimated,” as the president repeatedly claimed during the campaign (and continued to claim even after the September 11 violence in Egypt and Libya), al-Qaeda and its allied jihadists remained a driving force of anti-American violence in Muslim countries — indeed, they had been strengthened by the president’s pro-Islamist policies.

The State Department knew there was going to be trouble at the embassy on September 11, the eleventh anniversary of al-Qaeda’s mass-murder of nearly 3,000 Americans. It was well known that things could get very ugly. When they did, it would become very obvious to Americans that President Obama had not “decimated” al-Qaeda as he was claiming on the campaign trail. Even worse, it would be painfully evident that his pro–Muslim Brotherhood policies had actually enhanced al-Qaeda’s capacity to attack the United States in Egypt.

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