The first piece in an on-going personal exploration of radical Islam in Jordan.
Over the next few months, I'll be posting a several part investigation into radical Islam in Jordanian society. Most of this will come from a lengthy background essay of mine on the topic. The series will culminate with a report during the mid-summer when I return from a Tufts University Joint Research Project, in coordination with the United States Service Academies at West Point, Annapolis, and Colorado Springs, on this very matter. We will be interviewing college students, government officials, and similar sources to ascertain a better picture of what is going on in Jordan today. I don't have the slightest clue where our investigation will lead us, but suffice it to say, it should be very interesting indeed. Here then, is part one.
Jordan has a long history of supporting Western interests and cooperating on matters of war and peace, especially in the post 9/11 environment. Jordan has been an invaluable ally and bastion of moderation in a region which is increasingly seeing polarization between autocratic regimes and jihadist opposition. While the Jordanian Monarchy exercises more control over Jordanian society than we would find to be democratic, the traditional American foreign policy calculation has been that the Hashemites are worth supporting because they favor American interests in the region. Consequently, it’s worth examining the society the Hashemites have created and seeing if in fact the Hashemite have fostered a society which is worth such vast levels of U.S. support.
In examining the success of the U.S.-Jordanian relationship, one of the most important factors to consider is the radicalization of the Jordanian population itself. If Islamism has taken hold in Jordan, despite the Monarchy’s pro-Western orientation, that would present cause for serious concern. On the surface, this appears not to be the case. The Jordanian political arena ostensibly is more stable than that of, for example, Egypt, and jihadist violence by domestic political parties seems minimal. How Jordan has avoided the widespread political violence which has engulfed so many Middle Eastern states is one of the most important comparative questions of today. Unlike most of the “moderate” Arab states, Jordan has sought to include the Islamist opposition within mainstream society. As in many Arab states, the Islamist opposition in Jordan is the Muslim Brotherhood. The Jordanian chapter of the organization was formed in 1945 and from the beginning, the Jordanian Brotherhood renounced violence as a tool to institute Islamist society. The Brotherhood has enjoyed a curious relationship with the Monarchy, in which the Brotherhood historically has been able to criticize the King—even severely at times—while it has stayed within the bounds of political opposition and has not directly challenged the legitimacy of the Monarchy.
The Jordanian Brotherhood began with a focus on social issues that allowed it to advocate for Islamist policies while posing no threat to the Monarchy. As the Brotherhood gained grassroots support throughout Jordan, it was able to gradually increase the scope of its priorities to include issues such as the Palestinian question and the Monarchy’s pro-Western agenda. As the Brotherhood increased the scope of its issues, it also increased the scope of its operations. The Monarchy has traditionally allowed the Brotherhood to run candidates for elected office, and the Brotherhood has also taken to reaching out to civil society groups such as labor and professional organizations in order to expand its reach. The Brotherhood now commonly runs its members for the boards of different labor organizations in an attempt to cut across traditional cleavages in Jordanian society and expand its member base. In fact, professional and labor organizations have become some of the Brotherhood’s most important outlets for dissent. The government generally tolerates this circuitous method of political criticism and allows for alternative opinions to be expressed so long as they do not cross the line and leave the realm of the loyal opposition. As a result, the Jordanian Brotherhood and its political offshoot, the Islamic Action Front (IAF) have traditionally stayed within the regime’s defined boundaries and seldom ventured beyond the line of what is commonly acknowledged as acceptable behavior.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
The Jordanian Question: Part 1
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Al Qaeda's Newst Recruiter
California Senator Dianne Feinstein recently sponsored an amendment to the 2008 Defense Authorization Bill which would close down the Defense Department’s detention center in Guantanamo Bay and prohibit the practice of rendition, in which prisoners are shipped to states whose interrogation techniques are more, well, direct. The effect of the Feinstein Amendment would be to integrate jihadist detainees into the federal prison system where they would receive further legal protections. Presumably, the good folks at the American Bar Association would rush to the defense of these misunderstood individuals and put up a spirited legal defense in the name of the rule of law.
What in fact the Feinstein Amendment shows is that a significant portion of the American legislative community is dangerously ignorant to even the most fundamental aspects of counter-insurgency warfare. If the Feinstein Amendment passes—which, fortunately, it likely will not—al Qaeda and other jihadist groups would be irreparably strengthened in what would be a cataclysmic abdication of all semblance of rational policy.
Reasonable minds can differ on subjects such as Guantanamo Bay and the legal status of jihadist detainees. The legal community, while misguided, can be patriotic while insisting that greater access to legal resources be provided to detainees. What is not patriotic, nor rational, is granting al Qaeda unhindered access to the ideal recruitment demographic on a permanent basis. The unwavering lesson of every insurgency in history is that prison is the ideal recruitment ground for insurgent factions. Prisoners are necessarily in constant communication with each other, and all it takes is one radical to evangelize the message of radicalism amongst a population which is already at odds with the government.
Simply put, there is no better recruiting ground than prison. Every insurgency—from the IRA famously training and conducting exercises behind British prison bars in full defiance of powerless guards, to the terrible school of French Indo-China, to the FLN radicalizing common Algerian criminals against the French, has directly utilized the unparalleled access that prison provides to convert and radicalize its target demographic. If you put members of terrorist cells in standard prisons, they will recruit more followers. There’s no gray area here: either we want to contribute further to the propagation of jihadist ideology or we wish to isolate the Islamist prophets of doom from the general population—especially the segments which would most receptive to these ideas.
The genius of Guantanamo Bay is that it segregates insurgents from the rest of prison population. Individuals in Guantanamo (with the few inevitable exceptions) are already radicalized and consequently no harm is done in detaining them. However, the minute that radical population is mixed with common inmates, the jihadists will have scored a tremendous victory on a scale far greater than September 11th ever was. If one purposely set out to loose a counter-insurgency, the absolute first thing one would do would be to provide guerrillas the human resources that are the sinews of any insurgency. Senator Feinstein, has, unwittingly, proposed this very thing.
Friday, June 29, 2007
What can Brown do for you?
Earlier today, British officials discovered two parked cars filled with explosives in the heart of London. The devises were set to be trigged by cell phone and were placed in high traffic areas such as outside a nightclub. Government sources so far have pegged “international elements” to be responsible for the car bombs.
And so Gordon Brown faces his first great crisis only three days into office as Prime Minister. Two years ago, Tony Blair acted with steadfast resolve and moral clarity when his country was rocked by jihadist terrorism. Today, Gordon Brown must set the stage for how his government—and indeed the United Kingdom as a whole—will react to the forces of jihad in the post-Blair era.
Mr. Brown faces quite a challenge. The Muslim population of the UK is amongst the most radical in the world. According to the left-leaning Guardian periodical, Muslims in the UK are the most anti-western in Europe, and a full ¾ of the Islamic population of Great Britain blames jihadist activity on western disrespect of Islam.
Britain’s liberal immigration laws have allowed radical clerics to preach the doctrines of jihad in London mosques and now the country finds itself swamped with a radicalized population where it is easy to walk into any movie store in Islamic communities and purchase propaganda DVDs from al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups.
Under the leadership of Tony Blair, the United Kingdom was a steadfast ally against radical Islam despite its internal crisis. The attempted bombings of today are clearly a test to challenge the fortitude of Mr. Brown. Gordon Brown is a capable minister and a decent man—but he must meet the challenge presented to him head on and wage war with the forces that have attempted time and again to destroy everything that his society is predicated upon.
The response of the Brown government will be a clear indicator of how the UK will act years into the future. The British people will either retain their stubborn pride and finish the fight or they will slink silently back into the darkness. This is Gordon Brown’s moment. How he chooses to respond is up to him, but he would do well to remember the words of Ronald Reagan:
“During the dark days of the Second World War, when this island was incandescent with courage, Winston Churchill exclaimed about Britain's adversaries, ‘What kind of people do they think we are?’ Well, Britain's adversaries found out what extraordinary people the British are. But all the democracies paid a terrible price for allowing the dictators to underestimate us. We dare not make that mistake again. So, let us ask ourselves, ‘What kind of people do we think we are?’ And let us answer, "Free people, worthy of freedom and determined not only to remain so but to help others gain their freedom as well.”
Thursday, June 07, 2007
The View From the Hellespont
Modern day Turkey stands at a great crossroads. On one side of the Dardanelles, Turkey faces east, towards the oil fields and despotism of the Middle East. Tellingly, however, Turkey’s most important city lies on the European side of the Hellespont, in the old Byzantine fortress of Constantinople or modern day Istanbul. Constantinople, with its footprint in both Europe and Asia, acts as the ultimate manifestation of Turkey’s conflicted nature. With vital interests in both Europe and Asia, Turkey seems a nation turned inwards in search of a true identity. It is in the Turkish quest for identity that the vigorous debate regarding its admission to the European Union reaches its most fundamental question: Should Turkey be Western or Eastern? While Turkey clearly possesses a very different cultural and political background than the rest of Europe, what should—and must—be important to European policy makers is Turkey’s future, not its past. Europeans and Turks must unite around common principles and common dreams and seek to strengthen the bonds of brotherhood before extremist forces on both sides ruin the Western-Turkish entente of the Kemalist era.
Despite Turkey’s ostensibly Western orientation after the reforms of Ataturk, there has been considerable European resistance to its application to enter the EU. European skepticism of Turkey is generally a byproduct of historically minded Europeans recalling the Turks at the gates of Vienna three centuries ago and the perceived threat of Islamic civilization to European values. While recent Turkish culture is secular, the Turkish population itself is overwhelmingly Islamic and recent trends have only accentuated the daily role of Islam in Turkey. The Justice and Development Party (AKP) controls the Turkish Grand National Assembly by a nearly unassailable majority, holding over 60% of all seats, as well as the position of Prime Minister. Certain elements in Turkey and elsewhere are concerned that the President—due to be elected by the parliament in 2007—will also come from the AKP. The AKP traces its origins to the Islamist Welfare Party, founded in 1982. The Welfare Party was radically Islamic, and the AKP was created by a splinter group of moderates in 2001 and thus retains its predecessor’s connection to Islam. However, unlike the Welfare Party, the AKP has repeatedly vowed to uphold secularism and democracy, and the AKP’s invocation of Islam is essentially analogous to the European political tradition of Christian Democracy. Turkish concern over the role of the AKP caused the Presidential Election in early May to end in failure, and a new General Election is scheduled for late July in order to resolve the political gridlock. Paradoxically, the moderate Islamists in Turkey are probably more democratic than the defenders of secularism. While the AKP has always worked within Turkey’s democratic framework, the army has repeatedly threatened to “intervene” to protect the Kemalist legacy of secular government. Such military posturing is clearly antithetical to liberal government, and consequently, the whole Turkish election fiasco has done much to damage Europe’s view of Turkey as a responsible and modern democracy worthy of full acceptance as a member of Europe.
The controversy regarding Turkey’s application to the EU is generally portrayed in the context of Christendom’s self-preservation in the face of Islamic radicalism. In a sense, the Europeans are correct: militant Islam is a fundamental threat to European Civilization. However, the intrinsic conflict between Islamic Fascism and the West makes it imperative and indeed, ultimately unavoidable from a Western perspective that Turkey enters the EU. If we are truly in a clash of civilizations, we must employ every means at our disposal to divide and conquer. If Europe rejects Turkey out of fear of Islam, than it will be sentencing the most Western of all Muslim states to abandonment. Kemalist Turkey has a long and proud tradition of Western policy—but that orientation must not be taken for granted. Ataturk dreamed of a Turkey fully cooperative and in perfect harmony with the rest of Europe. That dream is close to realization with Turkey’s application to the EU. But if Europe turns its back on Turkey, Turkey will turn to other sources for friends and allies—and why shouldn’t she, if after fifty years of cooperation and friendship, her European cousins decided she wasn’t European enough to join the family? Forsaken by Europe, a disillusioned Turkey would turn to the only alternative: the Sunni states such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan. Turkey would turn from being a critical ally of the Western world against radical Islam to a supporter of the very Sunni regimes sponsoring Wahabbist jihad. While many Europeans have legitimate concerns about Turkish democracy and the influx of Islam into the public sector via the AKP, the way to influence Turkey’s direction is not to cut it off entirely and let the Arab states gain influence amongst Turkish policy makers, but rather to gradually encourage Turkish assimilation into the European body politic through constructive engagement.
Unfortunately, the prospect for Turkish acceptance into the EU does not appear good—at least in the short term. New French President Nicolas Sarkozy seems to have captured much of the European anti-Turkish sentiment and for the time being, it appears that Europe will continue to stall and delay as it seeks to avoid directly confronting the Turkish question. After all, Turkey did apply for membership in the Common Market all the way back in 1987—and the Turks have been patiently waiting for a concrete answer from the Europeans ever since. While it’s taken Europe almost two decades to finally get around to addressing the Turkish question, the ball is certainly moving and Turkey’s application has moved to the front of the EU docket since 2005. Whatever the delay, eventually, Europe will be forced to admit Turkey or see it switch teams halfway through the ballgame. It might take a decade or two for the strategic importance of Turkey to fully sink in amongst cautious Europeans, but Turkey’s Western orientation—and for the less ideologically driven European—geographic location to facilitate the importation of natural gas from Central Asia into Europe will ultimately pave the road from Ankara to Brussels.
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
The Lion in Winter
Later this summer, Tony Blair will resign as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and his beleaguered Labor Party will be inherited by Gordon Brown, a current financial chancellor in the Blair government and in all likelihood, Blair’s successor as Prime Minister as well. The end of Blair’s decade in office seems an appropriate time to reflect upon the lasting significance of the man who brought Labor in from the wilderness and proved to be perhaps the most enduring champion of the trans-Atlantic alliance since Dwight Eisenhower.
Tony Blair entered office in 1997 with a sweeping public mandate to reform the British welfare state and restore Britain’s faltering economy. Blair’s vision was to transform Labor (and consequently Britain itself) from a demoralized socialist wreck into a genuinely pro-American party which stood for justice abroad and economic freedom at home. Blair’s domestic agenda was a resounding success. “New Labor,” as Blair calls his party, is here to stay and the days of former party leader Ramsey McDonald advocating the socialization of the means of production are gone for good. Blair’s legacy, however, will ultimately be judged on the success or failure of his support for nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Heart-wrenchingly, the British public has turned against its former champion. With his nation discontented with slow progress in Iraq, the Prime Minister has become the object of vitriolic scorn and animosity on a scale not even paralleled in the United States with the current administration. As Blair’s approval ratings have plummeted, so have Labor’s, and the opposition Conservatives stand poised to assume control after the next election cycle. The only chance for Labor seems to be an early exit for Blair followed by frantic action from presumably Gordon Brown to win back over former Labor supporters who left the party because of Mr. Blair.
The resurgence of David Cameron’s Conservatives is disenchanting from an American perspective principally because Cameron’s party is not conservative in any sense of the word. Cameron is a slick politician who has forsaken the traditional Tory policy of pro-Americanism and moved towards a generic anything-but-Labor platform. Cameron has gone as far as to indicate that he would move the U.K. away from the United States politically and his support for American action in the Middle East is unreliable to say the least.
The best chance for the trans-Atlantic alliance to be preserved is probably for Gordon Brown and Labor to retain power. While Brown is certainly not as vocal about his American sympathies as Mr. Blair, Mr. Brown is a reliable ally and is a moderate supporter of a continued British presence in Iraq. Unfortunately, this muted position is the best America can help for out of its long-time strongest and most important ally.
What Blair’s exit demonstrates more clearly than anything is that Britain is no longer the rock of Europe. After three and a half centuries of leading the Western world, Great Britain has finally settled into a long slumber. While after the Victorians Great Britain had seemingly found a balance between projecting power and shunning colonialism, the Second World War caused Great Britain to fully retreat from its imperial past and settle into its role as a second rate world power. The status quo of the Thatcher-Blair era was a waning Britain struggling to exercise what influence it had left as it sought to support Washington in strategic areas across the globe. However, even this minimized approach seems likely to meet its own end as the trans-Atlantic alliance’s last great champion makes his exit.
With Britain now seemingly in perpetual retreat, it is more important than ever for American policy makers to look elsewhere to forge lasting and meaningful alliances. While Europe has always dominated global politics, the strategic scene has, for the past quarter century, been shifting towards the Orient and in particular the Pacific Rim. Japan is the most likely candidate to replace Great Britain as our foremost ally, and so long as we finally liberate Japan from the burdensome post-WWII restrictions placed upon its military, the Japanese will be able to project power deep into Asia and safeguard a liberal order on the high seas just as Great Britain did throughout its history. Coupled with a strong bi-lateral alliance with Japan, a strategic partnership with India would not only balance a growing China, but provide a reliable trading partner without the double-edged sword of doing business with the Devil. In short, a new Pacific entente is in order, fully integrating growing Japanese self-confidence, India’s immense population and economic potential, and of course the hard power of an American Carrier Battle Group.
As American policymakers look towards the brave new world of the future, they would do well to keep in mind the strategic implications of the Blair administration’s fall from power. With Great Britain on the defensive, new strategic partnerships will have to be forged and while Great Britain will always remain a sentimental and ideological ally of the United States, hard power has shifted decisively to the Pacific Rim. The future of the world rests with the burgeoning powers of Japan and India, and perhaps if we are less fortunate, with China as well. While the twilight of British power is surely lamentable, if history teaches us anything, it is that self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly. We as a people cannot meet the challenges of the 21st century with the strategic partnerships of the 20th.
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Lights Out in the Middle East
On the eve of the First World War, Lord Edward Grey observed that “[t]he lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” To Lord Grey, World War I was the result of decades of indirect competition between rival nations. The tensions and feuds resulting from the natural clashing of the European powers from the mid 19th century on eventually culminated in the most apocalyptic war the world had ever seen. As British Foreign Secretary, Lord Grey was savvy enough to do all that was in his power to protect his nation’s interests in the coming holocaust—but even he realized that all that was left was to make the best out of a catastrophic situation.
Lord Grey realized, unlike so many of his generation, that the new war would not be a quick and pleasant affair. Grey saw that the conflict could not be concluded until the underlying disputes between the great nations of Europe were resolved—even if it meant four years of literal apocalypse across the fields and forests of Europe. The fundamental conflict between blocs of nations had reached such a point that one side would necessarily destroy the other before it was all over.
Today in the Middle East, if we are not quite facing an analogous situation, we are fast approaching a similar point of no return. The fundamental conflict pervading the Middle East is the clash between liberalism and Islamic Fascism, just as there was a fundamental conflict between Western liberalism and Prussian militarism during the First World War. However, wars are seldom fought over purely ideological matters. The imminent threat in the Middle East is not the long term clash of values but the immediate clash of religions and the nations which finance them.
Traditionally in the Middle East, power has always lain with Sunni Islam. The Sunnis won favorable terms from the British and the French after the colonial period and the Sunnis now control the ostensible U.S. “allies” in the region: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt. These traditional Sunni powers are threatened by the growing power of a newly strengthened Iran. In many ways, the story of the past decade in the Middle East has been the spread of Iranian influence throughout the region, just as the specter of German unity created many of the geo-political fault lines in the decades proceeding World War I.
With Iraq’s large Shiite population freed from an oppressive Sunni minority, Iraq is now up for grabs ethnically and religiously. This power vacuum has created a battleground for the competing strands of Islam to fight it out for supremacy. Because of Iraq’s central location, a victory for either Iranian-backed Shiite death squads or Saudi-financed jihadists might permanently tip the balance of power in the region. A widespread regional war between Sunnis and Shiites—amounting to a proxy war between the conservative Gulf States and Iran—would not only have catastrophic effects on the global economy and regional stability (the gas lines of the 1970’s would for example, would look trivial in comparison) but would exponentially increase the threat of terrorism. Both branches of Islam would be trying to show that they are chosen heirs of Mohammed and would consequently wish to destroy as many American and Israeli targets as possible in order to gain bragging rights within the Middle Eastern community. It would amount to a very deadly PR war in which Al Qaeda (a Sunni organization) has already won the first round with its famous attacks on 9/11.
The only way possible to avoid such a bleak future is to regain stability in Iraq. In order to do that, we need more troops on the ground to get the job done. If the administration has the courage to request roughly 45,000 more troops and Congress is able to put partisan politics aside in order to avert the single greatest foreign policy calamity in American history, we may yet avoid wholesale slaughter in the region. However, the point is fast approaching where we will no longer have any control over events in the most strategic region on earth. Europe paid the price of global war on an unintelligible level twice during the 20th century. If we do not get our act together very quickly, future generations to come will be paying the price for our abdication of responsibility, principle, and ultimately humanity in the Middle East.
Friday, September 15, 2006
Ned Lamont and Iraq
Ned Lamont’s victory in last month’s Democratic Primary is only the most recent success for the growing anti-war faction. This coalition’s only real common bond seems to be an intrinsic and complete loathing of President Bush and those associated with him. Unfortunately, this hatred has focused itself on an unlikely victim, Senator Joseph Lieberman, who was defeated by Lamont in the Democratic Primary last August. While Senator Lieberman is running on an independent ticket in November and will probably be reelected, Lamont’s victory is a disturbing harbinger of things to come.
Lamont’s essential campaign message is that Senator Lieberman does not accurately represent the people of Connecticut—solely because of the Senator’s support for the Iraq war and his perceived closeness to the administration. Essentially, Lamont is getting Connecticut voters to vote against President Bush by voting against Joe Lieberman. Not only is this a decidedly poor way to choose between candidates for political office, it is indicative of the fundamental danger of Lamont’s siren song. The problem is that Lamont and his wing of the Democratic Party have, in their hatred of President Bush, transcended all levels of political competition and embraced a sort of self-delusional nihilism that is predicated upon sheer contempt for one man. This does not make for good political philosophy, and more importantly, it does not make for good governance.
In 1964, Republican voters endorsed Arizona conservative Barry Goldwater as their party’s candidate for President over the Northeastern liberal Nelson Rockefeller. The primary marked a genuine ideological shift, with Republicans almost universally embracing conservatism to the exclusion of the leftover remnants of the progressive Republican titans such as Rockefeller. While Goldwater lost the election of 1964 to Lyndon Johnson, his campaign helped pave the way for Ronald Reagan and the resurgence of conservatism in the second half of the twentieth century. It was the defining moment of the Republican Party and forced Republicans to permanently commit to a conservative agenda.
Forty years later, Mr. Lamont’s supporters no doubt hope to pull off such a revolutionary party movement, with the ultimate goal being a Democratic Party united on an anti-war ticket. Unfortunately, unlike the Goldwater partisans, Lamont does not have a coherent ideological message. Lamont simply wants to eliminate all traces of George W. Bush from government, no matter whom he destroys in order to accomplish this. It is this nihilistic nature of the Lamont campaign that makes it so dangerous. Like any demagogue, Lamont has his own popular appeal. He can offer Connecticut voters what they seem to want—a purging of the pro-Bush faction. Regardless of one’s feelings about the President, an honest account of the possible consequences of a widespread victory for men like Ned Lamont is in order.
Most obviously, a Senator Lamont would vote to “redeploy” (he means retreat) out of Iraq. With potential Democratic takeovers in the House and Senate, the possibility of such a vote is quite real. Blinded by their fundamental hatred of an American President and the war that has come to define his Presidency, Lamont and his cohorts would orchestrate the single greatest foreign policy catastrophe in American history. The withdrawal of American forces from Iraq before a stable and secure Iraqi democracy was created would sentence the Iraqi people to endless sectarian strife. Moreover, the Shiites would look towards a new state sponsor to provide support for their government—and choose their Shiite brothers in Iran. Thusly, Iraq would become a proxy state of the world’s foremost sponsor of terrorism and would provide integral resources and arms for the world’s most dangerous terrorist groups such as Hezbollah. Essentially, Iraq would become another Afghanistan pre-liberation in 2001, and in ten or so years, we’d have to go back in to clear out a Taliban-style government. We can get the job done in Iraq now or we can pay the price for a generation.
Certainly, the administration needs to do more to improve the situation on the ground. While many strategic decisions have proven incorrect, the fog of war does not allow for perfect wars. However, one must keep in mind that Americans have always faced adversity. If not for a Christmas miracle at Trenton, Washington’s Continental Army never would have made it to the endgame outside Yorktown. Lincoln was one afternoon in July 1863 away from losing the Civil War, and Eisenhower nearly declared defeat after the first several waves at Omaha Beach. American military history is filled with catastrophic setbacks that we were always able—and more importantly, willing—to overcome. In comparison, the blunders seen in Iraq are rather insignificant and are easily surmounted—if we just have the will to wage a war for our own survival against the forces of global jihad. Unfortunately, men like Ned Lamont will never understand this and will do whatever they see necessary to take a ceremonial slap at the President.
At the close of the Boer War, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle remarked, “The deepest instincts of the nation told it that it must fight and win, or forever abdicate its position in the world. Through dark days which brought out the virtues of our [nation] as nothing has done in our generation, we struggled grimly on until the light had fully broken once again.” Are we willing to struggle grimly on?
