| Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty September 29, 2014 FLASHBACK: Obama Administration, Day Three: Crocker, Odierno Warn about 'Precipitous Withdrawal' from Iraq Whoopsie. The United States underestimated the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, President Obama said during an interview, to be broadcast Sunday night, in which he also acknowledged the Iraqi army's inability to successfully tackle the threat. According to transcript from Sunday's "60 Minutes" on CBS interview, correspondent Steve Kroft referred to comments by James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, in which he said, "We overestimated the ability and the will of our allies, the Iraqi Army, to fight." | | You know you want to come! Get complete info at NRCruise.com. | | | | "That's true. That's absolutely true," Obama said. "Jim Clapper has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria." Interesting pronoun, "they." Eli Lake: Reached by The Daily Beast after Obama's interview aired, one former senior Pentagon official who worked closely on the threat posed by Sunni jihadists in Syria and Iraq was flabbergasted. "Either the president doesn't read the intelligence he's getting or he's bull****ing," the former official said . . . In prepared testimony before the annual House and Senate intelligence committees' threat hearings in January and February, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the recently departed director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said the group would likely make a grab for land before the end of the year. ISIS "probably will attempt to take territory in Iraq and Syria to exhibit its strength in 2014, as demonstrated recently in Ramadi and Fallujah, and the group's ability to concurrently maintain multiple safe havens in Syria," he said. Obama continued: "Essentially what happened with ISIL was that you had al-Qaeda in Iraq, which was a vicious group, but our Marines were able to quash with the help of Sunni tribes. They went back underground. But over the past couple of years, during the chaos of the Syrian civil war, where essentially you have huge swaths of the country that are completely ungoverned, they were able to reconstitute themselves and take advantage of that chaos," he said. "And so this became ground zero for jihadists around the world." Isn't this what all of those allegedly horrific warmongering Bush-administration officials warned about? Didn't we have an entire 2008 presidential campaign debating the consequences of a "precipitous withdrawal"? Didn't Obama and his team assure us, over and over again, that they would manage the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq responsibly? Vice President Cheney, November 21, 2005: Would the United States and other free nations be better or worse off with terrorists like Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi running Iraq? And would the United States be more or less safe with Iraq ruled by extremists intent on its destruction? A precipitous withdrawal from Iraq would be a victory for the terrorists, an invitation to further the violence against free nations and a terrible blow to the future security of the United States of America. President Bush, July 12, 2007: I know some in Washington would like us to start leaving Iraq now. To begin withdrawing before our commanders tell us we are ready would be dangerous for Iraq, for the region, and for the United States. It would mean surrendering the future of Iraq to al Qaeda. It would mean that we'd be risking mass killings on a horrific scale. It would mean we'd allow the terrorists to establish a safe haven in Iraq to replace the one they lost in Afghanistan. It would mean increasing the probability that American troops would have to return at some later date to confront an enemy that is even more dangerous. In fact, not only was Obama warned about this; he was literally warned about this on his first days on the job by Americans on the ground in Iraq. U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, January 22, 2009: The U.S. ambassador to Iraq on Thursday warned against an abrupt American military departure from Iraq, saying "a precipitous withdrawal" could run severe risks. "Al Qaeda is incredibly tenacious," Ryan Crocker said of the Sunni insurgent group. "They will have to be killed or captured, and as long as they hang on, they are looking for the opportunity to regenerate." He added, "[If] we were to decide suddenly we're done, they would certainly work to use space that opened up to do just that. I think it would encourage neighbors with less than benign intentions to carry them out, and perhaps most importantly I think it would have a chilling effect on Iraqis." The comments came one day after Crocker and Gen. Ray Odierno, head of U.S. forces in Iraq, spoke via teleconference with President Obama and other top military brass in Washington. "Taking a look back at when I arrived here in March 2007 and how it looked and felt then, [there's been] a really remarkable transition within Iraq itself," he said. "Neither the Iraqis nor we can take our eye off that ball, because as we tragically have seen, there are still elements out there, particularly al Qaeda, capable of delivering devastating attacks," he said. Can we please learn from this? Can we please learn that just because we want a war to be over, it doesn't end? Can we please recognize that when the U.S. withdraws from a region without a rock-solid allied government to control and secure that region, bad things follow? Can we please accept that malicious forces will aim to kill and conquer, whether or not we're "war weary"? Can we understand that just maybe some evil people in this world see our "war weariness" as an opportunity? And can the American public please be more skeptical of the next guy who comes along and says he can keep us safe and more respected in the world just by using "smart, tough diplomacy"? Bruce Braley, Big Fat Liar In the Iowa Senate debate Sunday night, Republican Joni Ernst mentioned Democrat Bruce Braley's threat to sue a neighbor over a dispute over chickens wandering into his yard: "You're talking about bipartisanship, how do we expect, as Iowans, to believe that you will work across the aisle when you can't walk across your yard?" Braley's response: "It's just not true. I never threatened to sue anyone. It's just not true." How else would one define a message demanding action to "avoid a litigious situation"? 
The story of the chickens suggests the Braleys are neighbors from hell: This spring, Pauline Hampton's chickens roamed onto Bruce and Carolyn Braley's vacation property on tranquil Holiday Lake. Hampton said she did not know this until she walked over one day to offer Carolyn a dozen fresh eggs. To which she said her neighbor replied, "We aren't going to accept your eggs -- and we have filed a formal complaint against you." Oh, by the way, the Des Moines Register poll puts Joni Ernst up by 6 points. The Government's Climate Change Look, it's more good-government liberals complaining about the federal bureaucracy! One alumnus [of the Presidential Innovation Fellow (PIF) program, a group of tech-savvy standouts brought in to tackle problems in the executive branch], Greg Gershman, recalls the triage as "a once-in-a-lifetime experience." Still, Gershman is frustrated. Another project he worked on as a PIF -- an effort called MyUSA, which aims to make it easier for citizens to interact online with the federal government -- remains shelved two years after he developed a working prototype; it's partly a victim of the Paperwork Reduction Act. The 1995 law, intended to keep government from overburdening people and businesses with information requests, is now hamstringing technologists like the PIFs, who want to run pilot tests that solicit public feedback for their innovations before they tweak and expand them, a.k.a. that whole lean-startup thing. Clay Johnson, the PIF who tackled the small-bore tech procurement reform project, says it is "America's worst law." He blames it and other bureaucratic hurdles for thwarting the broad adoption of an online-bidding process he developed to save the feds an estimated $24 billion a year on tech spending, more than NASA's annual budget. Johnson was once the digital guru of Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign, but he now says the small-vs.-big-government debate that consumes our politics misses the point: The bureaucracy's inability to modernize is "the government's climate change," he says. "If we don't fix it soon, it will mean the end of government as we know it." It's like a novel come to life! Our friends on the left might get more bipartisan support for their reinventing government ideas if they would openly acknowledge that conservative critics of bloated, bureaucratic, slow-moving, resistant-to-change, devoted-to-its-own-self-preservation government have had a point all these years. To Win People's Votes, You Must First Persuade Them You Want Them A few things you learn from reading Mike Gonzalez's A Race for the Future: How Conservatives Can Break the Liberal Monopoly on Hispanic Americans . . . Whether or not you think Republicans do a good job of pursuing the votes of Mexican-Americans . . . (mind you, this is only one subset of the Hispanic American vote) . . . Mexican Americans don't think Republicans are even trying: A close reading of the questions and answers makes clear, however, that Mexican-Americans main gripe with the GOP is that the party doesn't even make an effort to understand their needs. Only one-fifth of the respondents said the Republican Party cared about the middle class, and even fewer, around 12 percent, said that the Republicans understand the needs and concerns of Hispanic voters. Even fewer than that, 11 percent, said that Republicans "make an effort to win Hispanic voters." (p.43) Voter contact doesn't automatically translate into votes . . . but if you're getting your butt kicked in that area of campaigning, you're probably setting the stage to get your butt kicked on Election Day, too: Close to 80 percent of the respondents said they were contacted by the Obama campaign at least once in the battleground states of Colorado and Nevada, and 50 percent said they were contacted more than five times by the Obama campaign. Just 60 percent said they were contacted only once by the Romney campaign, and the number who said they were contacted more than five times hovered around 30 percent. (p.45) For what it is worth, Romney may have done better among Cuban-Americans than the post-election conventional wisdom suggests: Much was made of reports that Barack Obama had edged out Mitt Romney in 2012 for the Cuban vote, 49 percent to 47 percent… Those numbers came from the Democratic pollster Bendixen & Amandi International. A separate scientific analysis of Cuban-American votes in Florida's Dade County, the home of Little Havana, conducted by Dario Moreno and Kevin Hill for the Cuba Democracy Public Advocacy Corp., found that Romney won 58 percent of the Cuban American vote to Obama's 42 percent, or about the same as the 59 percent of the non-Cuban white vote Romney received around the country. Is part of it that Romney did better among Cuban-Americans living in Dade County/Little Havana, and not as well among Cuban-Americans living outside of that concentrated community? ADDENDA: Want to see a possible GOP House pickup? "Former Republican state treasurer Bruce Poliquin has established a lead over Democratic state Sen. Emily Cain in the race for an open seat in the 2nd Congressional District. Poliquin has a 10-point lead over Cain, while independent Blaine Richardson is a distant third, according to a Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram poll conducted by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center." Bethany Mandel, fan of Morning Jolt, hopes you'll take a moment to check out a charity she's involved with, Liberty in North Korea. Don't delay! Sign up today for the NR 2014 Post-Election Caribbean Cruise, and for our spectacular pre-cruise kick-off gala November 8th featuring Ambassador John Bolton and Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio! Learn more here.
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