Back to Basics

Arizona’s immigration law supposedly “would impose a ‘distinct, unusual and extraordinary’ burden on legal resident aliens that only the federal government has the authority to impose.” So asserted Federal District Judge Susan Bolton in her injunction of the new Arizona immigration law on Wednesday. “Given the large number of people who are technically ‘arrested’ but never booked into jail or perhaps even transported to a law enforcement facility, detention time for this category of arrestee will certainly be extended during an immigration status verification,” Ms. Bolton wrote in her decision.

But this reasoning makes little sense. Anyone — no matter what their accent or looks — who is “technically ‘arrested’” by police is required to show some type of ID. The minor exception is when the arrestee happens to be known to the police already. If unable to provide a basic ID, the police officer has no choice but to detain the individual until identification can be made. This is very basic. Police can’t issue a ticket, even for a minor speeding offense, without being able to properly identify the person.

Despite the picture painted by Bolton, an immigration check for someone “technically ‘arrested’” imposes no more of a burden than the individual already faces. There are no more documents that are required or additional procedures under Arizona’s immigration law. Any regular ID will do: a driver’s license, a non-operating identification license, valid tribal enrollment card or other form of tribal identification, or “any valid United States federal, state, or local government issued identification.”

But Judge Bolton provides another line of reasoning against the Arizona law, that “only the federal government has the authority to impose” these checks. This argument is just as bad, for federal law is routinely enforced by the states. Ironically, the typical conflict between the federal government and the states is that the federal government is trying to make states do something that they don’t want to do. Here we have the reverse: a federal law that a state is happy to help enforce but that the present administration does not wish to enforce.

Congress passes federal laws and it is their intent that counts, not the wishes of the current president. If the Congress that passed the current immigration law had intended for states to stay away from enforcing this law, there is a simple solution: write in the law that enforcement is limited to the federal government. That never happened.

Judge Susan Bolton was — not surprisingly — appointed by a Democrat, Bill Clinton. Her decision shows just how important a judge’s selection can be. Unfortunately, President Obama will appoint many more judges with similar left-wing leanings.

The dominant question on everyone’s mind is when are we going to get out. Out of Iraq and out of Afghanistan. Liberals who voted for Obama with the certainty that both wars were the product of some evil plot hatched by Cheney in the White House subbasement are confused and frustrated as to why the US hasn’t just pulled out. Of course those are the same people who were never troubled by Taliban atrocities or Saddam’s rape rooms, and aren’t going to be too bothered when the Iranian puppet Mahdi Army and the Taliban come back in for a bloody takeover. And if they do, George Galloway or Robert Fisk will be by shortly to explain to them that it’s just the oppressors getting exactly what they deserve.

The Obama Administration has no commitment to either war. Much of the Administration from the top on  down, shares Jeremiah Wright’s assessment of the last ten years, as a case of the chickens coming home to roost. But it’s also concerned enough about its popularity to underwrite a year or two of bloody battles between Allied forces and the Islamic insurgents in both countries, just in order to time a Mission Accomplished pullout before the next Presidential election. This brand of amoral cynicism is in some ways worse than that of a Galloway or a Buchanan, since unlike the Bush Administration, Barry, Biden and Jim Jones are not fighting a war they believe in. They’re sending troops into battle for a cause they don’t believe in, to boost a reelection campaign.

And so what started out as two straightforward wars to rout a brutal Islamist gang, capture Al Queda terrorists, and remove a tyrant, morphed into nation building exercises in the Bush era, and have now become completely detached from any strategic goal, but that of “Re-Elect Obama-Biden in 2012″. It’s straightforward enough to see that the more the real goals drift away from that of defeating the enemy, the harder it will be to achieve it. The military is essentially a blunt tool. It is best used for blunt objectives. You can only apply so much finesse with a hammer, until you either break what you’re trying to fix, or render the hammer unusable. But for the last 7 years we’ve been trying to use a hammer with finesse, and the body count has climbed horrifically as a result.

The problem is that we’ve never gotten over WW2 and its nation building aftermath as a victory condition. And so we shifted from winning wars, to rebuilding infrastructure and winning the hearts and minds of the population. In 1939, the conventional wisdom was that if only an isolationist America had agreed to stay on in Europe, the whole mess of WW2 would have never happened. But while that conventional wisdom might not be wrong, it ignores the fact that we don’t know what would have happened if the US had made the kind of investment that Wilson wanted. Or the kind of investment we did make after WW2, maintaining bases for generations, and become the permanent guarantors of European security. History would probably have turned out differently, but there’s no way of knowing exactly how.

In 1948 the conventional wisdom certainly said that we had to save Western Europe by rebuilding it in order to keep the Commies out (except for the conventional wisdom coming from the left, which demanded that we get our imperialist asses out and let the “people’s parties” who had resisted the fascist beast claim their right to rule). And so we did just that. We saved Western Europe from the Commies– only to hand it over to the Islamists, rampaging into the senescent remnants of what had once been great nations, who had forgotten how to stand up for themselves. But is it typical enough of the FDR-Eisenhower era that the people in charge could never comprehend that a nanny state turns men and women into children. And that protecting others too much weakens them so that they are unable to protect themselves.

What implications does this have for Iraq and Afghanistan? Once again we repeated the same mistake we made in Vietnam, cultivating tame useless armies of soldiers who won’t stand and fight, because they know Americans will do the real fighting for them. We’ve schizophrenically tried to set up or back governments whose only real agenda is stashing away the dollars we’ve injected into their economy with our nation building efforts. And we have no idea how to fix any of that, because none of it is fixable.

For one thing our goals are completely detached from reality. Creating stable working governments is a long and painful process. Even in the United States, it took a long time to get to the Constitution, and we had to discard a previous system as unworkable. And that was in a country which had a tradition of working local governments. While we’re dealing with regions where the only form of power is either tribal or tyrannical, usually some combination of both. Despite all the horrors of post WW2 Europe, we were still dealing with countries that had been reasonably functional and understood how democratic systems of government worked, and were our equals in most areas. That is again not the case in Iraq and Afghanistan, where we are not rebuilding, so much as trying to recreate them into shapes that we find acceptable. And without an extensive colonial project, that is simply not going to happen.

But none of that even matters anymore. As a former resident of the Muslim world, Obama understands these things himself already. He’s simply pandering to the Americans who don’t, and throwing away the lives of American soldiers, in order to withdraw on a high note. Obama doesn’t expect to break the Taliban, only to demonstrate enough resolve so they’ll cut a deal that will avoid any mobs chasing after departing embassy helicopters. He’s deluded on that note, because where the Taliban might have cut such a deal with McCain, they won’t with Obama, who is just too weak to be taken seriously. Obama’s outreach to the Taliban turned Karzai into a loose cannon, further destabilizing the network of tribal alliances, and making it even more impossible to get the job done.

But what is the job anyway? As a blunt tool, the military was never a good choice for winning the hearts and minds of the population. Nor should that have been the goal in the first place. The leftover ideas from WW2 about nation building might seem fine in theory, but are virtually unworkable in reality without turning into a vast multi-generational colonial project on the British model. And such a project would change us, as much as it would change them. And that is the twist in the hook. Because the war we are fighting has already changed us. It has imported Islamic and Middle Eastern culture in a way that we are mostly not aware of. That is the flip side of all such efforts, that they change the conquerors almost as much as the conquered.

The Romans started out using barbarians in their armies, until eventually the barbarians became their emperors. So too the Ottoman Empire began by using non-Muslims as Janissaries in their armies, only to have them nearly take over. Similarly there was a time when we tried to use Muslim countries as proxies in our wars. Today Muslims use us as proxies in their wars.

There was a time when things seemed very clear and simple. Nuclear weapons and the memory of the devastation that WW2 had brought, made a direct war between the US and the USSR too prohibitive to be seriously considered. So instead we used proxies to fight our wars for us. We needed to protect our oil supply, which meant that both the US and the USSR tried to form alliances with Muslim countries in the Middle East. But then the Soviet Union fell, and in that same year, US forces found themselves engaged as proxies in a war between Saddam Hussein and the Saudi Royal Family.

Of course we were protecting our oil supply, but who were we protecting it from? Russia was backing our actions. China was not involved. Instead we were fighting for one Muslim power against another. And what we were actually doing was the same thing that Westerners had been doing for a while. Serving as Janissaries, non-Muslim troops for the Saudi Royal Family. To provide some perspective on this, in 1979 when Islamists connected to Bin Laden seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the Saudi Royal Family imported French Commandos, had them convert to Islam, and then storm the mosque. In the last two decades, Bin Laden didn’t try a doomed mosque takeover, instead he carried on a war against America and Europe. And once again we found ourselves fighting a proxy war for the Saudi Royal Family.

This was hardly the first time that Muslim terrorists had attacked Westerners in order to force them to do their dirty work for them. The PLO had made that the linchpin of their strategy, hijacking airplanes and setting off bombs, in order to force Europe and America to pressure Israel into giving them a state. And what’s more is that the strategy worked. By now, it has become routine for Islamist groups to target foreigners, whether it is Australians in Bali or Israeli tourists in Egypt or American tourists in Israel or French tourists in Mauritania. The pattern is the same. The wannabe Bin Ladens murder Westerners, knowing that their governments will eventually get around to helping them achieve their goals either through diplomatic pressure, or another proxy war that will rally other Muslims to their side.

And how it got this way is very simple. The balance of power shifted, just as it did in the Roman Empire, and the rulers became the ruled. It didn’t happen through overwhelming force. It happened because we let it. It happened because our politicians were too cowardly to stand up to medieval tribal leaders in burnooses, until a generation later, those same tribal leaders now controlled their entire economy. And immigration plus demographics adds the second potent threat of a voting base that doesn’t mind torching cars when they don’t get their way, or even when they do. This is the game we’ve been playing, or rather the game that’s been playing us.

After Israel stopped a Gaza bound ship funded by an Islamist group, Labor’s Harriet Harman demanded of UK PM David Cameron, what he intended to do about the British detainees. Cameron of course took the Londonistan line, as has every British PM in quite some time now. Now mind you, the British citizens imprisoned in Saudi Arabia and Dubai had not occasioned that kind of firm response. Rachel Thaler, a British subject who was murdered in Israel, did not receive it. But then she was a Jew murdered by Muslims, which just made her hopelessly inconvenient. No questions were put to Brown over the arrest of a British citizen in Dubai for reporting her own rape. No high profile condemnations or concern for the British couple sentenced to jail in Dubai for reportedly kissing in public. And there were no angry denunciations of Sudan after it arrested a British schoolteacher for naming a teddy bear Mohammed. Which only stands to reason, no dog will bite his master’s hand.

The latest round of European denunciations of Israel are nothing more than Western governments acting like proxies of Islam. Which is exactly what they are. And when Muslim immigrants treat European countries as their new colonies, those same governments react by treating them as their new masters, and like good native rulers, they silence all domestic dissent. After all who knows what the masters might do to them, if they spoke up. Who knows. Certainly not them.

The left enjoys accusing America and Europe of colonialism in regard to the Muslim world, but the reality is of course completely backward. How many Westerners are moving to Muslim countries, vs how many Muslims are moving to Western countries. And while Westerners in the Muslim world are expected to abide by the most repressive and sexist laws of the region, Muslims who come to the West bring their own laws with them, and expect us to abide by them. Which means that not only had you better not liquor up in Riyadh, but you had better not do it in parts of Minnesota either. Or anywhere in New York where Muslims decide to open up their mosques.

When the Saudi Royal Family decided to seize the assets of the US oil company that had made them wealthy, the United States Government did not send over a small fleet to explain to the burnoosed thugs living under US protection, just what belongs to whom. Instead the US government nodded its head, and repaid the shareholders using taxpayer money. And since then, that same oil company has gone on to become the invisible Saudi lobby with a number of Secretaries of State coming from its board. Ask yourself if this is how a colonizer or a colony does business?

Under the title of Public Health & Workforce Development are a number of grants, scholarships and other programs, providing training, services and a whole new array of studies relating to health care – a lot of money being spent to support the expansion of government, special interests, illegal immigrants and labor unions, but little to help solve the health care issues.

The first expansion is the establishment of the Public Health Investment Fund, which requires deposits from the revenues of the Treasury in the amount of $88,700,000,000 over 10 years. This money is authorized to be appropriated by the Committee on Appropriations of the House and Senate for carrying out the activities under the designated public health provisions. These areas include Community Health Centers, National Health Service Corps Program, National Health Service Corps Scholarship and Loan Repayment Programs, Primary Care Loan Funds, Primary Care Education Programs, Nursing Workforce Development, The National Center for Health Statistics and the Agency For Healthcare Research and Quality.

To make these programs even more appealing is the stipulation that “Amounts appropriated under this section, and outlays flowing from such appropriations, shall not be taken into account for purposes of any budget enforcement procedures including allocations under section 302(a) and (b) of the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act and budget solutions for fiscal years during which appropriations are made from the fund.” More spending without any concern for balancing the budget or controlling the country’s deficit. We don’t have it, but let’s spend it!

The first program – Community Health Centers – will obtain increased funding in the amount of $38,800,000,000.

The National Health Service Corps is being amended allowing the Secretary to issue waivers to individuals who enter into a contract for obligated service to pay for their education. It further raises the loan repayment amount from $35,000 to $50,000 and will be adjusted thereafter to reflect inflation. Additional appropriated funds for this program are $796,000,000 over the next 10 years. Additional funding is authorized in the amount of $3,171,000,000 over 10 years to cover the National Health Corps Scholarship and Loan Repayment Programs.

The Frontline Health Providers Loan Repayment Program will be established to address unmet health care needs in certain areas, populations, or facilities as designated by the Secretary. Individuals participating in this program must agree to serve for a period of 2 years in a health professional needs area specified in the program. This program has a clause that if there are an insufficient number of applicants for the program, then all excess funds from the program will be transferred to the National Health Service Corps to recruit more people to take advantage of this fund.

The Secretary shall establish a primary care training and capacity building program consisting of grants and contracts to plan, develop, operate or participate in accredited professional training in the field of family medicine, general internal medicine, general pediatrics or geriatrics. Funds for this program are from the Public Health Investment Fund in the amount of $3,023,000,000 for 10 years and will include the following:

• Capacity Building in Primary Care – grants to specialties of family medicine, general internal medicine, general pediatrics or geriatrics, with preference given to entities that train individuals who are from underrepresented minority groups or disadvantaged backgrounds.
• Training of Medical Residents in Community-Based Setting – a program established for the training of medical residents in community-based settings, with preferences given to entities that support teaching programs addressing the health care needs of vulnerable populations or are a Federally qualified health center or rural health clinic, as well as preference to those training individuals from underrepresented minority groups or disadvantaged background.

• Training for General, Pediatric or Public Health Dentists and Dental Hygienists – grants and contracts to plan, develop, operate or participate in an accredited professional training program or oral health professionals, with preference given to individuals who are from underrepresented minority groups or disadvantaged backgrounds.

Grants for Health Professionals Education – Advanced Education Nursing Grants is being amended, including increases in dollar amounts for the Nurse Faculty Loan Program. Funding for this program is $1, 450,000,000 over 10 years.