WASHINGTON — Just hours before announcing an escalated campaign against Islamic extremists last week, President Obama privately reflected on another time when a president weighed military action in the Middle East — the frenzied weeks leading up to the American invasion of Iraq a decade ago.

“I was not here in the run-up to Iraq in 2003,” he told a group of visitors who met with him in the White House before his televised speech to the nation, according to several people who were in the meeting. “It would have been fascinating to see the momentum and how it builds.”

In his own way, Mr. Obama said, he had seen something similar, a virtual fever rising in Washington, pressuring him to send the armed forces after the Sunni radicals who had swept through Iraq and beheaded American journalists. He had told his staff, he said, not to evaluate their own policy based on external momentum. He would not rush to war. He would be deliberate. (more…)

It ought not to be only for the nostalgia of some momentary comfort that we remember. Our efforts to comprehend the present may receive an assist from deliberate and thoughtful recollection of things that happened less than 100 years ago. Charles Lindbergh made his trans-Atlantic flight in 1927. [See the link for details]
https://www.charleslindbergh.com/history/timeline.asp
There are word pictures about him and The Spirit of St. Louis in The American Scrap Book published in 1928, a copy of which I have due to my MIL’s generosity with her own personal library back in the ’80s.
The Need for a Second Look is the title of their brief forward and these words are included in the comments that introduce this sizable volume:

The American Scrap Book and its companion volume, The European Scrap Book, aim to collect between the covers of two books, the year’s golden harvest of thought and achievement. The newest ideas in Literature, Art, Music, Business, Science, Religion and Invention make up the material that has been gathered together. Here, jostling together in pleasant proximity, are hundreds of writers and painters and world flyers, statesmen and biologists and doctors, poets, playwrights and diplomats.
“If we are to build up a Civilization around ourselves in these United States,” says Vachel Lindsay, “we must learn to keep our beautiful things, and to look at them more than once.”
A second look is what this book…offer(s) the reader. An opportunity to look a second time at beautiful worthwhile things and weave them into the fabric of our consciousness so that they may become a part of us.
It is a serious attempt to harvest the distinguished work of the year and prevent its being blown out of our hands in the swift passage of the seasons. We whiz through life at a pace that leaves very little time for reading, and no time at all to be wasted.

(more…)

There’s definitely something new afoot with how the western liberal media are selling the Kerry goes to Egypt narrative.

It’s an odd dynamic to think about President Peace Prize Obama needing to put together a coalition of support for his poll tested non-war war on terror; to fight the Non-Islamic Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (NI-ISIS) terror group.
However, the bizarro world is the 2014 new normal.

We are witnessing what happens when the U.S. Sunni President, and 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner, needs to put a non-combat fighting team together to give the appearance of military attacks for optical publication in globally liberal Western newspapers.
The #hashtag campaign didn’t work.
Turkey has already said they will not support fighting against NI-ISIS because, well, essentially they have been supporting NI-ISIS for the past two years with weapons, intelligence and logistical support. So why would they start attacking a group they helped create and are continuing to fund?
Following his visit to Turkey, where he must have reduced the request to: ‘just don’t go on record against us and we’ll keep up appearances for you‘, John Kerry enters Egypt.
Now, keep in mind Egypt already has it’s hands quite full.
In the Northern Egyptian peninsular Egypt’s president, Fatah el-Sisi, has been fighting ISIS (Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis) for well over a year. Unlike Obama who calls ISIS “non islamic“, el-Sisi has been willing to call Islamic Extremists, well, Islamic; and not only call them Islamic he’s been fighting them on four fronts. (more…)

(more…)

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy Name. Thy kingdom come. THY WILL BE DONE, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but DELIVER US FROM EVIL.
For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

It’s always about the optics of politics, all the time. Always about the show, never about the substance. President Milli Vanilli !

NEW YORK –- President Barack Obama met with over a dozen prominent columnists and magazine writers Wednesday afternoon before calling for an escalation of the war against the Islamic State, or ISIS, in a primetime address that same night.

The group [pictured], which met in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in an off-the-record session, included New York Times columnists David Brooks, Tom Friedman, Frank Bruni, and editorial writer Carol Giacomo; The Washington Post’s David Ignatius, Eugene Robinson, and Ruth Marcus; The New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins and George Packer; The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg and Peter Beinart; The New Republic’s Julia Ioffe; Columbia Journalism School Dean Steve Coll; The Wall Street Journal’s Jerry Seib; and The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky, a source familiar with the meeting told The Huffington Post.
National Security Advisor Susan Rice, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes and White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough also attended the meeting, according to the source.
The White House declined comment. (read more)

The Islamic State has released a video showing the beheading of British captive David Haines. The father-of-two, an aid worker, was abducted by militants in Syria last year. He appeared at the end of a video showing the beheading of US journalist Steven Sotloff earlier this month.

#ISIS have released another video. It appears the #UK hostage #DavidHaines is now also gone. pic.twitter.com/jEmm7CiZDl

— Syricide (@Syricide) September 13, 2014

https://twitter.com/Syricide/status/510902061404545024/photo/1

UK’s Daily Mail Has Background on David Haines and Alan Henning – HERE

Perhaps the best way to think of this is to use President Obama’s own words. It appears the “doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth” have struck up a truce with ISIS.

That’s a problem, because Obama’s ISIS elimination plan requires the “doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth” to fight against ISIS on the ground while we shoot at ISIS from the sky.

If the “doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth” don’t put the pointy end toward the Islamic State, oops, wait, sorry… the non-Islamic Islamic State (NI-ISIS) in Syria, then who will?

SYRIA – Moderate Syrian rebels and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) reportedly struck a cease-fire deal on Friday, according to a group that has monitored Syria’s civil war.
The groups agreed to a non-aggression pact in which they promised not to attack each other.
The development could influence members of Congress to vote “no” on an authorization to train and equip moderate rebel groups as early as next week. The White House has requested the authorization, but some lawmakers have already been skeptical the opposition groups can be trusted. (more…)

Turkey – […] Kerry has been touring the Middle East to build support for President Barack Obama’s plan, announced on Wednesday, to strike both sides of the Syrian-Iraqi frontier to defeat Islamic State Sunni fighters, who control swathes of both countries.
On Thursday, Kerry won backing for a “coordinated military campaign” against Islamic State from 10 Arab countries – Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and six Gulf states including rich rivals Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

But it remains far from clear what role individual nations will play and while he confirmed France’s commitment to use military force in Iraq, Kerry declined to say whether France would join a similar campaign in Syria.
That follows conflicting reports in key ally Britain over its potential role, with Prime Minister David Cameron on Thursday saying he has not ruled out military action in Syria after his foreign secretary said Britain would not take part in any air strikes there. (more…)