The Undocumented Mark Steyn (29 page)

But no, that would be an utterly fantastical America. In the real America, the President is too busy to attend the security briefing on the morning after a national debacle, but he does have time to do Letterman and appear on a hip-hop radio show hosted by “The Pimp with a Limp.” In the real State Department, the U.S. embassy in Cairo is guarded by Marines with no ammunition, but they do enjoy the soft-power muscle of a Foreign Service officer, one Lloyd Schwartz, tweeting frenziedly into cyberspace (including a whole chain directed at my own Twitter handle, for some reason) about how America deplores insensitive people who are so insensitively insensitive that they don’t respectfully respect all religions equally respectfully and sensitively, even as the raging mob is pouring through the gates.

When it comes to a flailing, blundering superpower, I am generally wary of ascribing to malevolence what is more often sheer stupidity and incompetence. For example, we’re told that, because the consulate in Benghazi was designated as an “interim facility,” it did not warrant the level of security and protection that, say, an embassy in Scandinavia would have. This seems all too plausible—that security decisions are made not by individual human judgment but according to whichever rule book sub-clause at the Federal Agency of Bureaucratic Facilities Regulation it happens to fall under. However, the very next day the embassy in Yemen, which
is
a permanent facility, was also overrun, as was the embassy in Tunisia the day after. Look, these are tough crowds, as the President might say at Caesars Palace. But we spend more money on these joints than anybody else, and they’re as easy to overrun as the Belgian consulate.

As I say, I’m inclined to be generous, and put some of this down to the natural torpor and ineptitude of government. But Hillary Clinton and General Martin Dempsey are guilty of something worse, in the Secretary of State’s weirdly obsessive remarks about an obscure film supposedly disrespectful of
Mohammed and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs’ telephone call to a private citizen asking him if he could please ease up on the old Islamophobia.

Forget the free-speech arguments. In this case, as Secretary Clinton and General Dempsey well know, the film has even less to do with anything than did the Danish cartoons or the schoolteacher’s teddy bear or any of the other innumerable grievances of Islam. The four-hundred-strong assault force in Benghazi showed up with RPGs and mortars: That’s not a spontaneous movie review; that’s an act of war, and better planned and executed than the dying superpower’s response to it. Secretary Clinton and General Dempsey are, to put it mildly, misleading the American people when they suggest otherwise.

One can understand why they might do this, given the fiasco in Libya. The men who organized this attack knew the ambassador would be at the consulate in Benghazi rather than at the embassy in Tripoli. How did that happen? They knew when he had been moved from the consulate to a “safe house,” and switched their attentions accordingly. How did that happen? The United States Government lost track of its ambassador for ten hours. How did that happen? Perhaps, when they’ve investigated Mitt Romney’s press release for another three or four weeks, the court eunuchs of the American media might like to look into some of these fascinating questions, instead of leaving the only interesting reporting on an American story to the foreign press.

For whatever reason, Secretary Clinton chose to double down on misleading the American people. “Libyans carried Chris’s body to the hospital,” said Mrs. Clinton. That’s one way of putting it. The photographs at the Arab TV network al-Mayadeen show Chris Stevens’s body being dragged through the streets, while the locals take souvenir photographs on their cell phones. A man in a red striped shirt photographs the dead-eyed ambassador from above; another immediately behind his head moves the splayed arm and holds his cell-phone camera an inch from the ambassador’s nose. Some years ago, I had occasion to assist in moving the body of a dead man: We did not stop to take photographs en route. Even allowing for cultural differences, this looks less like “carrying Chris’s body to the hospital” and more like barbarians gleefully feasting on the spoils of savagery.

In a rare appearance on a non-showbiz outlet, President Obama, winging it on Telemundo, told his host that Egypt was neither an ally nor an enemy. I can understand why it can be difficult to figure out, but here’s an easy way to tell: Bernard Lewis, the great scholar of Islam, said some years ago that America risked being seen as “harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.” So, at the Benghazi consulate, the looters stole “sensitive” papers revealing the names of Libyans who’ve cooperated with the United States.

Oh, well. As the President would say, obviously our hearts are with you.

Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the local doctor who fingered bin Laden to the Americans sits in jail. So, while America’s clod vice president staggers around pimping limply that only Obama had the guts to take the toughest decision anyone’s ever had to take, the poor schlub who actually did have the guts, who actually took the tough decision in a part of the world where taking tough decisions can get you killed, languishes in a cell because Washington would not lift a finger to help him.

Like I said, no novelist would contrast Chris Stevens on the streets of Benghazi and Barack Obama on stage in Vegas. Too crude, too telling, too devastating.

THE MAN AT THE BORDER

SteynOnline
, June 23, 2014

ELEVEN YEARS AGO
, a few weeks after the fall of Saddam, on little more than a whim, I rented a beat-up Nissan and, without telling the car-hire bloke, drove from Amman through the eastern Jordanian desert, across the Iraqi border, and into the Sunni Triangle. I could not easily make the same journey today, but for a brief period in the spring of 2003 we were the “strong horse” and even a dainty little media gelding such as myself was accorded a measure of respect by the natives. The frontier is a line in the sand drawn by a British colonial civil servant, and on either side it’s empty country. From the Trebil border post, you have to drive through ninety miles of nothing to get to Iraq’s westernmost town, Rutba—in saner times an old refueling stop for Imperial Airways flights from Britain to India. Fewer of Her Majesty’s subjects swing by these days. I had a bite to eat at a café whose patron had a trilby pushed back on his head Sinatra-style and was very pleased to see me. (Rutba was the first stop on a motoring tour that took me through Ramadi and Fallujah and up to Tikrit and various other towns.)

In those days, the Iraqi side of the Trebil border was manned by U.S. troops. So an “immigration official” from the Third Armored Cavalry glanced at my Canadian passport, and said, “Welcome to Free Iraq.” We exchanged a few pleasantries, and he waved me through. A lot less cumbersome than landing at JFK. I remember there was a banner with a big oval hole in it, where I assumed Saddam’s face had once been. And as I drove away I remember wondering what that hole would be filled with.

Well, now we know. That same border post today is manned by head-hacking jihadists from the “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.” Bloomberg News reports:

         
Fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, an al-Qaeda breakaway group, took all the border crossings with Jordan and Syria, Hameed Ahmed Hashim, a member of the Anbar provincial council, said by telephone yesterday. Militants took Rutba, about 145 kilometers (90 miles) east of the Jordanian border, Faleh al-Issawi, the deputy chief of the council, said by phone. Anbar province in western Iraq borders both countries. The Jordanian army didn’t immediately respond to a request for information about the situation on the border.

I should think not. The Jordanian official I met was charming if somewhat bureaucratically obstructive, and wound up asking me about how difficult it was to emigrate to Canada. More difficult than emigrating from Syria to Iraq. From the German news service Deutsche Welle:

         
Rutba gives ISIS control over a stretch of highway to Jordan that has fallen into infrequent use over the past several months because of the deteriorating security situation. The town has a population of 40,000, but it has recently absorbed 20,000 people displaced from Fallujah and Ramadi.

               
ISIS now controls much of the Iraq-Syria border. Taking crossings such as the one in Qaim allows them to more easily move weapons and heavy equipment. Rebels also control the Syrian side of the crossing.

The Iraq/Syria border no longer exists: ISIS has simply erased the Anglo-French settlement of 1922. Jordan has just one frontier post with Iraq—the one I crossed all those years ago—and it’s asking an awful lot of these lads to
be more respectful of Jordan’s sovereignty than they’ve been of Iraq’s or Syria’s. This thought has apparently just occurred to Barack Obama, who thinks that sounding presidential is largely a matter of stating the obvious: “Obama told CBS in an interview that will be aired in full today that the fighting could spread to ‘allies like Jordan.’”

Gee, thanks for that insight.

In her interrogation of Dick Cheney, Fox’s Megyn Kelly mocked that line from eleven years ago about how we’d be “greeted as liberators.” In May 2003, I wasn’t a liberator, but I was pretty much greeted as one by the majority of the fellows I encountered in the Sunni Triangle. The towns were dusty and rundown but intact, with only two signs that anything dramatic had happened: As at the Trebil border post, the giant portraits of Saddam mounted on plinths at every rinky-dink roundabout had been removed—but very neatly, almost surgically: it was an act not of vandalism, but of political hygiene. A few weeks earlier, the dictator would have been omnipresent; now his absence was omnipresent. That’s what you were supposed to notice. In Rutba and Ramadi and the other western towns, you’d also see the occasional fancy house with decorative stonework, and gates and doors hanging off the hinges with the odd goat or donkey wandering through the compound defecating hither and yon. These were the pads of the local Baathist big shots, who’d taken off in a hurry, and, other than the drained gas stations, they were the only scenes of looting I saw.

If you had asked me, in that café in Rutba eleven years ago, as I was enjoying what passed for the “mixed grill” with mein host, what utter defeat would look like in a single image, it would be hard to beat the scene that now greets you in the western desert: An Iraqi border post staffed by hardcore jihadists from an al-Qaeda spin-off. The details are choice—the black flag of al-Qaeda flies from buildings built by American taxpayers, they drive vehicles paid for by American taxpayers, they shoot aircraft out of the sky with Stinger missiles donated by American taxpayers—and thousands of their foot soldiers are nominally Britons, Frenchmen, Aussies, Canucks, Americans, and other western citizens for whom the open road in Iraq, decapitating as they go, is the greatest adventure of their lives. Until they return “home.”

But, as I said, these are details. The central image—the al-Qaeda man at the border post—is in itself an image of complete and total defeat.

Where next? With Syrian refugees expanding the population of his country by 25 percent, I wonder how Jordan’s King Abdullah feels about being an “ally” of Obama’s. Perhaps he nodded his head at the reported comments of the Polish Foreign Minister—that being a U.S. ally “isn’t worth anything” and is “even harmful because it creates a false sense of security.” No matter how secure that false sense is, waking up to find yourself sharing a border crossing with ISIS is apt to shatter it.

I had a grand time in liberated Iraq in 2003, but one exchange stuck with me, and nagged at me over the years. At a rest area on the highway between Rutba and Ramadi, I fell into conversation with one of the locals. Having had to veer onto the median every few miles to dodge bomb craters, I asked him whether he was irked by his liberators. “Americans only in the sky,” he told me, grinning a big toothless grin as, bang on cue, a U.S. chopper rumbled up from over the horizon and passed high above our heads. “No problem.”

“Americans only in the sky” is an even better slogan in the Obama era of drone-alone warfare. In Iraq, there were a lot of boots on the ground, but when it came to non-military leverage (cultural, economic), the non-imperial hyperpower was content to remain “only in the sky.” And down on the ground other players filled the vacuum, some reasonably benign (the Chinese in the oil fields), others less so (the Iranians in everything else).

Still, the roots of ISIS do not lie in the actions America took in 2003. Bush made mistakes in Iraq, and left a ramshackle state that functioned less badly than any of its neighbors. Obama walked away, pulled out a cigarette, tossed the match over his shoulder, and ignited a fuse that, from Damascus to Baghdad to Amman and beyond, will blow up the entire Middle East.

Back in America, the coastal sophisticates joke at those knuckle-dragging rubes who believe Obama is some kind of “secret Muslim.” But really Occam’s razor would favor such an explanation, wouldn’t it? That a post-American Middle East divided between bad-cop nuclear Shia and worse-cop
head-hacking Sunni was the plan all along. Because there are only two alternatives to that simplest of simple explanations:

The first is that Obama and the Z-graders who fill out his administration are just blundering buffoons. And we all know from Michael Beschloss that he’s the smartest president ever, so it couldn’t possibly be colossal stupidity on a scale unknown to American history, could it?

The second is that his contempt for American power—a basic class signifier in the circles in which he’s moved all his life—is so deeply ingrained that he doesn’t care what replaces it.