Members of Congress; other distinguished guests, and the American People:
I thank President Obama for declaring Martial Law and relinquishing the duties of Commander-in-Chief to me. In this role I will ask Congress for specific actions and expect they will be taken for under Martial Law Congress exists is to assist the Commander-in-Chief in executing the duties imposed upon him.
There is a season for all things. Our season for sacrifice has now arrived. Our nation is in grave danger from the forces allied to or inspired by the Islamic State.
This enemy, the Islamic State, has beheaded our citizens and has inspired attacks that have murdered peaceful Americans in our beloved country. The Islamic State has declared war on us. Later today I will stand before Congress and ask for a declaration of war against the Islamic State.
This is not a war against terrorism which can never be won. It is against an identifiable group. If other groups arise to threaten us, we will treat them in the same manner as we treat the Islamic State.
The Islamic State has under its total control vast swaths of land in northern Syrian and central and eastern Iraq which include two major cities: one in Iraq called Mosul a city of 650,000 people; the other in Syria called Al-Raqqa which with its surrounding area contains approximately one million people. It has drawn forces from almost all nations of the world in its fight against us and has called upon its followers to attack targets us.
Make no mistake we are at war. War demands from those who enjoy the benefits of freedom and liberty to share in its burdens. Those on the battleground in our armed forces will sacrifice most; the rest of us can no longer accept them doing it alone..
Our war plan is simple. We will destroy ISIS by taking from it all the land over which it exercises control. We will free the millions of people it holds in bondage. We will remain there as we did in Japan at the end of that war until we are assured the people living there can do so in safety. .
We did not ask for this war into which we have been thrust. We must pick up the gauntlet thrown in our face or forever cower waiting for the next outrage to be perpetrated on us. Do not be mistaken into thinking this will be easy. We will be tried to the limit of our strength but we will prevail.
I will ask and expect Congress to impose a 5% war sur tax on all Americans. There will no longer be war profiteering where some get rich and others die. I will ask that a tax of 85% be placed on all profits made from assisting in this war effort. The money raised from this tax will be dedicated to the families of those who sacrifice the most or those injured.
I will ask and expect Congress to establish a National Service to which all men and women of a certain age will be eligible to be drafted and required to serve until the end of this war. The draft will be by lottery with no exemptions, deferments or exceptions. No longer will the Donald Trumps or Howard Deans or Dick Cheneys or Bill Clintons or Alan Dershowitzs avoid serving and be able to claim the benefits of this country. The National Service will place the draftees into military, medical, auditing, or other public service slots in accordance with the demands that exist from time to time. This bringing together of our youth from across the nation will result in greater appreciation and understanding of our differences.
All Americans expect to be protected by their government therefore all Americans must be involved in our protection.
I will order our military to begin immediate preparation for the imposition of a no fly zone over all of Syrian and Iraq. No air plane traffic of any kind will be allowed to fly without the permission of our armed forces. I have also ordered our Army and Marines to prepare several decisions for immediate deployment; the Navy will forthwith send four of our nuclear aircraft carriers with supporting naval forces to the Middle East. Our Air Force will forward station all of its combat forces and actively assist our ground forces in our war.
I will establish a War Emergency Board that will control of all air plane, rail and interstate traffic in the country. It will have the power to seize land for the military training if such is deemed necessary to increase our armed forces to the strength necessary for carrying out our mission. This Board will also have the power to direct industries to assist our country in our war effort.
This is America’s fight. I expect all American people will join in. As to our friends and allies throughout the world you can assist us or get out-of-the-way. As to those who wish us ill, watch and see how we act against those who do.
Until the day of ultimate triumph I can only offer you days of hardship, sorrow and sacrifice. Our history teaches us we are at our best when all are united in common purpose. With God’s help the war will be swiftly concluded, the state of Marshall Law ended, and we can return to our normal lives.
An Iraqi clique runs IS at the moment. Their dream is to recover Baghdad from the Shia, and, ethnic cleanse it. Khalipha Ibrahim (al-Baghdadi) fancies himself in the mold of Harun al-Rashid, not Umar al-Kattab.
Help from the Kurds is problematic. Generally, Arabs are not that fond of Kurds, especially, Kurds with guns. Using Peshmerga troops to conquer and police Arab areas will not work. Syria:Direct reports that Arab Syrian rebel militias would rather go over to IS, or, JAN, than tolerate a Kurdish presence on their turf.
Khalid:
I’d add, don’t know if you agree, that the Kurds themselves are not too anxious to move beyond their ancient territory.
True, that.
Unfortunately, territorial claims over-lap in Iraq and Syria, usually, in the areas of oil production. Syria, before the war, was a pluralistic dictatorship. I liken it to Tito’s Yugoslavia. Substantial populations of other ethnicities, and, sects, existed, peacefully, in each of the ethnic majority enclave areas. Once the authoritarian ruler was gone, or, weakened enough, as, happened in the case of the Assad regime, the enclaves cleansed ethnically, then, took off on centrifugally driven nationalist projects.
The Kurds have been successful in their national project, thus, far, but, must be wary of “biting off, more than they can chew.” If you check recent maps in Syria on Syria:Direct you’ll notice that the Kurds are expanding into regions where they were formerly in the minority. Turkey is very reactive to any idea of an independent Kurdistan.
For local players it’s a zero-sum game in Syria. If one group makes a gain the others must lose. In order to get around that situation, US foreign policy has utilized a “game theory” (Nash) diplomatic approach in Syria in which all the players can gain some of their goals, but, none can achieve supremacy. Behind the scenes, there are negotiations going on all the time. People make difficult chessmen.
No way,?????????
This has something to do with oil?
Get out.
Don’t you remember where Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met to finalize Operation Overlord?…………..Teheran.
A zone that they neutralized because of oil.
Sacred (or not) ground ever since.
It’s a zero-sum game for global players too….
Every once in a while as we are constantly turning the frequency knob
of our consciousness we arrive at a channel that is crystal clear about
a summary of our current state of affairs.
one finds themselves drawn to the clarity of sound against the
background static of our everyday lives.
Such was the case when I watched the new documentary film
SIRIUS made by Steven Greer MD
America doesn’t want to destroy IS, it wants to redirect IS energies east-ward. As NC pointed out, IS is no strategic threat to the USA. On the other hand, Iran will soon develop nuclear weapons, and, the means to deliver them. Iranian interests in the Mid-East are diametrically opposed to American interests. Any political and/or military vacuum Washington leaves is immediately filled by Tehran. In strategic terms, Iran is a potent enemy with great potential.
What if American policy is intent on turning the attention of the Khilafat (Government of the Khalipha) toward Baghdad? That would be hard to explain to the American public. How, and, why, is the current enemy being turned against a different more threatening enemy?
Here’s a thought, or, two. Iran has been steadily pouring troops into the Syrian and Iraqi cauldrons. Every troop who perishes in Iraq and Syria destabilizes the Khamenei regime. Here-to-fore the Quds Force and the Pasdaran were sufficient to hold the military situation together. Recently, Iran was forced by accelerating events to commit regular units of the IRGC to the Syrian and Iraqi fights. There’s been a lot of funerals of late in Iran and Lebanon. Maybe, this did not come about by chance, but, has been helped along by a sub-rosa policy of the G for quite some time.
If that’s the case how do we judge Obama, stupid, or, smart, weak, or, strong? How can folks make any such judgement about the President’s personality and work product, considering that we won’t know anything about the effects of his decisions concerning Mid-East for a decade, or, so. Perhaps, we won’t even know that he made any decisions.
It’ll take time for the truth of things to percolate through academia. Once the process is complete, the “truth” will be served to the public in digestible portions in much the same fashion that the “truth” about Viet Nam was fed to the public over the last few decades.
Khalid:
We must destroy ISIS. I do agree though that Iran is a threat and its interests are opposed to ours. I do not believe we can turn it to be against the Shiites because from what I understand it dislikes Sunni Muslims who do not follow its teachings as much as it does the Shiites.
If Obama is able to pull this off so that ISIS can turn against the Shiites; and that the Iranian people can throw off the yoke of their present leaders; he has to be considered a genius. But we cannot wait for decades to make judgments; we can only make them on the present available evidence which shows confusion and lack of will by a president who is counting down the days when he can be free at last.
We do not have time. ISIS has shown its ability to inspire strikes beyond its borders. Wouldn’t it be best if we eliminated it and then enabled the Kurds and anti-Assad forces to destroy the Iranians, Russians and Assad forces. With my war I want to simplify matters, one step at a time.
I would love to think that our plan in Syria as it now exists is to undermine the Iranian forces. That is something that I did not consider when I gave the new commander in chief the speech to give. If we get them really involved in Syria perhaps the Green Revolution can spring to life again.
“I thank President Obama for declaring Martial Law and relinquishing the duties of Commander-in-Chief to me.”
Doubtful. Under the U.S. Constitution, the President, or in resignation his successor the former Vice President, Speaker of the House, etc. would remain Commander-in-Chief. Civilian oversight of the military continues.
http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/martial_law.aspx
https://www.law.cornell.edu/anncon/html/art2frag11_user.html
https://www.quora.com/Can-the-President-order-martial-law-and-declare-himself-as-a-dictator-of-the-USA
I think he was kidding, Ed.
Ed:
Marshall law will suspend all the Constitutional guarantees. As long as the military goes along then there is nothing that can stop any action that is taken.
Marshall law. A mistake I have often made, it is Martial law. Similarly I have written on occasion causa belli for casus belli. In both cases the incorrect word or spelling conveys the same general idea though on closer examination contain important differences.
Your plan sounds like it came from the neo con playbook. ISIS has no air force. Why would we want a no fly zone? Who would we be preventing from flying? France, Russia, Syria, Iran? Let every nation on the planet that wants to bomb ISIS do so. Your plan is comparable to the Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld plan on Iraq. They promised swift victory and we would be welcomed with open arms. Twelve years later we are still there fighting with no end in sight. The only thing our intervention produced was a fractured state. This plan would have a similar result. Sounds like a replay of Viet Nam. No American boots on the ground should be the policy and our role quite limited. Mike Morrell the former number two at the CIA says there is only one ground force that will defeat ISIS and it is the Syrian army. Lets support the Syrian army and the Syrian state. One enemy at a time is the right principle. So lets back the Shia in the region. As Rand Paul said lets stop arming our enemies, the allies of ISIS. We should end our efforts against Assad. Lets pivot away from the Sunnis in Turkey, Jordan, Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Lets assist Assad, Iran, Hezbollah, the Iraqi Shia, the Kurds and the Syrian army and any others in the region that want to defeat Sunni jihadists. Work with France, Russia, Syria and Britain to wage an air campaign but let the local ground forces defeat ISIS. 2. Jeremy Greenstock the former British ambassador shortly after 9-11 was asked if AlQaeda was an existential threat to the west. He said emphatically no. ISIS controls a small land mass in the middle of the desert with a gdp about half of Puerto Rico’s. It has no air force or navy. It can kill some people but it can’t conquer a nation willing to fight. Engage in terrorism yes. Project force outside it’s area ? NO. BHO is correct. They are not an existential threat. The problem should not be overstated. Over twenty thousand Americans and Europeans die of Heroin overdoses a year. The Mafia supplies that drug. The Mafia is not an existential threat to the West even though they kill substantially more people than ISIS. What would be an existential threat to the West would be a nuclear conflict with Russia and their thousands of atomic weapons along with the required delivery systems. We won the cold war thanks to Reagan’s approach of peace through strength. We avoided direct conflict with the Soviets. We should do so today. In 1982 Reagan pulled our peace keeping forces out of Lebanon after the bombing of the Marine barracks. He saw the intense hatreds and tribalism that existed in that region. We shouldn’t be drawn back into ancient disputes in that region. Let Syria be Syria. America shouldn’t be suckered into fighting someone else’s war. Let the locals sort it out.
NC: Good post. Agree.
NC:
Reagan’s defense secretary Casper Weinberger said as the Marines were in Lebanon: “What we need is a multinational force until certain conditions have been achieved. Nobody knows when those conditions can be achieved. It is not an open-ended commitment.” Pretty clear, isn’t it?
Sept. 29, 1983, Reagan said: “Their mission is to provide an interposition force at agreed locations and thereby provide the multinational presence as requested by the Lebanese Government to assist it and the Lebanese Armed Forces.”
On October 23 Hezbollah-linked militants drove two truck bombs containing a half a kiloton of explosives into the Marine barracks at the Beirut International Airport, killing 220 Marines and 21 other U.S. service members.
On Feb. 4, 1984, Reagan stated something frequently heard in debates over Afghanistan and other theaters of conflict today — if the United States withdraws, “we’ll be sending one signal to terrorists everywhere: They can gain by waging war against innocent people…. If we’re to be secure in our homes and in the world, we must stand together against those who threaten us.”
Yet, just three days later, on Feb. 7, Reagan ordered the Marines to “redeploy” to their ships offshore — which was actually a full withdrawal achieved in three weeks.
You simplify the Reagan idea of “peace through strength” If you are strong but afraid then the strength does you little good. If we fear Russia having nukes and make our policy on that then we must as well cede Western Europe to it. Unfortunately there are times when you have to fight.
What is the sense of having the biggest armed forces in the world if we are afraid to fight against people who attacked us?
You want to align with the Hezbollah Assad and Iran and Russia? You want to turn against our long term allies and friends Jordan,Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and all the other Sunni nations which represent over 85% of all Muslims. Talk about America losing credibility in the world. These nations that supported us for generations are to be thrown over for nations that have been our enemies and have murdered Americans in the past. What would be left of our word as a nation?
You suggest we shouldn’t be drawn back in. That’s yesterday’s newspaper. We are already drawn in thanks to Clinton, Bush and Obama and our failed policy over the last few decades. The only way to get out is to go in an finish the job and to keep our long term allies as our friends.
Good rhetoric, terrible plan. Perhaps it would be better to stop financing and arming ISIS. Join Putin in destroying it. And most importantly demand those under our protection and subsidies abandon all support of ISIS. Here is an example of an “ally” that could not exist without American goodwill enabling ISIS and its atrocities.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3315347/Watch-heart-pounding-moment-Israeli-commandos-save-Islamic-militants-Syrian-warzone-risking-lives-sworn-enemies.html
ISIS is a creation of America and its “allies”. Just pull the plug on it. No further action needed. No body bags filled.
Tadzio:
The rhetoric is to make us think, myself included. Thanks for commenting. Putin is not fighting ISIS – he is fighting against those who are fighting against Assad. True, Israel would have a much harder time existing if we did not assist it but the article you note shows the good it can do. Perhaps we are to blame in some part for ISIS but that is why we must destroy it. If you can show me where the plug is I would be glad to pull it but barring that I think we have to go there even though I perish the thought.
Let’s hear it for the “Trum(p)man Doctrine”!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Well done, sir.
And exactly WHO is to give this speech?