The new year started with a turn of foreign events, as I wrote last week. Capitalism Magazine’s editor and publisher, without whom this blog, site and many articles would not be possible, asked to reprint it. Read my commentary on the day America’s impeached president of the United States ordered a pre-emptive and proper retaliation against Islamic Iran, the first serious strike against this enemy of Western civilization, here.
Iran attacks America, November 1979
Since the strike that killed a general for Iran’s army of Islamic terrorist proxy gangs and regimented soldiers of Allah, Iran has attacked America and a Ukrainian passenger jet carrying 176 innocents with missiles. The American president pledged this morning that, while showing restraint by declining to hit back for the moment, he will prevent the state sponsor of terrorism from acquiring nuclear weapons. When his predecessor brokered a deal with Iran that returned billions of dollars which were withheld after Iran attacked America and seized our embassy, capturing 66 Americans as prisoners of war in Iran’s jihad (“holy war”) against the West, I called it Obama’s death pact. Horrifically, for the Americans and others, including 63 Canadians on board the Boeing 737 Iran shot down in Teheran, death or its imminent threat became real thanks to Obama’s Iran deal. Barack Obama continued U.S. selflessness in foreign policy which, for decades, appeased Iran.
May appeasement end with military defense ordered and enacted by President Trump.
Thirty-five years after it debuted in theaters, I watched a notorious movie by director Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, One from the Heart). Read my new review of a restored version of Mr. Coppola’s 1984 motion picture, The Cotton Club, now available on Blu-ray, DVD and streaming for its 35th anniversary, here.
Though I never saw the original in either theatrical or home video release, I was not disappointed in The Cotton Club (encore edition). It isn’t perfect, as I write in the review. But its jazz and tap dance scenes offer rare and exquisite entertainment.
The Harlem-themed epic has an unusual history. This is Mr. Coppola’s first movie after a self-financed 1982 musical, One from the Heart, lost money. The Cotton Club was made and financed by a range of contentious principals, such as the late producer Robert Evans, and others, such as Orion Pictures, now owned by MGM, which Lionsgate purchased, acquiring its library years ago.
The nightclub, where in reality only Negroes were allowed to perform for an exclusively white audience, was a swank joint on Manhattan’s upper end. The film features a score by the late composer John Barry, leading performances by Richard Gere, Diane Lane, Lonette McKee (the 1976 original remade with Whitney Houston in Sparkle) and the late Gregory Hines. Also look for Mario Van Peebles, Gwen Verdon, James Remar, Maurice Hines, who appears in a home video segment with Mr. Coppola, Lawrence Fishburne (Boyz N the Hood) as a thug named Bumpy Rhodes, Jackee Harry (227), Jennifer Grey, Nicolas Cage, Bob Hoskins, Fred Gwynne and Woody Strode (Sergeant Rutledge) as a club doorman. Music by Fats Waller, Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong is fabulous.
“This is the movie I meant you to see”, Mr. Coppola, referring to the additional 20 minutes, tells a New York audience in the Q&A feature in the bonus segments. The panel includes disclosures about lawsuits, attempts to steal the negative and a murder trial surrounding The Cotton Club, which debuted in the fall of 1984. Francis Ford Coppola also remembers reading and being influenced by Arthur C. Clarke’s science fiction novel, Childhood’s End, with a black character and Maurice Hines recalling his late brother, Gregory, and their grandmother being an original Cotton Club showgirl.
Read the article
Finally, my editor informed me this morning that my article about Pittsburgh and its connection to Ayn Rand (1905-1982) for the winter edition of the print publication Pittsburgh Quarterly, is featured on the online version’s cover. Read about Rand, who revered the Industrial Revolution, and the city of bridges, steel and progress, here.
President Trump apparently ordered today’s pre-emptive strike on Iran’s top military official for planning to mass murder Americans in Iraq. The Islamic dictatorship of Iran confirmed the death. The New York Times reports confirmation of both assertions.
The historic nature of this excellent act of U.S. self-defense is unmistakable. Donald Trump is the first American president to militarily counterstrike this evil enemy explicitly on the principle of saving American lives. Time and again, from President Carter, who refused to assassinate Iran’s first Islamic dictator, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, before the monster returned to impose a barbaric theocracy, to President Obama, who appeased Iran and brokered a deal which brought Israel’s prime minister and the late Elie Wiesel to plead to a joint session of Congress for U.S. rejection of Obama’s death pact.
“This is devastating for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, the [Islamic] regime and Khamenei’s regional ambitions,” Mark Dubowitz, who runs a think tank opposing appeasement of Iran, referring to the Iranian dictatorship’s ayatollah, told the Times, which reported that President Trump ordered the drone strike on Baghdad’s International Airport.
In the 40 years since Iran waged war on America by seizing our embassy in Teheran, capturing Americans as prisoners of war wrongly dubbed “hostages”, beating U.S. Marines, baiting Americans for a race war involving radical leftists including Rev. Jesse Jackson and waging war with mass murder on American Marines in Beirut and across the world, including sponsoring nonstop attacks on America from hijacked passenger jets to countless untold acts of war, not a single American government hit Iran back hard. Carter shrunk in defeat after his folly over Khomeini. Reagan retreated. Bush the pappy appeased Iran, letting the savages threaten a published Western author and bomb American bookstores. Clinton did nothing when Iran bombed the United States Navy. Bush the son ordered the Marines to stand down in Iraq when Iran’s mystics ordered a siege against America. Obama welcomed and appeased Iran over and over. Even when Obama ordered the U.S. military to kill the top Moslem connected to carrying out the attack on Black Tuesday, September 11, 2001, he did so with a sad, morose, somber tone and honored the monster, granting an Islamic ritual at sea. And pleading with the enemy by pledging that he had done so in accordance with the faith that moves the enemy to destroy the West.
On Friday, January 3, 2020, the third American president to be impeached by Congress, Donald Trump, hit Iran by taking out one of its top thugs. It’s even better that he did so on the grounds of saving Americans’ lives, contrary to all of his presidential predecessors combined, who
“General Suleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region,” the Pentagon said in a statement. “General Suleimani and his Quds Force were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American and coalition service members and the wounding of thousands more.”
The ideals, life and career of Colin Powell came to a climax today on NBC’s Meet the Press. The former secretary of state under George W. Bush, a Harlem-born Republican who endorsed Barack Obama for president—twice—after serving as Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser, a four-star military general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced his support for Obama’s death pact known as the Iran deal.
This is the ultimate betrayal of the United States’ defense by one of its greatest pretenders. While Powell, whom I called upon to resign as secretary of state in a May, 2001 newspaper op-ed, has a reputation of being a competent, reasonable government official, the opposite is true. He has a long and undistinguished record in American government. In fact, his career is marked by blunder, failure and defeat.
This is because his philosophy is worse than his undeservedly decent reputation; Colin Powell is fundamentally anti-American.
The career military figure has always projected a measured, careful demeanor. In his early days as a military adviser in South Vietnam, where he was part of the unit involved in the My Lai massacre, Powell’s record is mixed and partly heroic; he was wounded and rescued comrades after he survived a helicopter crash. But from his service under President Nixon to Presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton, advising or commanding short U.S. military interventions in Grenada (1983), Libya (1986), Panama (1989) and the Gulf War (1990), his record is defined by short missions that accomplish little or nothing at all. He tends by his own admission to favor diplomacy over the use of military force that advances the nation’s defense and interest.
Powell’s limited, get-in-and-get-out incursions have shaped and defined U.S. military policy for decades with disastrous results; in Grenada, the U.S. rescued the medical school students but failed to dissuade Communist Cuba from militarily opposing the U.S., including supporting states that sponsor terrorism. In Libya, the limited bombing failed to accomplish anything and actually bolstered the dictatorship, which was unshaken by the strike. In Panama, the country was invaded by the U.S. for the sake of protecting Americans, helping others and stopping illegal drug trafficking and the dictator was removed, all to little effect. The Gulf War infamously liberated Kuwait at the expense of leaving an anti-American dictator in power in Iraq and abetting the rise of Islamic terrorism, which spread and led to the worst attack on America in history in 2001.
Powell’s half-measures leave enemy combatants essentially unopposed to do real harm and inflict major, lasting damage.
This is because Colin Powell’s ethics embrace selflessness, as against selfishness, as a virtue. He consistently and emphatically holds that the highest morality is helping others. He is mixed, as evidenced in his opposition to Clinton’s policy to help others in Bosnia on the grounds that it did not also benefit the United States. What drives Colin Powell, however, is the antithesis of self-interest. Powell opposes any act which explicitly advances U.S. interest, such as advancing toward Baghdad during the Gulf War to take out Saddam Hussein or get oil or annihilate Islamic terrorist state sponsors—and he does so exactly because the proposed act advances U.S. interest.
Powell opposed any unilateral U.S. military action following the September 11, 2001 attack on America, for instance, insisting that the U.S. must plead for permission from the United Nations instead. When, as secretary of state, Powell got his way and pleaded to the U.N. for an invasion of Iraq, he did so not on the grounds that the U.S. retains the moral right to eradicate state sponsors of terrorism but on the argument that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction—which Powell was also wrong about—posed some vague, general threat to the world. The invasion proceeded, accomplished nothing, sacrificed thousands of innocent American servicemen and women and failed, all but delivering today’s Iraq into the control of America’s arch-enemy, Iran.
Now, Colin Powell supports Obama’s deal with Iran.
From castigating Israel for acting in its self-defense, offering praise and support for Communist dictator Fidel Castro and trying to schedule a meeting with Arab terrorist and Munich Olympics massacre chieftain Yasser Arafat while he was secretary of state, Powell’s anti-Americanism is fully, alarmingly steady and consistent. That he wants this death pact with Iran, too, is part of Powell’s doctrine of self-sacrifice.
I do not doubt that this is his sincerely held philosophy. Colin Powell, who opposed neoconservatives in the Bush White House and defends a woman’s right to an abortion, expresses sincerity in all of his convictions. But he is mixed and the mixture is bad for America with deadly implications for U.S. national defense. For this reason, he is the worst type of American leader: one who claims that America is good and ought to be defended but only because America helps others at the expense of American interest and strictly on the condition that America seeks and obtains the approval of the others whom it’s morally obliged to help.
From the beginning of his military career, when he served as an adviser in South Vietnam, to today’s deplorable sanction of a deal to engage nuclear advancement for America’s foremost enemy, Powell consistently acts against America. Powell’s selflessness goes back decades, to his earliest experiences when he says he “found himself” in what he sees as service to the state. It was never more explicit than when he asserted in 1997—spearheading the Bush-Clinton initiative to impose “national service” under the Orwellian term volunteerism—that each individual has a moral duty to serve others, the opposite of the founding American ideals of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of one’s own happiness for one’s own sake. This selfless statesman’s dogged anti-Americanism is never more wicked and dangerous than it is now in defense of those who seek death to America.
Today’s historic accord in Vienna between Iran and the West makes the West’s submission to Islamic fascism official government policy. The agreement, which trades lifting Western sanctions against Iran for United Nations-supervised nuclear advancement, creates a new alliance between America and Iran. It is in this sense that leftists and the Obama administration are correct that the Iran deal is a major advancement in complicity between these historic enemies.
I am not convinced that Barack Obama’s deal with the Islamic dictatorship makes Iran’s nuclear weapons development and acquisition easier. This is because I think nuclear proliferation by Iran is already extremely easy and a lot depends on Iran’s ability as a military dictatorship to make, maintain and use nuclear weaponry. But neither America nor Israel chooses to end the nuclear program which should have been decimated long ago. The only hope for termination of Iran’s nuclear program may come from France, which should have learned its lesson in the perils of appeasement the hard way when it was occupied by the Nazis and once stood for reason against an appeasing America over the Arab seizure of the Suez Canal. On this grim Bastille Day, France, which suffered a major assault by Moslem terrorists early this year in Paris at Charlie Hebdo, ought to be motivated to act in defense of liberty and Western civilization.
Motives are what this bad deal makes clear. With sanctions lifted, Islamic fascist Iran, which seeks total annihilation of the West, is free to expand banking into Europe and continue to sponsor and wage its terrorism with new power, yielding jihadist infiltration and domination of the West. Nuclearization ought to be obvious—Obama’s deal is a deal with a barbaric regime and thus contains no real safeguards for anything but the totally catastrophic prospect of Islamic nuclear attack—and there is every reason to think Iran will seek, make and use nuclear weapons against the West.
However, as this map illustrates, Iran’s new power hikes the potential for catastrophic war between Islamic factions of fundamentalists, as John Lewis warned in my exclusive 2011 interview, and threats or instances of nuclear strikes against America and the West in the region. Coupled with Obama’s deal’s explicit approval of Islamic economic influence and infiltration in the West, this agreement, even if stopped by a unanimous act of Congress and override of an Obama veto, may preclude the necessity of an Iranian nuclear act of war. Such an attack may not, given U.S. submission to Islam, be necessary.
Obama’s deal means the U.S.A.’s endorsement of Iranian nuclear proliferation and thus may or may not make nuclear holocaust on the West likely or all but certain. These monstrous years of Obama’s presidency make the end of America more realistic in either case. Obama’s evil deal makes official America’s submission to the world’s predominant faith-based barbarism and marks a change from a nation based on the enlightenment to a country kneeling to the looming, foreign threat of savagery and mass death. Netanyahu calls the Iran deal a “mistake” but will probably do nothing about it. Hillary Clinton says she concurs with Barack Obama that this is a good deal.
Ominously, Iran’s president pledges that Obama’s deal opens “new horizons”—as NASA’s New Horizons space probe climaxes with the best view of Pluto known to man, thanks to men of aerospace, science and reason—in an interesting and contrasting choice of words. By the time the West awakens to the reality of Iran’s new horizons—fanatical religious delusions by mystics inciting mobs to bring “Death to America!”—it will be too late.
Obama’s deal with Iran is a pact for mass suicide.
Iraq no longer exists, not in any essential sense. The fall of Ramadi is a sign of impending ruin. With the Islamic state rising, spreading and rallying Moslems to arms for jihad, which still means holy war, the Middle East is near total war. The aimless war for nothing that George W. Bush started for the wrong reasons in the wrong country, which was continued and scaled back for the wrong reasons by Barack Obama, comes to this: pure barbarism. As an American government official, choosing to remain nameless, tells today’s edition of the New York Times: “We’re still trying to piece together exactly what happened [in Iraq].”
Any honest man can see what happened, as any thinking adult could have seen that Islamic terrorists would be motivated to fly passenger jets into skyscrapers and kill thousands despite what the foolish Condoleezza Rice said to the contrary. Bush refused to declare, wage and win war against state sponsors of 9/11 and other Islamic terrorism. This is what happened to end Iraq. Instead, Bush chose to praise the ideology of the enemy, Islam, refuse to bomb mosques (like his predecessor Bill Clinton), order the Marines to stand down at Fallujah, put the lives of others above the lives of Americans, time and time and time and time again like his father, and wipe out thousands and thousands of Americans for absolutely nothing of value for the United States of America. Nihilistic Obama, also time and again, lied and went back on his word and did the same as Bush only with more explicit endorsement of the enemy’s ideology. The end of Iraq makes plain what some of us have been saying since 2004: American soldiers who died in Iraq, as painfully depicted in American Sniper, died in vain. This is what Americans should think about on Memorial Day.
That and the fact that they, the Americans, sanctioned the sacrifice and collapse. They did so by electing and re-electing Bush and Obama. They did so by tuning into cynicism or, worse, nihilism, and choosing not to think about Iraq, Syria, and the major state sponsors of death to the West, Iran and Saudi Arabia. They did so by ignoring Libya, Afghanistan, and attacks by Moslems on Americans at Benghazi, Boston and Fort Hood. They did so by regarding 9/11 as a crime, not as an act of war; as a tragedy to mourn rather than as an atrocity to avenge. They did so by going along with America’s submission to those waging war for Islam. They did so by evading that the war between religious savage and civilized man and its corollary, the rise of the U.S. police state such as the NSA, TSA and censorship, is a victory for jihad and an imminent threat to life. Americans all but made, chose and commissioned the end of Iraq and the meaningless deaths of thousands of their soldiers and countrymen—by refusing to think and demand the end of jihad without mercy—and the end of Iraq is the bloody forewarning that, until they do, Americans act by default to end America.
This Memorial Day weekend, I urge Americans to think, or re-think, and think twice about the men and women who fought and died, the unending war and the fact of doom and dictatorship that threatens to destroy freedom in America. Read this interview with my late friend and teacher, war and history professor John David Lewis, who studied the essentials of liberty and victory. Read, think and check your premises, as Ayn Rand wrote. If you, too, regard Memorial Day as the proper time to think about liberty and victory, and reflect on those who gave their lives for your freedom, with life as the ultimate value, pledge to honor the fallen, especially the one who once said: “Let’s roll”. Let the end of Iraq be the start of a renewed, radical American ideal.
Author’s Note
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The Harlem-themed epic has an unusual history. This is Mr. Coppola’s first movie after a self-financed 1982 musical, One from the Heart, lost money. The Cotton Club was made and financed by a range of contentious principals, such as the late producer Robert Evans, and others, such as Orion Pictures, now owned by MGM, which Lionsgate purchased, acquiring its library years ago.
The ideals, life and career of Colin Powell came to a climax today on NBC’s Meet the Press. The former secretary of state under 