Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin stopped by the Reagan National Defense Forum to deliver an address titled, ‘A Time for American Leadership’. What leadership lessons did he have to offer? “I learned a thing or two about urban warfare from my time fighting in Iraq and leading the campaign to defeat ISIS,” he told his audience. “Like Hamas, ISIS was deeply embedded in urban areas. And the international coalition against ISIS worked hard to protect civilians and create humanitarian corridors, even during the toughest battles. So the lesson is not that you can win in urban warfare by protecting civilians. The lesson is that you can only win in urban warfare by protecting civilians.” He then went on to lecture that “we will continue to press Israel to protect civilians” and” that “protecting Palestinian civilians in Gaza is both a moral responsibility and a strategic imperative.” Gen. Austin headed Central Command from 2013 to 2016. Obama officials blamed Austin for telling Obama that ISIS...

In 2020 and 2021, the United States spent over $600 million on foreign aid in Iraq. That’s down from a high of over $2 billion in 2018 and $4.4 billion in 2016. But it still means that we have blown through over $10 billion on Iraq since 2016. That’s long since we officially withdrew. Meanwhile, where was Iraq’s money going? Iraq’s latest budget dedicates $2.8 billion to Shiite PMU terror militias including Kataeb Hezbollah: an Iran-backed terror group that has been responsible for the deaths of numerous American soldiers. At the height of the Iraq War, Kataeb Hezbollah was using Iranian IEDs to kill American soldiers. Kataeb Hezbollah is listed as a foreign terrorist organization which makes it a crime for Americans to fund it. But that hasn’t stopped the Biden administration from providing massive amounts of foreign aid to Iraq. While some U.S. conflicts with Jihadists in the region are old news, Kataeb Hezbollah fired rockets at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad in 2019, and has bombed ...

In 2020 and 2021, the United States spent over $600 million on foreign aid in Iraq. That’s down from a high of over $2 billion in 2018 and $4.4 billion in 2016. But it still means that we have blown through over $10 billion on Iraq since 2016. That’s long since we officially withdrew. Meanwhile, where was Iraq’s money going? Iraq’s latest budget dedicates $2.8 billion to Shiite PMU terror militias including Kataeb Hezbollah: an Iran-backed terror group that has been responsible for the deaths of numerous American soldiers. At the height of the Iraq War, Kataeb Hezbollah was using Iranian IEDs to kill American soldiers. Kataeb Hezbollah is listed as a foreign terrorist organization which makes it a crime for Americans to fund it. But that hasn’t stopped the Biden administration from providing massive amounts of foreign aid to Iraq. While some U.S. conflicts with Jihadists in the region are old news, Kataeb Hezbollah fired rockets at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad in 2019, and has bombed ...

When Shiite members of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) attacked the American embassy in Baghdad, in a deliberate recreation of the attack on our embassy in Tehran that had ushered in a new age of Shiite terror, the media was quick to label it 'Trump's Benghazi'. The parallels are certainly there. In both Benghazi and Baghdad, Islamist terror militias who we thought were our allies turned on the United States. In both cases, there was nothing surprising or unexpected about this inevitable development to anyone except foreign policy experts and the media. And, in both Benghazi and Baghdad, the Obama administration's policy of cultivating Islamic terrorists had come home to roost. The Islamists who attacked the embassy were not Trump's allies, but Obama's allies. When Hadi al-Amiri, the head of the Badr Brigade, the former military wing of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, came to the White House, it was in 2011, not 2017. The close IRGC ally w...