(Akiit.com)

“Therefore, the clever combatant imposes his will on the enemy, but does not allow the enemy’s will to be imposed on him.” — Sun Tzu, “The Art of War”

“War – an act of violence whose object is to constrain the enemy, to accomplish our will.” — George Washington, General of the Continental Army

First, I want to say, Honor Memorial Day to everyone. This is not a day of happiness, but a day to reflect upon the sacrifices of those who made the “last full measure of devotion” for our nation.

I came on active duty as a U.S. Army Field Artillery Second Lieutenant on 1 November 1983. I arrived at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, for my Field Artillery Officers Basic Course on 30 October. That was one week after the 23 October Beirut barracks bombing, which killed 241 Marines, Sailors, and a Soldier. The Islamic terrorist attack was executed via a truck bomb by Hezbollah, the proxy terrorist army of the Islamic Republic of Iran. While attending the University of Tennessee, I became very aware of Iran due to the Islamic revolution, which ushered in the tyrannical regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini, and the seizing of our U.S. Embassy and taking American hostages for over 400 days. For those who would quip that we have embarked upon a “war of choice,” that is an absurd assertion. Iran has been at war with the United States since our Bicentennial in 1976, for almost 50 years. And the recent battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan resulted in thousands of American troops being killed and maimed by Iranian-made explosive force penetrators (EFPs), a very lethal IED (improvised explosive device). If there was any justification for entering into combat operations, Iran has provided plenty.

However, in prosecuting this combat operation, we have failed to comprehend the premise of Sun Tzu, the imposition of our will. The “Art of War” was mandatory reading for us new Lieutenants, and we had to submit a report on it as one of our graduation requirements. One does not make deals with a maniacal, tyrannical theocratic enemy. You simply overwhelm them with focused combat power and leverage the other elements of national power (the D-I-M-E theory): diplomatic, informational, military, and economic.

Wars are fought at three levels: strategic, operational, and tactical, with each having its respective tasks and purposes. The key element is that there must be mutual support, which we call in the military “nesting” of these objectives with each other. The strategic level would assess what the global goals, objectives, and tasks would be. When it comes to Iran, it is imperative to undermine the regime leadership by way of kinetic action, but also delegitimization, along with targeted economic actions. Also, from the strategic level, how can Iran be isolated from external support? This is what I call the 21st-century axis of evil: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Islamic jihadists, and transnational narco-criminal terrorist organizations (TNCOs). I would refer to this as peeling back the layers of the onion, a major strategic task. We have started against the TNCOs and Venezuela, having success, and it would appear that Cuba is teetering as they have lost vital support. Iran is another layer of that axis that we can affect.

At the operational level, which is the theater of operations, the Middle East, we must endeavor to neutralize and eventually eliminate the means by which Iran holds the region hostage. A key part of this is to negate any Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz. Back in the late 90s, I was the 18th Field Artillery Brigade (Airborne) operations officer. It was the largest and most diverse artillery unit in the Army. We supported the XVIIIth Airborne Corps, but we were given a mission to support the 82d Airborne Division in a contingency operation simulation exercise to seize the Iranian city of Bandar Abbas, at the Strait of Hormuz. LTG(R) Keith Kellogg was the Commanding General of the 82d Abn Div at that time. He would be a great advisor on this critical operational mission. Allowing Iran to hold the region, as well as the world, hostage by way of the flow of energy resources is unacceptable. A critical operational objective would be U.S. control of the Strait of Hormuz and adjacent islands, such as Qeshm, and also seizing Kharg Island to separate Iran from its major source of revenue. And, we should isolate Iran from external arms support, such as the rail line enabling such from China.

Then, the tasks and objectives at the tactical level are clear: destroy Iran’s military capability and capacity, and support the strategic and operational goals. One thing that is vital at the tactical level is what we call OPTEMPO, meaning operational tempo, momentum. Unfortunately, with all the so-called negotiations and deal-making exploits, we risk losing such. Tactically, to impose your will upon the enemy means you stay on offense, strike him incessantly, and be relentless, giving them no breathing space or opportunity to rearm and refit. If you do not believe in the importance of such, read the maneuvers of Gen. George Patton in World War II. There was a reason why the Germans feared him.

Combat operations are conducted in phases with respect to the varying levels: strategic, operational, and tactical. Each phase has its tasks and purpose, with a designated end state. The end state is determined by what is called MOE, measures of effectiveness. For example, the operation planners are constantly reviewing and assessing the phase objectives, and when a certain level is met, let’s say 85 percent, then they can recommend a transition to the next phase. Right now, we are clearly operating under a “fog of war,” being told the war is over, it is not over, we are waiting for a deal, or we are one hour from restarting combat operations. There has to be clarity, and my assessment is that it is missing.

Another key aspect of prosecuting a combat operation at the various levels of warfare is to understand the enemy’s center of gravity. It is that which, if effectively engaged, will cause their defeat. The mad mullahs, crazed clerics, and delusional tyrants, in uniform and out, in Iran, do not care about their people. Therefore, threats against their bridges and power plants mean little. But if we start cutting them off from their source of revenue and freezing their personal international accounts, along with those of their relatives residing outside of Iran, that is a critical center of gravity. As well, we have to enable the Iranian people to rise up. Sadly, we see what happens when a populace is disarmed, similar to the desire of the American Marxist left. From the standpoint of informational warfare, we should seek to create a divide between theIranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), their version of the Roman Praetorian Guard, and the regular Army. I would like to see us go back to the old-school leaflet drops, after all, we do have aerial dominance over Iran.

Prussian General and military strategist Carl von Clausewitz, whose book On War was another mandatory read, spoke of the paradoxical trinity: the tendencies of the people, the commander and his army, and the government. He advocated that a successful war or combat operation cannot be accomplished without the alignment of the three. I would offer that we do not have that alignment, and it comes back to effective messaging, strategic, operational, and tactical synchronization, and clarity of mission. And please, enough about the War Powers Act. Barack Obama outsourced our military to Islamic jihadists for seven months in Libya.

We must defeat Iran. It is the next layer in defeating the 21st-century axis of evil. But, we cannot do so, thinking that military policy is done by social media. We must have an effective plan and stick to it in order to impose our will on the Islamic regime of Iran. This ain’t about making a deal. Deals are transactional.

War is hell, and it is about fighting, and fighting does mean killing. Two opposing generals from the Civil War gave us those maxims.

Columnist; Allen West

Official website; https://x.com/AllenWest

(Akiit.com) On Monday, two teenagers killed three men at the San Diego Islamic Center, then killed themselves. What a pointless spasm of violence it was. It took a few days for The New York Times to flex their rhetorical muscles and blame conservatives.

On the top left of Thursday’s front page, the headline read: “Islamophobia Spreads Fast, As Does Fear: Mosque Attack Reflects Rise in Overt Hatred.”

The second paragraph from reporters Shaila Dewan and Jill Cowan was blunt: “To some, the killings seemed like an inevitable result of a swell of Islamophobia in the United States and around the globe. Anti-Muslim rhetoric on the right has become louder,” spurring “a new phase of overt discrimination and fears of violence.”

The words “inevitable result” do a lot of work. Conservative rhetoric will “inevitably” be blamed, but no one has to prove a causal connection. This kind of sloppy smear caused Sarah Palin to sue the Times over their suggestion that her placement of targets on congressional districts in a pamphlet somehow led to the shooting of then-Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.) by an apolitical nihilist.

The Times reporters quickly turned to assigning blame to President Donald Trump, Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) and Trump ally Laura Loomer, who used the term “invasive species” for Muslims. Most Americans believe in our history of religious liberty and tolerance. That is different from being critical of Islam in general — Muslim countries often don’t allow any religious freedom — or Islamic extremists in particular. Criticism of Islam is not automatically “Islamophobia.”

The rise of radical Muslim Democrats in office, from New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani to Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), causes the Times to worry about “increased vitriol against them.” No one at the paper worried in print about “increased vitriol” against Trump leading to “fears of violence,” despite the three assassination attempts.

This very same newspaper recently celebrated Islamic extremist Hasan Piker on one of its podcasts, as he spoke in warm terms of the man who was filmed assassinating a health insurance CEO on the street, because he was guilty of “social murder,” so he had it coming. “Fears of violence” seem to only flow in one direction. Some violence is apparently socially acceptable.

Likewise, the Times turned to the Council for Islamic-American Relations as their source of data on Islamophobia. CAIR “received more civil rights complaints last year than it had recorded in any year since 1996.” CAIR leader Nihad Awad was quoted as calling on public figures not to fuel “hatred and division that inevitably inspires acts of violence.”

They did not recall what their reporter Peter Baker noted in 2023, after the Oct. 7 massacre of 1,200 Israelis by Hamas. Awad celebrated the mass murder: “The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege, the walls of the concentration camp, on Oct. 7.” This group should be no journalist’s idea of an “anti-hate” or “anti-discrimination” or anti-violence group.

“PBS News Hour” also turned to a CAIR official, deputy director Edward Ahmed Mitchell, who proclaimed without challenge, “Anti-Muslim bigotry in the United States is completely out of control.” Anchor Geoff Bennett also acted unaware of CAIR’s record of cheering mass murder, asking Mitchell, “What’s it going to take to really lower the temperature?”

If these liberal journalists seriously wanted to lower the temperature, they’d stop linking violence to nonviolent speech, and they could try harder to notice when their designated leftist “hate” experts are engaged in vicious hate themselves.

Columnist: Tim Graham

Official website; http://www.efayewilliams.com/

(Akiit.com) Donald Trump is the undisputed king of the Republican Party. Earlier this month, Trump exacted revenge on Indiana state senators who had opposed his call to redistrict the Hoosier State; his endorsees won a majority of races against incumbents. Last weekend, Trump successfully nuked Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) from political life, relegating the incumbent to a shocking third place in his statewide primary. And this past Tuesday, Trump-endorsed candidates across the nation won every primary race — 37 victories and zero defeats. Overall, Trump’s approval rating among members of his own party sits around 81% — down from last year but higher than comparable second-term approval metrics for either Barack Obama or George W. Bush.

On the one hand, then, things could not possibly be going better for Trump within the GOP fold. It is only when one considers the generational divide among Republican voters, especially on matters of foreign policy, that things begin to look a bit bleaker.

The latest New York Times/Siena College poll reveals some startling age-based demographic splits within the MAGA coalition. Sixty percent of Republicans 18 to 44 want an overall new direction for their party beginning in 2028; only 33% want to follow Trump’s course. Seventy percent of young Republicans want the post-2028 GOP to chart a new course when it comes to U.S.-Israel relations; only 20% want the party to continue Trump’s close embrace of the Jewish state. Fifty-six percent of young Republicans want a new direction on Iran; just 35% want to follow Trump’s antagonistic stance.

Young voters shifted notably to the right in the 2024 election. Trump’s political challenge, in this midterm election year, is to keep these new MAGA voters firmly in the coalition while not alienating the loyal older MAGA voters who have served as his core base since 2016 — and who overwhelmingly approve of his second-term job performance. Given the consistently greater reliability of older voters in turning out to vote, simply pandering to the younger generation’s various desires would be foolish at the most rudimentary political level.

So, what to do? The answer is to lead with vision, conviction and confidence, as great men of history do.

Consider foreign policy, which is the most divisive cross-generational issue within the GOP. There is an undeniable foreign policy chasm between Republican boomers, who often get their news from cable TV, and Republican millennials and zoomers, at least some of whom get their news from “Podcastistan” subversives. The explanation for this divide is that many older Republican voters have been around long enough to see actual American military success in the world. Many younger Republican voters, by contrast, spent their formative years in a milieu wherein the failures of 21st-century American foreign policy were all but universally acknowledged. In short, older voters have seen foreign policy success, but all younger voters know on the world stage is failure.

The solution is to alter the entire paradigm, and flip the script on its head, by demonstrating unambiguous success on the world stage.

All younger voters have seen is endless boondoggle after endless boondoggle. There are numerous reasons for this, including the mission creep inherent in the failed neoconservative/liberal humanitarian project of “democracy promotion,” overly restrictive and self-defeating rules of engagement, and transnational institutions (such as the United Nations) that take a tendentious view of “human rights.” Regardless of the causes, there have been no decisive military victories to speak of. And that is the reason our “forever wars” go on, well, forever.

So how about showing younger voters what real, decisive victory looks like?

Trump came closest to doing that with the astonishing extraction of Venezuelan strongman (and illegitimate leader) Nicolas Maduro in January. Iran has been a bit of a different story. What began as an extraordinary shock-and-awe campaign has become a quagmire. Voters are understandably concerned about rising gasoline prices, but the solution is not to repeat the cardinal sin of decades of American foreign policy blunders: starting a war and then failing to finish it. The debate over whether the Iran war is wise may have been a worthy discussion before it started. But at this point, it’s irrelevant.

The easiest way for Trump to stabilize oil markets while saving political face is to keep on pushing — with force — to achieve the four key goals of the Iran operation: an open Strait of Hormuz, the cessation of Iranian regime funding to its regional terror proxies, the end of the regime’s ballistic missile and drone programs, and the successful ferreting out of the regime’s enriched uranium stockpile. Unless and until those four things happen, the Iran operation will have achieved only partial success.

Even better, younger Republican voters will finally get a taste of real victory over a hardened adversary. Gas prices will come down. The MAGA coalition would yet again coalesce. Trump would yet again be king of all of MAGA. And for the GOP, the midterms could be saved.

But it depends on Trump leading with conviction and confidence by ripping off the proverbial Band-Aid and finishing the Iran job once and for all.

Columnist; Josh Hammer

Official website; https://x.com/josh_hammer

(Akiit.com) My grandmother was born in 1916 on the same red Virginia ground where her grandfather was born enslaved. She lived to one hundred and five. She carried the weight of what her family had been to my family, and what her family had been to itself, the way you carry a stone you cannot put down. When she died, the stone passed to me.

I went looking.

What I found was a paradox written in blood.

The man Thomas Jefferson called “the most learned and logical” of the founding generation was my fifth great-grandfather. In 1766 he wrote that Parliament’s fleets and armies might give it power, but not right. He wrote that shackles, however nicely polished, would never sit easy on free men. He was Jefferson’s cousin and political mentor. He helped invent the American argument.

He owned thirty human beings.

In 1769, in Jefferson’s first session in the House of Burgesses, the young man asked his old mentor to do one brave thing: introduce a bill making it easier for masters to free the people they enslaved. Bland did as Jefferson asked. He was denounced as an enemy to his country. In Jefferson’s words, he was “treated with the grossest indecorum.”

He kept his thirty slaves. He died still holding them.

That is the strange courage of the founding. A man who understood that government without consent is tyranny could not break the shackles in his own house. He indicted himself with his own argument. So did Jefferson. So did every Virginia patriot who signed his name to natural rights while holding the title to another human being.

They wrote the creed anyway. They knew it would destabilize them. And the argument they could not finish was picked up by the people they would not free.

A hundred years later, the great-great-grandson of the man they would not free left the place of his enslavement as a teenager and never looked back. He cobbled shoes. He preached. He kept a lighthouse on the same point of land where the patriot’s plantation once stood. In 1879 the people of Prince George and Surry Counties elected him to the Virginia House of Delegates as part of the most successful biracial coalition in the nineteenth-century South.

They abolished the poll tax. They tore down the public whipping post. They founded what is now Virginia State University. They rebuilt the colleges the war had broken. They funded free public schools for every Virginia child, Black and White. They built, for one bright moment, the Virginia the patriot could have written into law and would not.

The Danville Massacre of 1883 ended that coalition with bullets. The argument went unfinished again.

It is unfinished still.

Read the grievances in the Declaration of Independence one more time. Standing armies in our streets without the consent of our legislatures. The military rendered superior to the civil power.

Quartering armed troops among us. The protection of armed men, by mock trial, from punishment for murders committed against us.

Last June the President federalized California National Guardsmen and active-duty Marines and sent them into Los Angeles over the governor’s objection. A federal judge ruled it violated the Posse Comitatus Act. Patrick Henry warned of exactly this in 1788. He used almost the same words.

The Fourth Amendment was written because British officers used general warrants — blank checks to search any home, any paper, any person. In 2024 the Fifth Circuit ruled that geofence warrants, which sweep up the data of everyone near a crime scene, are “modern-day general warrants” forbidden by the Constitution. The court named the colonial writs of assistance.

Section 702 of FISA lets the government query Americans’ communications — swept up in surveillance of foreign targets — without a warrant. The 1033 Program has poured seven billion dollars of military gear into ten thousand local police departments. Breonna Taylor was killed in her bed. Amir Locke was killed in his sleep. Both by officers serving no-knock warrants. Both, in the language of 1776, victims of armed troops quartered among us, protected from punishment by a mock trial.

This is not a left issue. It is not a right issue. Ron Wyden and Rand Paul wrote the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act together. The ACLU and Cato agree. The grievances are not partisan because the grievances are not new. They are the same grievances written in the same hand against the same kind of power.

The patriot understood the principle and could not live by it. His descendant lived it and was outvoted by force. My grandmother carried the weight of that unfinished business her whole life and never put it down.

It was unfinished in 1776. Unfinished in 1865. Unfinished in 1965.

It is unfinished now.

And it is ours to finish.

Columnist: Ben Jealous

Official website; https://twitter.com/BenJealous

(Akiit.com) At a news conference within hours after the shooting rampage at the San Diego Mosque the San Diego Police Chief said the obvious.,” the shooting would be investigated as a hate crime until it’s not.” His add on “it’s not” gave with one hand and took back with the other on the issue of whether the rampage was a hate crime.

The FBI was only marginally less equivocal about whether the shooting was a hate crime. A top official promised to leave no stone unturned and said, “there was definitely hate rhetoric that was involved.” But he also gave with one hand and took back with the other. He quickly added that he did not see the murderous attack as “a specific threat to the mosque.”

The irony is that the alleged shooters, Clark Cain and Caleb Vazquez, left little doubt just why they shot up the mosque. In what’s usual in these kinds of mass killings, the shooters leave a disjointed journal filled with scribblings that spew hate against Blacks, Jews, and Muslims. The pair did the same. If ever there was a smoking gun on a hate motive for the killing, they provided it with their diatribes against Blacks, Jews, and Muslims.

But why should that surprise? Surveys have repeatedly shown that hate crimes, violence, and harassment, and threats against Muslims have been almost the norm in many circles. Dozens of neo-Nazis, anti-government, white supremacist groups, and tens of thousands of individuals spew hate with aplomb. The site’s writers lambaste blacks, Jews, gays, and are unabashed in praise of Hitler. They perennially exhort their readers and followers to arm themselves to the teeth against the imagined assault by the federal government on white people’s rights. It was virtually a given that the murders would fire the horde of racists up, and ignite a frenzy of debate, speculation, denial, and even veiled acquiescence to the murders.

Cain and Vazquez, the alleged mosque killers, are the sort of nut jobs who would be perfectly comfortable with the white nationalist crowd.

However, even when the Cains and Vazquez’s are known tracked, monitored, and surveilled and worse commit hate acts, they often evade full punishment. This has nothing to do with the First Amendment, but rather muddled, confused, and outright lax enforcement and prosecution of hate acts. Even when the FBI and local law enforcement agencies ID them for their propensity for violence their hands are still tied.

Federal prosecutors are loath to step on the toes of police and prosecutors in criminal cases no matter how badly the crime is tainted by race, gender, or religious hatred. Federal prosecutors flatly say that hate perpetrators are more likely to be convicted and get stiff sentences in state court. That makes good legal and political sense.

Yet, that’s not the only reason for their hands off of the Cains and Vazquez’s. Except in the highest profile cases, they see these prosecutions as no-win cases with little political gain, and the risk of making enemies of local police, DAs, and state officials. Hate crimes may be horrific but they are largely seen as common crimes and are treated as such. Few state prosecutors will chance inflaming racial passions and hatred by slapping a hate crime tag on a case.

There’s also the belief that hate crimes are mostly a thing of the past. When they do occur, they are isolated acts committed by a handful of quacks, and unreconstructed bigots, and that state authorities vigorously report and prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes.

When Congress passed the Hate Crimes Statistics Act of 1990, it compelled the FBI to collect figures on hate violence. However, it did not compel police agencies to report them. Record keeping on hate crimes is still left up to the discretion of local police chiefs and city officials. Many police departments still refuse to report hate crimes, or to label crimes in which gays, Jews, and minorities are targeted because of race, religion, or sexual preference as hate crimes.

Still other police departments don’t bother compiling them because they regard hate crimes as a politically loaded minefield that can tarnish their image and create even more political friction. The official indifference by many police agencies to hate crimes prevents federal officials, even if they wanted to more aggressively enforce civil rights laws, from accurately gauging the magnitude of civil rights violence.

Clark and Vazquez’s hideous rampage almost certainly would have been treated as a murder, charges if they had lived. But in the hands of the Trump DOJ they may well not have been slapped with federal hate crime charges. This glaring laxity is just enough space for the Cains and Vazquez’s of America to run loose.

Columnist; Earl Ofari Hutchinson

One can visit this brother online over at; TheHutchinson Report.