©2016 By ILANA MERCER 

In the 1990s, broadcaster Charles Sykes wrote an important book called “A Nation Of Victims: The Decay of the American Character.”

Fast forward to 2016, and Mr. Sykes is defending a character on grounds he once rejected in his trailblazing book.

When Mr. Sykes lamented the “The Decay of the American Character,” no reader was under the impression it was the mettle of reporter Michelle Fields he was hankering for and hoping to see restored.

I’ve watched the grainy footage that has fueled the hysterics of Ms. Fields and her shameful sisterhood, housebroken males included. The whole world has watched. In it, Donald Trump can be clearly observed recoiling defensively, as Ms. Fields presses up against him. Invisible to the naked eye was the assault Fields alleges.

Still, if Hillary Clinton’s flesh were being pressed by a reporter like Fields, and sidekick Huma Abedin forcefully flicked the reporter aside, I’d say the same. No assault occurred. No litigation should follow. Leave Huma the heck alone.

In other words, a reasonable individual can easily accept—even in the absence of visual evidence—that a protective campaign manager, former cop Corey Lewandowski, might have instinctively shoved the pushy reporter away from Mr. Trump.

To frame this melee as an assault and manufacture a national incident is beneath contempt; is disgraceful. Unacceptable is that the law rushed to validate Fields’ hurt feelings by charging Lewandowski with a misdemeanor battery.

As unacceptable was the reaction of Ms. Fields and her solipsistic sisters—those with the Y chromosome included. Ms. Fields is not a victim and her conduct demonstrates decay of character.

Were she a reasonable professional, Ms. Fields would’ve grasped that there was no intention to harm her; only to protect a man who is in constant, real danger. (A bruised massive ego aside, Fields was unharmed.)

Mr. Trump is the object of unparalleled death threats and hatred. If someone moves you aside in a journalistic scrum; it’s because they perceive you to be a threat to such a man.

What would a pro have done? Step back. Take five. Shrug it off. Or give the grabber a piece of her mind.

Better still, Ms. Fields, call CNN’s heroic war correspondent Arwa Damon for perspective. If this recipient of the Courage in Journalism Award doesn’t reply because under fire, give Clarissa Ward a tinkle in Syria. Raise your staccato tart-like voice. Those bombs are loud.

Look: Michelle Fields and her enablers are no conservatives. These women and their male helpers inhabit a solipsistic, narcissistic, decidedly progressive universe. In “A Nation of Victims,” Mr. Sykes had described a lamentable process whereby America’s formative institutions had morphed from transmitting timeless values, to being propelled by a therapeutic ethos, a “social contract with The Self.”

A contract with The Self—or the selfie—better describes the new breed of badly bred, unprofessional, Michelle Fields millenials.

The woman’s claims-making is that of someone who sees herself as the center of a small universe, pussy-whipped, feminized and sissified by her ilk.

Ditto the empaneled female screeches who’ve come to her rescue, and are seen on anti-Trump TV, baying in unison for the blood of Messrs. Trump and Lewandowski. (At least two of the phony conservative females who’ve detected a crime against Fields—S. E. Cupp and Meghan McCain—are borderline retarded.)

The Sykes book I devoured in the 1990s would never have countenanced such unbecoming conduct; would never have demanded that a man be brought to heel for defending an imperiled presidential candidate. Now, the New Mr. Sykes was asserting on anti-Trump TV that a real man would apologize to a woman.

Did Sykes mean to say a real man would cop to a physical assault he did not commit, based on a woman’s say-so?

No! Real men affirm reality. The immutable reality is that no assault occurred. Therefore, no litigation should follow.

I don’t know how the law got to a place where it considers it a crime to shove an individual aside so as to maintain a perimeter around a man, Mr. Trump, who is the object of death threats and hatred.

I do know that law is force. Whenever a lawmaker legislates, he creates more potential criminals out of individuals whose actions were once—still are—naturally licit.

Our venerated legal system locks up more people per 100,000 individuals than do China and Russia, respectively. Yet look at the U.S. Constitution. The Constitution is remarkable in its brevity. The laws under which free men were meant to live and thrive are few and fundamental.

That Mr. Lewandowski is being criminalized and his employer maligned for an infraction invisible to the naked eye tells me something is very wrong with the law. The same can be said for the culture.

The contagion whipped-up by Ms. Fields and her coven of pseudo-conservatives should repulse any conservative-minded man or woman, irrespective of his or her feelings about Mr. Trump.

The assault on Ms. Fields was as real as the ectoplasm said to spill from a medium’s mouth during séance (which is to say, as truthful as what comes out of Megyn Kelly’s mouth).

©ILANA Mercer
WND, Quarterly Review, Praag.org,
The Libertarian Alliance &  The Unz Review
April 1, 2016

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Almost unanimous on the right is the mystifying notion that a reduced American footprint in the world, President Barack Obama’s doing, has brought about the “sudden” eruption across Iraq of a particularly savage faction of Sunni fundamentalists called the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). This small band of zealots has conquered a third of Iraq, including the metropolis of Mosul, from which 500,000 residents have fled. Tikrit too is under ISIS control. Fallujah fell in January.

Odd too is the idea that ISIS, currently barreling toward the capital, Baghdad, is somehow a new killer on the block. While the gang, led by newcomer Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is not as ancient as the Egyptian goddess by the same name—ISIS was previously known as Al Qaida in Iraq (A.Q.I.), reflecting its earlier, more modest mission. A.Q.I. was the brainchild of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, described aptly in the New Yorker as, “A Jordanian who had been a convicted thief and sex criminal before turning to radical Islam.” Commensurate with its morphing, expansive ambitions, A.Q.I. changed its name to ISIS. Whereas “Al Qaida was originally envisioned as a kind of Sunni foreign legion, which would defend Muslim lands from Western occupation,” writes New Yorker staffer Lawrence Wright, “Zarqawi had a different goal in mind. He hoped to provoke an Islamic civil war.” George W. Bush’s invasion primed Iraq for Zarqawi’s purposes. “There was no better venue than the fractured state of Iraq, which sits astride the Sunni-Shiite fault line.”

So savage and extreme is ISIS, always has been, that it had been “booted out of the Al Qaida consortium,” attests Wright. Remember the “Dear Al (Zarqawi)” letter penned by Ayman al-Zawahiri to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in 2005? In it, Bin Laden’s Capo Bastone (Zawahiri) had asked the lieutenant (Zarqawi) to reconsider the wisdom of slaughtering so many Shia civilians in Iraq. Al-Z No. 1 broached the topic by counseling Al-Z No. 2 about the wisdom of bringing “the Muslim masses to the mujahed movement.” To that end, killing so many of them was probably unhelpful. Yes, the Shia are a handful—theologically problematic—conceded Zawahiri. Suspect too was the Shia’s history of “connivance with the Crusaders.” But while Zawahiri didn’t give a dried camel’s hump about his Shia brethren, he thought better of slaughtering them, preferring to forgive their “ignorance.” Besides, added Zawahiri as an afterthought, it’s impossible for the mujahedeen to kill all Iraq’s Shia.

While Zarqawi rejected Zawahiri’s soft approach, his personal odyssey has a happy ending. Zarqawi died, killed by Americans in 2006. But his legacy, like that of Bush’s invasion of Iraq, lives on in ISIS. Shia Iran, once a bitter enemy of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, now has pride-of-place in the Iraq that Bush built. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has been galvanized to the aid of the Iraqi army. But it is not the 930,000 members of the Iraqi security forces that the Revolutionary Guard aims to rouse. Despite the princely sums ($25 billion) Americans spent to train and prepare it, in Mosul, this inorganic, artificial creation of the Bush brigades fled before 1,300 ISIS fighters. To fight the marauding Sunnis, the Revolutionary Guard will likely corral well-motivated, tribal Shia militias. (In Iraq, Shiites make up about sixty percent of the population. Sunnis comprise less than twenty percent.)

It is this cauldron of sectarian strife that Saddam Hussein kept from bubbling over.

What’s unfolding in Iraq, with ISIS, is no more than a progression along a predictable continuum, the starting point of which was an American occupation that unseated an extremely effective law-and-order leader: Saddam Hussein. Consequently, where there was once oppression and order, there is now only chaos and carnage. The lawlessness we brought to Iraq with our messianic, faith-based initiative has allowed the manifestation of divisions that have riven the region for four millennia.

As this column predicted in 2007, “Once we decamp, some Saddam-like strongman will fill the power vacuum left. The dictator to emerge from the ruins of Iraq will impose Sharia, pray to the hidden Imam, and compel women to walk about in black nose bags. We had it good with Saddam because he was secular, an enemy of fundamentalist Islam. Can we have back what, in our folly, we fouled up? No.”

There is little reason for me to hope to impart something new about the predictable progression of Iraq from (sectarian) rogue state to failed state to Islamic state, in the wake of the American occupation. There is no reason to expect me to best a column dated December 2006, titled “At Least Saddam Kept Order”:

… If Iraqis appear ungrateful or disoriented, it is because they are busy … busy dying at rates many times higher than under Saddam. In the final days of Saddam’s reign of terror, i.e., in the 15 months preceding the invasion, the primary causes of death in Iraq were natural: “heart attack, stroke and chronic illness,” as The Lancet reported. Since Iraq became a Bush object lesson, the primary cause of death has been violence. …… Hussein’s reign was one of the more peaceful periods in the history of this fractious people. What a shame it’s too late to dust Saddam off, give him a sponge bath, and beg him to restore law and order to Iraq. Secretly, that’s what anyone with a head and a heart would want. We could promise solemnly never to mess with him again—just so long as he kept his mitts off nukes, continued to check Iran (which he did splendidly), and minimized massacres. To be fair, Saddam’s last major massacre was in 1991, during which only 3,000 Shiites were murdered. That’s less than Iraq’s monthly quota under “democracy.” No one is praising Saddam, yada, yada, yada. But even the Saddam-equals-Hitler crowd cannot but agree that Iraq was not a lawless society prior to our faith-based intervention. Even the war’s enablers must finally admit that under our ministrations Iraq has gone from a secular to a religious country; from rogue to failed state.Put yourself in the worn-out shoes of this sad, pathetic people. Would you rather live under Saddam—who was a brutal dictator, but did provide Iraq with one of the foundations of civilization: order—or under a force made up of ideological terrorists, feuding warlords, and an “Ali Baba” element, all running rampant because they can, and where not even mosques provide a safe haven from these brutes and their bombs?

“Iraq has slipped back into chaos,” huffed one of Fox News’ interchangeable commentators, who, heretofore, had been oblivious to the pal of despair that has engulfed this Gulf state; to the Christian community’s near annihilation; to the millions of displaced Iraqis, refugees living in squalor within and without their country, all since Bush sicced the dogs of war on it.

“I wish the Americans had never come,” Baghdadi Mohammed Rejeb told veteran war correspondent Arwa Damon, a decade after the American Nakba (catastrophe). “They ruined our country. They planted divisions. They made us cry for the days of Saddam Hussein.” Wept another Iraqi woman, on that anniversary: “I lost hope six to seven months ago. You don’t feel it’s home anymore.” One after another, Iraqis all speak of the “corruption, suspicion and tribalism” that have seeped into civil society since the invasion.

No. Iraq hasn’t suddenly “slipped back into” this backward and benighted state. It was bombed there by a mulish military power which didn’t know Shiite from Shinola.

©2014 By ILANA MERCER
WND, Economic Policy Journal,
American Daily Herald, Praag.org,
Quarterly Journal  & Junge Freiheit
June 20

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