By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER 

Many have charged that President Obama’s decision to begin withdrawing from Afghanistan 10 months from now is hampering our war effort.

But now it’s official. In a stunning statement last week, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Conway admitted that the July 2011 date is “probably giving our enemy sustenance.”

A remarkably bold charge for an active military officer. It stops just short of suggesting aiding and abetting the enemy.

Yet the observation is obvious: It is surely harder to prevail in a war that hinges on the allegiance of the locals when they hear the U.S. president talk of beginning a withdrawal that will ultimately leave them to the mercies of the Taliban.

How did Obama come to this decision?

“Our Afghan policy was focused as much as anything on domestic politics,” an Obama adviser at the time told the New York Times’ Peter Baker. “He would not risk losing the moderate to centrist Democrats in the middle of health insurance reform and he viewed that legislation as the make-or-break legislation for his administration.”

If this is true, then Obama’s military leadership can only be called scandalous. During the past week, 22 Americans were killed over a four-day period in Afghanistan.

War ‘Distraction’

This is not a place about which decisions should be made in order to placate congressmen, pass health care and thereby maintain a president’s political standing.

This is a place about which a president should make decisions to best succeed in the military mission he himself has set out.

But Obama sees his wartime duties as a threat to his domestic agenda. These wars are a distraction, unwanted interference with his true vocation — transforming America.

Such an impression could only have been reinforced when, given the opportunity in his Oval Office address this week to dispel the widespread perception in Afghanistan that America is leaving, Obama doubled down on his ambivalence.

After giving a nod to the pace of troop reductions being conditions-based, he declared with his characteristic “but make no mistake” that “this transition will begin — because open-ended war serves neither our interests nor the Afghan people’s.”

These are the words of a man who wants out. Most emphatically on Iraq, where from the beginning Obama has made clear that his objective is simply ending combat operations by an arbitrary deadline — despite the fact that a new government has not been formed and all our hard-won success hangs in the balance — in order to address the more paramount concern: keeping a campaign promise.

Time to “turn the page” and turn America elsewhere.

At first you’d think that turning is to Afghanistan. But Obama added nothing to his previously stated Afghan policy while emphatically reiterating July 2011 as the beginning of the end, or more diplomatically, of the “transition.”

Well then, at least you’d then expect some vision of his larger foreign policy. After all, this was his first Oval Office address on the subject.

What is the meaning, if any, of the Iraq and Afghan wars?

And what of the clouds that are forming beyond those theaters: the drone-war escalation in Pakistan, the rise of al-Qaida in Yemen, the danger of Somalia falling to al-Shabab, and the threat of renewed civil war in Islamist Sudan as a referendum on independence for southern Christians and animists approaches?

Domestic Priorities

This was the stage for Obama to explain what follows the now-abolished Global War on Terror. Where does America stand on the spreading threats to stability, decency and U.S. interests from the Horn of Africa to the Hindu Kush?

On this, not a word. Instead, Obama made a strange and clumsy segue into a pep talk on the economy. Rebuilding it, he declared, “must be our central mission as a people, and my central responsibility as president.”

This in a speech ostensibly about the two wars he is directing. He could not have made more clear where his priorities lie, and how much he sees foreign policy — war policy — as subordinate to his domestic ambitions.

Unfortunately, what for Obama is a distraction is life or death for U.S. troops now on patrol in Kandahar province.

Some presidents may not like being wartime leaders. But they don’t get to decide. History does.

Obama needs to accept the role. It’s not just the U.S. military, as Baker reports, that is “worried he is not fully invested in the cause.”

Our allies, too, are experiencing doubt. And our enemies are drawing sustenance.

By J.R. Dunn

There comes a moment in a failing presidency where the incumbent, through some single gesture, action, or statement, crosses a certain line from beyond which there is no return. Through his own will and behavior he so underlines his failings, so frames his negative image, that no further action can ever erase it. Fate, accident, and circumstance have nothing to do with it. It is the president himself who puts the period at the end of his own sentence.

There is a tide in the affairs of men,

Which, taken at the flood, leads us to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

According to the Leftist CBS News:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, known for his melodramatic flourishes, improvised a song this week about his contentious relationship with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

In the middle of a speech on Wednesday, Chavez began singing a little tune with lyrics that translate to, “I’m not loved by Hillary Clinton… and I don’t love her either,” the BBC reports.

Clinton has been touring Latin America over the past week, and she criticized Chavez’s government policies during a television interview in Ecuador, according to the Associated Press. She said the U.S. is open to improving its relationship with Chavez but that “it doesn’t appear that he wants to.”

The Venezuela Foreign Ministry reportedly called Clinton’s remarks “foolish and inopportune.”

In his Wednesday night speech, the AP reports, Chavez said, “Look, Mrs. Clinton, We’re really sorry here about what is happening to the people of the United States…They’re the ones who are suffering with some of the measures that Obama is taking.”

Chavez is notorious for giving hours-long speeches and making over-the-top statements about the United States, such as when he called President George W. Bush the devil as he was addressing the United Nations.

By Jay Ambrose–Washington Examiner

Oliver Stone, a politically dim bulb wishing to shine bright with his new idolizing documentary on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, says he has just one complaint about the guy. He’s on TV too much. Ought to cut it out. Not good.

And so finally, after years of unrelieved, deep immersion in loony, leftist ideology, the Hollywood director has a solitary insight. Sadly, he understates it.

According to a press report, Stone said Chavez is “overpowering” with his many hours of almost daily rambles in which he mixes lectures, news and occasional songs.

Others of us might say this verbal strutting is exhibitionist, megalomania in keeping with Chavez’s bizarre imitation of a responsible leader. If it were not likely he would just make things worse, you might advise him to tend instead to an economy rendered one of the world’s worst by an 11-year set of policies Stone refers to as a wonderfully laudable “social transformation.”

Jackson Diehl, a Washington Post editorialist, ably sums up the transformational actuality. The Venezuelan inflation rate of 30 percent is three times higher than anyplace else in Latin America and worse than other economies mistakenly believed as bad as it is possible to be. While Mexico, Argentina and Brazil are growing at 8 percent a year, the gross national product of Venezuela was down in the first quarter by almost 6 percent. Notes Diehl, Greece can’t compete with that collapse.

All this manifests itself in cruel ways, observers report — four-hour-a-day electricity blackouts, ever fewer jobs, woeful wages, rampaging crime and, hey, you are looking for basic foods? Don’t look here, skinny ones.

While drought is a factor, the main reasons given for the debacle are willy-nilly confiscation of private property, arresting business operators for such horrors as raising prices when insolvency was the alternative, scaring foreign investors away by nationalizing their operations, inflation of the currency, sink-the-nation debt, ignoring infrastructure for transient goals and various other progressive policies.

But the poor are being treated more equitably under this socialist Robin Hood, right? Not according to a former economist with the Venezuelan government. In parts of an essay available on the Internet, he said Chavez had done next to nothing in his first eight years to increase that portion of the national budget devoted to programs for the poor, and that meanwhile life had grown harsher for them – a higher percentage of underweight babies and homes with mud floors, for example.

You as a Venezuelan don’t like what’s going on? Shut up, Chavez advises you through a law that will send you to jail for two and a half years if you criticize him.

Unfair? Hey, if you’re a reporter who is “inaccurate,” the sentence is five years.

He has come to control much of the media and has chased political opponents out of the country, had them locked up and has looked the other way when some have disappeared. Don’t worry about the Supreme Court saying stop that stuff. He has already stopped the court. He has taken control of it. It’s his baby.

Human rights violations don’t end there — our own State Department reports unlawful killings by security forces- but here is what you get from Stone and some other Hollywood buddies: Hugo is just as nifty as nifty gets.

Does this flapdoodle matter? Yes, because these clowns lend this tyrant credibility when there are elections coming up this year for the legislature and then the presidency and because a defeated Chavez just might be that much more inclined to resort to military power if emboldened by heil-Hitler reverence. Even stupid ideas can have consequences.

By Andrew Malone

With his bouffant hair, plat form shoes and strange penchant for zip-up, khaki catsuits, it would be easy to dismiss North Korea’s dictator as a faintly ludicrous pantomime villain.

But Kim Jong-il, known as the Dear Leader by his impoverished, brutalised people, is a psychopath who threatens the world with his burgeoning nuclear arsenal — and his neighbours with his pathological bullying.

Last night, Kim was being condemned around the world for torpedoing a South Korean naval vessel, killing 46 crew. Yet warnings and international disapproval cut little ice with Kim, a deranged and deadly tyrant who would rather destroy his own nation than kowtow to anyone.

For North Korea, which boasts the fourth biggest army in the world — a million troops are stationed along the border with South Korea alone — is now no more than his plaything. And he likes nothing more than a game of lethal brinkmanship.

Last year, he defied the world by detonating a nuclear bomb that sent seismic shocks around the world. At the time, jubilant North Korean officials claimed the atomic weapon was more powerful than Hiroshima, prompting U.S. President Barack Obama to warn: ‘North Korea is directly and recklessly challenging the international community.’

Not that most of Kim’s 24 million cowering subjects are in on his deadly joke. They live the most controlled life on the planet — under 24-hour surveillance and the constant threat of terror and death. Indeed, North Korea is Orwell’s 1984 dystopia brought to life. Televisions can only receive government stations; mobile phones are the preserve of a tiny elite, and the internet is banned. The entire nation is a black hole in cyberspace.

Henchmen: Kim surrounds himself with obliging y- but ageing – yes men

There is no free Press. All public telephones are monitored. And nobody is allowed to leave. Ever. Indeed, only a select few even know of their Dear Leader’s latest act of war against his enemies in the South.

Gulags are dotted around the country, and with people facing life imprisonment simply for forgetting to wear a badge bearing the Dear Leader’s face, this is also one of the most barbaric regimes on earth.

Compared by diplomats to the Bond villain Blofeld, only more blood-thirsty and deranged, the Dear Leader has jailed hundreds of thousands of his subjects, using a legal system that punishes three generations of a family if just one speaks ill of him.

Human rights groups say that he currently holds 200,000 political prisoners, topping up the gulags as thousands of ‘free’ citizens die of starvation outside.

Executions and torture are rife. In rare accounts from defectors, specially trained dogs are set on prisoners to maul them to death. Others are beaten and shot through the head. There have been horrifying accounts of foetuses cut from the wombs of female prisoners.

Yet Kim, of course, lives a life of unbridled luxury, constantly attended to by a 2,000- strong retinue of women selected for their looks and — often enforced — sexual compliance.

Known as Gippeumjo in Korean — meaning ‘Pleasure Brigade’ or ‘Joy Division’ — the unfortunates selected for these duties must be less than 5ft 2in tall. The Dear Leader is himself just 5ft 2in, and wears six-inch platform heels to bolster his meagre stature.

Rounded up by officials at the age of 15 to service the Dear Leader’s whims, these young women dance at the state banquets staged in Kim’s 12 underground palaces that are dotted around the country.

According to defectors, the women are checked for scars and must be virgins. They are given six months’ training in sexual techniques, and write a pledge of allegiance in blood before they are interviewed by the Dear Leader himself.

They are then split into three groups: the ‘happiness team’, who are responsible for his massages; the ‘satisfaction team’, who provide sexual services; and the ‘gamujo team’, who sing and dance.

To her enduring trauma, Mi-hyang was one of those forced to become a member of the Gippeumjo. She was seized as a 15-year-old schoolgirl when two of the dictator’s officials entered her classroom.

They wanted girls who were ‘comely, yet virtuous’ for the dictator’s harem. giving a rare insight into palace life in this notoriously secretive state, her chilling account was published this year by a human rights group.

‘They made a detailed record of my family history and school record,’ said Mi-hyang. ‘I was also asked whether I had ever slept with a boy. I felt so ashamed to hear such a question.’ For the next ten years, she was banned from all contact with her family. Any breach of this rule was punishable by death.

According to her account, the Dear Leader alternated between being virtuous and licentious, depending on how much cognac he’d consumed.

At times, Mi revealed, he could be a maudlin drunk, singing along to sad Russian and Japanese music with tears in his eyes. And when drunk, she said, he loves nothing more than eating the genitalia of shark, believing it boosts his libido.

‘He looked so normal — like a next-door neighbour,’ she said. ‘He has many brown spots on his face, and his teeth are yellowish. My previous imaginations about the Dear Leader were shattered at that very moment.’

There have been repeated rumours that Kim Jong-il is dangerously paranoid and employs up to four ‘doubles’ — party cadres who have undergone extensive plastic surgery and voice coaching — to confuse potential enemies and scupper as sas s inat ion attempts. Even more bizarrely, many believe he is, in fact, dead, having succumbed to alcoholrelated illness, diabetes or cancer, and that the ‘current’ Kim is a doppelganger.

Either way, the man with the bouffant hair is one of the few who have fun in this sinister state. With the exception of favoured party cadres, most of the people live in misery and terror.

Indeed, while Kim feasts on lobster, sushi and Kobe marbled beef at £100 a gram, chronically malnourished North Koreans have literally shrunk over the years. With millions starving, they are now, on average, five inches shorter than those just across the border in the South.

Terrified of flying, Kim travels everywhere in a 21- carriage armoured train, to which delicacies such as live lobster are airlifted daily, as he tours his various palaces.

While on board, he likes to relax with members of the ‘Pleasure Brigade’ and drink vintage Bordeaux wines. (His doctors have told him that his prodigious consumption of Hennessy cognac was killing him. One of his favourite stops is Mount Baekdusan — a sacred spot in Korean folklore, where, according to state mythology, Kim was born.

On this auspicious occasion, it is said, a star rose over the mountain and a double rainbow appeared — sure celestial signs that he was, indeed, god.

Reached by an underground road, this is also the site of the Dear Leader’s nerve centre. Here, fighter jets and helicopters are on constant standby inside bunkers dug deep into the mountain.

This extraordinary subterranean lair also boasts a 50-metre swimming pool , which features a massive portrait of him, made from gold tiles, on the bottom.

He keeps horses, homes stocked with vintage wines, and hires top chefs from around the world to cater for his palace blowouts.

In the so-called Noah’s Ark project, he has even struck a deal with Mugabe to acquire two of every one of Zimbabwe’s most endangered species.

The two men are long-time allies after North Korea helped Mugabe slaughter 20,000 rival Ndebele tribesmen.

Mugabe’s thugs are rounding up baby elephants, rhino, giraffe and zebra as part of the project. They are to be air-freighted to North Korea — prompting an outcry from conservationists, who warn such young creatures will not survive the trip.

But then Kim refuses to abide by any laws. Indeed, he once ordered his secret agents to kidnap the stars of a Seoul soap opera — simply because he wanted them to work on his television productions instead.

As well as women, and his own image, Kim loves fast cars. While his people travel by oxen or bike, he reputedly spent £12 million on cars last year alone, racing them around the grounds of his palaces.

But then money is no object. For Kim is an accomplished thief, plundering £4 billion from the country and placing it in secret Luxembourg bank accounts. In truth, the Dear Leader’s strange behaviour is simply that of a son following in the footsteps of a deranged father.

Kim il-sung, who died in 1994, became leader in 1948 and introduced state-wide murder and transformed North Korea into a private fiefdom, leading the country into the Korean War.

But whatever the fables peddled by state media, the truth is that Kim was born in Siberia, where his father had fled with a rebel group during Japanese colonial rule.

Not that such an inconvenient secret would ever be allowed to find its way onto the streets of the nation’s surreal capital, Pyongyang, where his countless vanity projects and monuments remain illuminated even when the regular power cuts plunge the rest of the nation into darkness.

Here, when not threatening his neighbours, Kim goes about his playboy existence, indulging his extraordinary passions for film — his collection is said to number 20,000 and he has even written a book on the subject; playing golf — state media claim he regularly scores three holes in one per round, and opera.

Used to getting his own way, a rare humiliation came last year when the rock star Eric Clapton turned down the chance to perform for the Dear Leader and his son Kim Jong- chul, who became a fan while studying in Switzerland.

But while Kim Jong-il is a drunken, paranoid megalomaniac, experts warn that he’s also a cunning strategist, keeping his country in a constant state of war with the South to cement his grip on power, and regularly outwitting the international community.

And things can only get worse. Named part of the ‘Axis of Evil’ by former U.S. president George W Bush, Kim is now reportedly working on a secret nuclear programme to produce weapons capable of striking cities on America’s Pacific coast.

So Kim Jong-il lives in a very strange world — but the world should beware.

As his subjects would surely warn if they were allowed to speak without facing torture and death, we ignore this catsuit-wearing oddball at our peril.

AZ Central

WASHINGTON – The U.S. extradited former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega to France on Monday, clearing the way for him to stand trial there on money-laundering charges.

The former strongman, who had been held in a federal prison just outside Miami, was placed on an overnight Air France flight to Paris, according to a Justice Department official who spoke anonymously because he was not authorized to comment on the case.

Yves Leberquier, one of Noriega’s lawyers, confirmed his client was headed to France. He said Noriega will be turned over to French prosecutors today and later taken before a judge who will determine whether he should remain in custody pending further action.

Leberquier said Noriega’s legal team will ask that the hearing be open “so that the defense can be totally transparent.”

Earlier Monday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signed a so-called surrender warrant for Noriega after a federal judge in Miami lifted a stay blocking the extradition last month, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said. 

He said Clinton signed the warrant because all court challenges to Noriega’s extradition were resolved.

One of Noriega’s lawyers in the U.S. said he had asked Clinton in a letter to reconsider sending him to Panama, which also has an outstanding request for the former dictator’s extradition. Frank Rubino said he got no response and was not told in advance that Noriega would be moved Monday.

Noriega’s attorneys in Miami said they first heard about their client’s pending extradition from reporters and initially couldn’t get independent confirmation.

“I guess the U.S. government thinks we are some kind of security risk,” said another attorney, Jon May.

Noriega was ousted as Panama’s leader and put on trial following a 1989 U.S. military invasion ordered by President George H.W. Bush. Noriega was brought to Miami and was convicted of drug racketeering and related charges in 1992. France requested his extradition shortly before his U.S. drug-trafficking sentence ended Sept. 9, 2007.

The French claim Noriega laundered about $3 million in drug proceeds by purchasing luxury apartments in Paris. Noriega was convicted in absentia, but France agreed to give him a new trial if he was extradited. He faces up to 10 years in French prison if convicted.

Noriega, believed to be in his 70s, was Panama’s longtime intelligence chief before he took power in 1982. He had been considered a valued CIA asset for years, but as a ruler he joined forces with drug traffickers and was implicated in the death of a political opponent.

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By Humberto Fontova

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