U.S. Launches Airstrikes Against ISIS Targets in Syria

The United States and allies launched airstrikes against Sunni militants in Syria early Tuesday, unleashing a torrent of cruise missiles and precision-guided bombs from the air and sea on the militants’ de facto capital of Raqqa and along the porous Iraq border.

American fighter jets and armed Predator and Reaper drones, flying alongside warplanes from several Arab allies, struck a broad array of targets in territory controlled by the militants, known as the Islamic State. American defense officials said the targets included weapons supplies, depots, barracks and buildings the militants use for command and control. Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired from United States Navy ships in the region.

“I can confirm that U.S. military and partner nation forces are undertaking military action against ISIL terrorists in Syria using a mix of fighter, bomber and Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles,” said Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, using an alternate name for the Islamic State.

“Given that these operations are ongoing, we are not in a position to provide additional details at this time,” Admiral Kirby said in a statement Monday night in Washington. “The decision to conduct these strikes was made earlier today by the U.S. Central Command commander under authorization granted him by the commander in chief. We will provide more details later as operationally appropriate.”

The strikes are a major turning point in President Obama’s war against the Islamic State and open up a risky new stage of the American military campaign. Until now, the administration had bombed Islamic State targets only in Iraq, and had suggested it would be weeks if not months before the start of a bombing campaign against Islamic State targets in Syria.

The strikes came less than two weeks after Mr. Obama announced in an address to the nation that he was authorizing an expansion of the military campaign against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

Unlike American strikes in Iraq over the past month, which have been small-bore bombings of mostly individual Islamic State targets — patrol boats and trucks — the salvo on Tuesday in Syria was the beginning of what was expected to be a sustained, hourslong bombardment at targets in the militant headquarters in Raqqa and on the border.

The strikes began after years of debate within the Obama administration about whether the United States should intervene militarily or should avoid another entanglement in a complex war in the Middle East. But the Islamic State controls a broad swath of land across both Iraq and Syria.

Defense officials said the goal of the air campaign was to deprive the Islamic State of the safe havens it enjoys in Syria. The administration’s ultimate goal, as set forth in the address Mr. Obama delivered on Sept. 10, is to recruit a global coalition to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the militants, even as Mr. Obama warned that “eradicating a cancer” like the Islamic State was a long-term challenge that would put some American troops at risk.

American warplanes had been conducting aerial surveillance flights in Syria for more than a month in anticipation of airstrikes, but it had been unclear just how much intelligence the Pentagon had managed to gather about the movements of the Sunni militant group in Syria. Unlike Iraq, whose airspace is controlled by the United States, Syria has its own aerial defense system, so American planes have had to rely on sometimes jamming the country’s defenses when crossing into Syria.

The strikes in Syria occurred without the approval of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, whose government, unlike Iraq, did not ask the United States for help against the Sunni militant group. Mr. Obama has repeatedly called on Mr. Assad to step down because of chemical weapons attacks and violence against his own people, and defense officials said Mr. Assad had not been told in advance of the strikes.

But administration officials acknowledge that American efforts to roll back the Sunni militant group in Syria cannot help but aid Mr. Assad, whose government is also a target of the Islamic State.

The administration did not announce the allies that participated in the strikes, saying they would leave it up to the nations’ leaders to announce their own military action. Arab officials said they expected to make announcements later Tuesday about their participation.

The United Arab Emirates announced three weeks ago that it was willing to participate in the campaign against the Islamic State, and administration officials have also said they expect the Iraqi military to take part in strikes both in Iraq and Syria. If both nations are in fact participants, the strikes on Tuesday could mark a rare instance when the Shiite-dominated Iraqi military has cooperated in a military operation with its Sunni Arab neighbors.

Combined with a French airstrike last week on a logistics depot held by Islamic State militants in northeastern Iraq, the allied participation in the strikes allows Mr. Obama to make the case that his plan to target the Islamic State has international cooperation.

In addition, Saudi Arabia recently agreed to a training facility for moderate members of the Syrian opposition, who the United States hopes to train, equip and send back to Syria to fight both Mr. Assad and Islamic State militants.

On Wednesday, Mr. Obama is expected to speak of the international coalition in an address to the United Nations General Assembly.

In his Sept. 10 speech to the nation, Mr. Obama drew a distinction between the military action he was ordering and the two wars begun by his immediate predecessor, George W. Bush. He likened this campaign to the selective airstrikes that the United States has carried out for years against suspected terrorists in Yemen and Somalia, few of which have been made public.

The airstrikes in Syria, so far, come without the benefit of a large ground force to capitalize on gains made by any aerial bombardment. While some Syrian opposition groups fighting the Islamic State militants may be able to move into a few cleared areas, administration officials acknowledged on Monday that it was doubtful that the Free Syrian Army, the opposition group most preferred by the United States, would be able to take control of major swaths of Islamic State territory, at least not until they have been better trained — which will take place over the course of the next year.

That could leave the forces of Mr. Assad in perhaps the best position to take advantage of any American bombardment. An administration official on Monday acknowledged that that was a worry, but said, “We don’t plan to make it easy for Assad to reclaim territory.” He declined to say what methods the United States would use to prevent the Syrian leader from capitalizing on the American aerial bombardment.

Although the full scope of the airstrikes was not immediately clear, they followed an urgent appeal from Hadi al-Bahra, the president of the Syrian Opposition Coalition, for American military action to stop militants from the Islamic State from pressing their attack against the Kurdish communities near the Syrian border town of Ayn-al-Arab, as it is known by Arabs, or Kobani, as it is called by the Kurds.

Mr. Bahra said that the Americans needed to act quickly. And Eliot L. Engel, the New York Democrat who serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, issued a statement urging “targeted American airstrikes” to protect the Syrian Kurds and prevent a “potential massacre.”

Obama administration officials asserted that they were having success building an international coalition to confront the Islamic State, but Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, said on Monday that France would limit its military operations to Iraq and had no intention to conduct airstrikes in Syria.

“The French president has said we do not have intention to do the same in Syria, I mean by air,” Mr. Fabius said in an appearance before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. He added, however, that France would support the moderate Syrian opposition.

[H/T The New York Times]

Die at 75! Ezekiel Emanuel, ObamaCare Architect, Releases Death Cult Manifesto

Last week, esteemed doctor and one of our ObamaCare Architect Overlords, Ezekiel Emanuel, penned a column for the Atlantic that should win a Pulitzer Prize for passive-aggressive shaming. Although Emanuel claims that *he* doesn’t want to live past the age of 75, the article itself could have been a listicle titled, “Top 15 Reasons No One Over 75 Should Receive Healthcare.”

Emanuel even includes a monstrous but brightly colored graph that is meant to tell anyone over 75 that their “last contribution” to society likely occurred more than a decade ago.

Good God.

The phrase “the banality of evil” gets bandied about a lot. Emanuel’s column, which in reality is a public service announcement meant to begin a debate about the way in which we prioritize healthcare, takes the prize in that department.

And yes, Emanuel’s article is an act of evil, written by a soulless bureaucrat with no respect or compassion for the individual. Emanuel’s only concern is for the collective, the State. And he is exactly the kind of “medical professional” many feared would grab hold of our healthcare system if the Federal government got their hands on it — which it now has.

Thanks Obama!

Leftists like Emanuel don’t see human life as anything more than utilitarian. They see nothing special or unique or inviolable about the Individual or life itself. For them, creating an orderly and structured Utopia takes precedent over the value and rights of the Individual. Abortion is a perfect example. Unwanted children mess up society. Unborn children with handicaps are imperfect and have no place in a society striving for perfection. So they are stripped of their rights, and as a result, by the millions, we break their spines and suck out their brains and call it “choice.”

Not everyone on the Left is as coldly robotic as Emanuel, but there’s a strain of this thinking throughout the Democrat Party; the idea that individual liberty and the rights of the individual must be subjugated by the need to perfect society and the future. Fat-shaming is a perfect example. Instead of leaving people alone to live life how they want, the Left is shaming them with the busybody argument that their obesity is everyone’s business because it costs society money through increased health care costs.

And now Emanuel is hoping to use the Fed’s grab of our healthcare system to create policies that will more quickly rid society of those “leeches and takers” you and I call Mom, Dad, Grandpa and Grandma.

Emanuel’s method is brilliantly sinister. Using figures and science and facts, he’s just sayin’!

I’ve broke Ezekiel Emanuel’s madness down into a handy listicle and highlighted the real jaw-droppers:

1. But over recent decades, increases in longevity seem to have been accompanied by increases in disability—not decreases.

2. My father illustrates the situation well. About a decade ago, just shy of his 77th birthday, he began having pain in his abdomen. Like every good doctor, he kept denying that it was anything important. But after three weeks with no improvement, he was persuaded to see his physician. He had in fact had a heart attack, which led to a cardiac catheterization and ultimately a bypass. Since then, he has not been the same.

3. The bad news is that many of the roughly 6.8 million Americans who have survived a stroke suffer from paralysis or an inability to speak.

4. So American immortals may live longer than their parents, but they are likely to be more incapacitated. Does that sound very desirable? Not to me.

5. Half of people 80 and older with functional limitations. A third of people 85 and older with Alzheimer’s. That still leaves many, many elderly people who have escaped physical and mental disability. If we are among the lucky ones, then why stop at 75? Why not live as long as possible?

6. Even if we aren’t demented, our mental functioning deteriorates as we grow older. Age-associated declines in mental-processing speed, working and long-term memory, and problem-solving are well established.

7. Conversely, distractibility increases. We cannot focus and stay with a project as well as we could when we were young. As we move slower with age, we also think slower.

8. It is not just mental slowing. We literally lose our creativity.

9. Living parents also occupy the role of head of the family. They make it hard for grown children to become the patriarch or matriarch.

10. When parents routinely live to 95, children must caretake into their own retirement. That doesn’t leave them much time on their own—and it is all old age.

11. How do we want to be remembered by our children and grandchildren? … We want to be remembered as independent, not experienced as burdens.

12. But even if we manage not to become burdens to them, our shadowing them until their old age is also a loss. And leaving them—and our grandchildren—with memories framed not by our vivacity but by our frailty is the ultimate tragedy.

13. This means colonoscopies and other cancer-screening tests are out—and before 75. If I were diagnosed with cancer now, at 57, I would probably be treated, unless the prognosis was very poor. But 65 will be my last colonoscopy.

14. After 75, if I develop cancer, I will refuse treatment. Similarly, no cardiac stress test. No pacemaker and certainly no implantable defibrillator. No heart-valve replacement or bypass surgery. If I develop emphysema or some similar disease that involves frequent exacerbations that would, normally, land me in the hospital, I will accept treatment to ameliorate the discomfort caused by the feeling of suffocation, but will refuse to be hauled off.

15. Flu shots are out.

This is what decent people would call the mission statement of a death cult.

When you look at society as a whole, instead of people as individuals, wiping out everyone over 75 looks like a great idea. Moreover, so does aborting unwanted pregnancies and “imperfect” fetuses.

Using a slide rule, all kinds of clinical madness sounds smart, even compassionate; The Greater Good, and all that.

What’s so unsettling is that Emanuel and his ilk aren’t trying to save money or improve quality of life. The endgame with ObamaCare has nothing to do with that. ObamaCare is the vehicle and this “cost-saving” propaganda is nothing more than the roadmap to crafting the Left’s twisted version of Utopia.

My dad just turned 75 this year. Because he wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth like Mr. Emanuel, he couldn’t live the kind of life he’s dreamed of until he turned 70. After 50-plus years of pumping our gas, fixing our cars, keeping our Air Force flying, remodeling our homes, and ensuring our nursing homes were up to code (oh the irony!), Dad finally had what he needed to retire only 5 years ago.

Put aside the countless “contributions” my father offers me and the rest of his family and friends (contributions not considered worthy enough to rate on Ezekiel Emanuel’s horror show of a slide rule) on a daily basis; for over a half-century my father did more than his part to keep our world turning. And now he deserves and has earned the right to enjoy his retirement, and the best medical care available to help him do just, for as long as he damn well pleases.

My father is not a burden and never will be.

He’s my dad.

So I guess that what I’m trying to say is that Ezekiel Emanuel and his ObamaCare death cultists can go straight to Hell.

[H/T Breitbart]

Democrats Launch Campaign to Get ‘Rush Limbaugh Off the Air’

During the Bush administration, national Democrat leaders threatened to kill the ABC network’s broadcast license if a miniseries unfavorable to the Clinton administration wasn’t censored to satisfy Democrats. ABC complied. Earlier this year, Democrats started a push for a Constitutional Amendment to gut (literally) the First Amendment. Over the weekend, Democrats launched a campaign to get — in their own words — “Rush Limbaugh off the air.”

The petition to get Limbaugh off the air comes straight from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) in the form of a fundraising/petition email. The idea is to use the muscle of the petition to in turn muscle Limbaugh’s advertisers to drop him. The phony outrage is manifested from a toxic stew of lies crafted by the DCCC and (naturally) Sandra Fluke that take Limbaugh’s recent comments about sexual assault way, way, way out of context.

Using the subject header, “PETITION: Rush Limbaugh off the air,” the hysterical email reads:

3OO,OOO Signatures Needed: Demand Rush Limbaugh’s sponsors pull their ads after his sexual assault comments >>

Sandra Fluke has been the target of disgusting, sexist comments from Rush Limbaugh before. So his latest abhorrent rant is no surprise to her.

Stand with Sandra and help us hit 300,00 signatures today to put real pressure on Rush’s advertisers to drop him once and for all:

Yes, the very same Democrats who joined President Bill Clinton’s crusade to personally destroy every woman who accused him of harassment, assault, and rape (Kathleen Willey, Paula Jones [who Clinton settled out of court with], Juanita Broderick), are accusing Limbaugh of being a rape apologist.

The truth is that Limbaugh was talking about a proposed policy at Ohio State that would require explicit permission between students before engaging in any kind of sexual activity. Here’s what Limbaugh said in full. He starts by quoting the proposal:

“Consent must be freely given, can be withdrawn at any time, and the absence of ‘no’ does not mean ‘yes.'”

How many of you guys, in your own experience with women, have learned that “no” means “yes” if you know how to spot it? Let me tell you something. In this modern world, that is simply not tolerated. People aren’t even gonna try to understand that one. I mean, it used to be said it was a cliche. It used to be part of the advice young boys were given. See, that’s what we gotta change. We have got to reprogram the way we raise men. Why do you think permission every step of the way, clearly spelling out “why”… are all of these not lawsuits just waiting to happen if even one of these steps is not taken?

The campaigns the Left and their allies in the media have waged to so silence conservatives like the Koch brothers and Limbaugh have been both big and small. Earlier this year the Left pushed to remove Limbaugh from consideration in a children’s book contest that he went on to win. There is also the organized “shadow campaign” against Limbaugh that involves a small group of leftists pretending to look vast as they intimidate Limbaugh’s advertisers.

Late last year, within the context of the Senate Democrats’ decision to weaken the filibuster, Limbaugh illustrated the importance of minority rights using the crime of rape. The phony outrage machines at the Huffington Post and Media Matter immediately hit warp ten: How dare Limbaugh use “rape” to make a political point!

Today Democrats and Sandra Fluke are using rape, not only to fund raise and make a political point, but as a fascist weapon to silence political speech.

[H/T Breitbart]