Chris Rock asked that of Jesse Jackson, but it’s a question that could be asked of many of our top politicians. What do they do?

Kevin Williamson in NRO writes that Senator-surgeon Rand Paul is on “vacation” in Guatemala performing eye surgeries on poor children who need care. As the Washington Post notes, it’s not the first time Mr. Paul has done this. Dr. Paul saw two patients he first treated 15 years ago.

Kevin asks his own questions. How many politicians can you point to who can actually do something useful?

If you were a poor family in Guatemala, which would you rather have: the services of a pretty good ophthalmologist, or those of an excellent orator? (Never mind that, unlike Senator Paul, President Obama does not speak Spanish — or, indeed, any foreign language.) Imagine dispatching Hillary Rodham Clinton to Calcutta or Joe Biden to Conakry and then expecting them to do something useful. The idea is preposterous.

Read more here from Kevin Williamson on our politicians who do not reap and do not sow.

Related posts:

Today in Iraq and Syria the world is facing a centuries old battle of Muhammadism.  Muhammadism is strictly a religious and not a nationalist issue.

Western values carry no weight in the world of Islam. The Bush administration charged into Iraq with little in the way of an end game, and under false pretenses at that. The over-decade-old mission has produced thousands of American deaths and tens of thousands of crippling injuries, never mind trillions of dollars in long-term cost.

Americans naively believe the rhetoric of, by example, former assistant to the president for National Security Affairs Setphen Hadley, who in the WSJ wrote Americans Can Be Proud of What Was Achieved in Iraq: “Americans helped build and train an Iraqi security force that numbers well over 500,000.”

Just how many ISIS fighters are today operating in Iraq? By most counts the number is the range of 10,000 fighters, with perhaps as many as a quarter foreign. Not much of an army in comparison to the size of the American-trained Iraqi security force. And Americans should be proud of the outcome visible today? I doubt that proud is the word that best describes the situation.

ISIS is well led, organized and funded. Through its raid on Mosul, ISIS may have made off with hundreds of millions of dollars from looted Mosul banks. ISIS now controls oilfields producing perhaps a couple of million dollars per day in revenue from oil smuggled into Iran and Turkey. Additional funding appears to be coming from the Gulf States, funneled through the Kuwaiti banking system. ISIS has captured tanks, artillery pieces (including Stinger surface-to-air missiles), and a large cache of M16 rifles. There is no question that ISIS must be defeated.  At the recent Aspen Security Forum, General Martin Dempsey, chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated, “They (ISIS) have to be, at the very least, initially contained and then disrupted and ultimately defeated. And what makes it very hard is that that ultimate defeat has to come from within the Sunni population.”

The Bush and Obama administrations have dragged Americans into a centuries-old religious war that has no end game. The basic elements of the original Weinberger/Powell Doctrine for intervention have today not been met, and Congress has not voted for military intervention in either Iraq or Syria.

The key foreign policy issue for every American is to make America safe. The Cato Institute’s Chris Preble in The Power Problem—How American Military Dominance Makes us Less Safe, Less Prosperous, and Less Safe, concludes, “Our hyperactive foreign policy of the last twenty years has become an impediment to the spread of ideas that make this country great.”

In Iraq’s Sunni dominant North West, ISIS has made rapid gains while only fielding a combat force estimated at between 6,000 and 10,000 soldiers. It’s not surprising that local Sunnis haven’t put up much of a fight given the rough treatment they’ve received from the Shia dominated al-Maliki administration in Baghdad. Why would they fight against fellow Sunnis for a government that treats them as second class citizens?

But as ISIS attempts to break out of its ethnic and religious home territory, it might meet stiffer resistance. To the North East the Kurdish peshmerga forces number in the hundreds of thousands. While the Kurds are Sunni dominant, they have been fighting for an ethnic homeland since the modern division of nations in the Middle East, and they won’t be keen on trading one set of Arab overlords for another. To the South East, ISIS faces the bulk of Iraq’s Shia population, which enjoys the backing and support of neighboring Iran, and the U.S. A reorganized Iraqi military, with the help of Shia militias like the Mahdi Army led by Muqtada al-Sadr, will make advances in the South East difficult for ISIS’s small fighting force.

On the other hand, ISIS is well funded with money looted from banks in the north and donated by wealthy Arab Sunni benefactors. The polished ISIS propaganda machine has also been able to attract jihadi reinforcements from around the globe. It’s also possible greater numbers of local Sunnis will find that they enjoy life out from under the thumb of the Shia government and join ISIS, turning the conflict into a separatist sectarian civil war. It remains to be seen what level of success ISIS can muster in territories outside its Sunni comfort-zone.

Why are members of Congress and their staff allowed to stay on their current health care plans while ordinary citizens have been thrown under the bus? Perhaps that is a question that you badly need to ask of your state senators and reps (contact info, for example, at contactingthecongress.com).

As the Cato Institute’s Michael F. Cannon writes, “It’s not just Republicans versus Democrats. It’s the ruling class—Republicans and Democrats—against everyone else.”

In a royally magnanimous gesture to Congress, Barack Obama illegally waived Obamacare for members and their staff. What that means to you and me is that we, the taxpayers, pick up the tab—individual coverage $5,000/family coverage $11,000—for our representatives in Washington.

Read here from Mr. Cannon how President Obama is buying votes from members of Congress with “taxpayer dollars he had no authority to touch.” It’s good to be king.

It’s time to place a call.

Rand Paul, in an on-the-money WSJ article, correctly advises Americans that “to interventionists like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, we would caution that arming the Islamic rebels in Syria created a haven for the Islamic State. We are lucky Mrs. Clinton didn’t get her way and the Obama administration did not bring about regime change in Syria. That new regime might well be ISIS.”

In terms of foreign policy intervention, Hillary Clinton is in precisely the neocon-centric camp of George Bush and Barack Obama. From Korea through Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, neocon interventionism has proven a failed foreign policy strategy. Americans have a chance this fall to do some house cleaning in Washington. As for the 2016 presidential elections, one candidate easily emerges as a danger for America, Hillary Clinton.

Wanted Dead or Alive: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

The U.S. has posted a $10 million reward. Now it is time to take him out. Here is exactly how. I refer back to Gary Bernsten’s Jawbreaker, The Attack on bin Laden and Al-Qaeda.

Dateline November 2001, northern Afghanistan. American Green Beret forces code named Tiger 02 were in action:

The most lethal pieces of equipment in Tiger 02’s arsenal were the satellite radios carried by the Air Force combat controllers. These allowed them to call in air strikes from the combined air armadas of the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force from halfway around the world. A close second was the Special Operations Forces Laser Acquisition Marker (known as SOFLAM), which looked like a giant pair of elongated binoculars mounted on a tripod with a trigger attached to a coiled length of cable. 

It shot out a laser beam to mark an enemy target so that a laser-guided bomb from a plane could lock on it and destroy it…. Once the planes neared the vicinity, the scanner would light the enemy with the infrared 

The combined effect of the “death ray” as General Dostum (the Uzbek, horse riding commander of fighters teamed up with the Americans) called the laser designator and U.S. air strikes was phenomenal. One Taliban bunker after another containing some combination of Russian-made T-55 tanks, ZSU-23-4 Russian antiaircraft guns, RPG shoulder-held rockets and machine guns was obliterated. The Taliban literally didn’t know what hit them.laser beam of the SOFLAM. From thousands of feet overhead a jet aircraft would drop a laser-guided bomb whose internal computer would hone in on the SOFLAM’s laser signature and essentially “ride the laser” to the target.

A similar strategy with similar effects today can be put in place with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as the SOFLAM target.

In Hunting the Jackal , Billy Waugh, Special Forces veteran, CIA contractor and possessor of eight purple hearts, provided interesting insight on the mindset of Arab fighters. Billy writes, “It is my experience that Arab units lack the middleman management necessary to run successful operations…. We saw this most recently in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the entire war effort collapsed when the main command structure was compromised. It is no surprise to me that the Arabs have lost every war in which they have participated…. The Arabs have a terrible penchant for losing interest, pretty dammed fast. The care and repair of technical devices does not interest them, and they consistently fail to keep their items fit for battle.”

A specific targeted mission with a well-defined end game is the concept here. Cut of the head of the snake and the body will wither and die. A SOFLAM/air strike-based plan offers promise. The big question is who replaces Tiger 02, General Dostum’s mop up ground forces and U.S. air support? Americans have been training Iraq’s army for years. Perhaps suitable teams of Special Operations Forces can be deployed effectively from this base. The Kurds definitely have SOF capability (See a Kurdish SOF night raid on ISIS here: WARNING GRAPHIC) and are a logical first choice.

As to ground mop up following air strikes, Iraq’s sizable army, Kurdish ground forces and the emerging presence of Sunni tribes in Anbar province might team up in a united front. Such a joint force would dramatically outnumber ISIS ground forces.

As to air power, the United States has not provided Iraq with the F-16s discussed for years. The reasoning is cloudy. The result is unhelpful given the current state of things. Thus it is likely that U.S. air strike power (see video below for an example) would be necessary for this well-defined mission.