This week, Islamism made two major advances in its war to recreate a grander caliphate – a global Muslim superstate that is strictly and astringently ruled by Shari’a, Islamic law, with all infidels either dead, driven out, or dhimmified. The capital of Yemen, Sana’a, has fallen to Houthi militia, Shi’ite extremists who are theologically aligned with the ayatollah cadre that rules Iran theocratically. The U.S. Marines at the American embassy were required to disarm themselves before being allowed to board private aircraft to leave the country. Until this rather ignominious collapse, Yemen was ruled by a pro-American government allied with the U.S. in the war against Islamist aggression. Not to be eclipsed entirely by Shi’a, a government military base in Iraq near the town of al-Baghdadi where 320 U.S. Marines are stationed came under a determined assault by Sunni Islamic State (IS) militants, led by suicide bombers. News reports claim that that battle reached within 7 kilometers (less than 4.5 miles) of the base before being blunted by Iraqi troops. Now the short-term big question is: What will happen to the Marines, relatively small in number and tasked only with training Iraqi forces resident on the base, if the base is eventually overrun by IS hordes? Based on IS’s well booked brutal and bestial behavior towards infidels thus far, a failure by Obama & Co. to make good a secure and complete rescue of these troops would send a cataclysmic shock wave through the American body politic. It would make our people’s reaction to the sight of a single dead American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu in 1993 a mere spark in the night.

If disaster does befall these U.S. Marines in Iraq at hands of IS hordes, it is certain that Obama’s long-expressed sympathies for Islam will be spotlighted with blinding rapidity – and likely high disgust. From his sanctimonious notion that he might one day have to act to protect Muslims in America “should the political winds shift in an ugly direction” (Dreams From My Father, p. 261) . . . . to his apologizing Cairo speech in 2009; from his subservient bow to Saudi Arabia’s king on a state visit to his spoken claim at the UN that the future “does not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam,” Obama can be expected to be condemned roundly and loudly. If Americans in uniform die on deployment in a hostile theater and the Commander in Chief is widely perceived to be (1) negligent or otherwise at fault, (2) nonchalant or even cavalier in his attitude about it, and (3) in apparent empathy with the motivating ideology behind such a rout and subsequent slaughter, could a mass movement favoring impeachment be averted?

With the House and Senate today solidly in the hands of Republicans, could any such popular movement be politically resisted? If so, for how long? And, if the Republican establishment, in solidarity with the Democratic leadership, holds firm in that resistance, how will the conservative (dare I say, patriotic?) component of the GOP’s caucus respond? And, should Obama indeed be both impeached and convicted for one or more offenses amounting to constitutional “high crimes and misdemeanors,” would he actually relinquish power voluntarily? And, if not, what then?

Given this president’s long-observed self-absorption and self-importance, America could well soon face a multi-tined crisis with both great quakes and monumental stakes. Julius, Charles, Louis, Benito, and Nicolae, who all had it worse, would certainly understand and empathize.

William Pippin
The Rational Empiricist