Faced with a choice in national security affairs, federal officials — elected and appointed, civilian and military — nearly always choose the side of America’s enemies. Since the end of the Reagan years, in fact, consistent failure has been Washington’s watchword and the credulity of Americans as they watch this rampant failure is astounding and heartbreaking.

This statement is not meant to ridicule my fellow citizens because I include myself — with thanks to God — in the term Americans. We all want to believe our leaders are intent on defending and preserving the republic. But so much do we want to believe this that we often miss both the self-serving and reality-defying nature of most federal officials, and the fact that those officials were educated in our elite universities’ by professors who deliver anti-American lessons.

The connection between the failure of federal officials to protect the United States and the so-called “higher” education they receive is manifest in the disclosures by Wikileaks and official reaction to them; the behavior of senior U.S. generals; and a federal judge’s decision to invalidate parts of Arizona’s immigration law. The three incidents document our elites’ fundamental lack of concern for genuine U.S. interests, an ingrained disregard that can only be attributed to the way in which they have been educated.

In particular, Wikileaks’ publication of 90-plus thousand classified documents is important not mainly for their content, but rather for what the documents tell us about the always-choose-failure bent of our political and military leaders. That Americans are not up in arms about the revelations also demonstrates the negative impact of letting the education of several generations of Americans rest in the hands of professors who care little or nothing about either defending U.S. security or perpetuating liberty as it was defined and provided for by the Founders.

1.) The Wikileaks’ papers make two points that are obvious to anyone who stops to think and apply commonsense: (a) Pakistan’s national security is being compromised and its internal stability wrecked by the U.S.-NATO occupation of Afghanistan. Islamabad helped us against al-Qaeda — in return for funding used to improve its capabilities against India — but our goals in Afghanistan are not Pakistan’s and never have been; Washington has known this since 9/11. We are trying to get Pakistan to do things that are detrimental to its national interests because our governing class lives in terror of media criticism and so wants foreigners to do our killing and to bleed for us. In so doing, they are ensuring U.S. defeat and perhaps Pakistan’s destruction. The tone of U.S. officials in dictating to Pakistan also shows their addiction to telling “lesser folks” — like Pakistanis and ordinary U.S. citizens — what to do and when to do it; and (b) the Afghan war has been lost because the U.S. military has not killed the enemy and his civilian supporters in sufficient numbers to make them see the game is not worth the candle.

A part of this failure is due to our leaders concern for their popularity with the largely Pacifist media and the Europeans, and the rest is due to the professors at our elite universities, including the service academies, who have taught those who lead us — and are now teaching our children — that everything can be negotiated and compromised; killing America’s enemies and their supporters in wartime is evil; and that America must follow rules-of-war by which no one else abides, even though such behavior has caused us to lose every war since 1945 and has made so many U.S. combat deaths pure waste.

The bottom line: Washington — under both parties — is knowingly giving our Islamist enemies a chance to defeat us, and U.S. professors have prepared our leaders, and are preparing our children for a world that exists only in their left-leaning ideological minds and crackpot theories about the brotherhood of man. This education leaves both groups unprepared to understand and defend America, or even to understand that America is worth defending.

2.) The leaks have been followed by U.S. and British officials expressing “outrage” over the fact that Pakistan is protecting its national interests by working with the Taliban. Well, no kidding; any sane nation must put its own interests first. But have you heard top officials in either Washington or London publicly express “outrage” over the fact that for the last several years donors in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states have supplied much of the Taliban’s funding, making the Taliban-led insurgents better-armed and more capable of killing U.S. and UK soldiers and Marines than any Pakistani? Do you suppose this has anything to do with U.S. and British leaders being owned by the Saudis and the other Gulf states because of the latter’s control of oil and their enormous purchases of U.S.- and British-made weapons?

The bottom line: In essence, U.S. and British officials are saying that Pakistanis cannot be allowed to help kill our soldiers and Marines, but both silently are saying that it is perfectly okay — and graft-wise surely lucrative for the officials — for Saudis, Emiratis, Kuwaitis, etc., to do anything they like to facilitate Anglo-American military personnel being killed in Afghanistan (and Iraq).

3.) Notwithstanding that the leaks show that U.S. troops have been long tasked to do far too much with a hand tied behind their back, most Americans continue to retain respect for U.S. generals who neither win wars nor safeguard the young men and women entrusted by American parents to their leadership and care. They and their political masters impose rules of engagement on our soldiers and Marines that make them targets not killers; before his relief, for example, General McChrystal limited the nighttime operations at which our men and women excel and which the enemy greatly fears. He was worried about killing civilians — mostly Taliban supporters — and so preferred to have more of our men and women die in more dangerous daylight operations. And our new commander in Afghanistan, General Petraeus, spends more time serving his political ambitions by sucking-up to the disloyal U.S. Israel Firsters via the journalist Max Boot — thereby giving a new definition to the term “bootlicking” — than in trying to defend America.

The bottom line: The U.S. general-officer corps — with the exception of some Marines — is prostituting itself to the governing class and after-the-military ambitions; has been educated by new-age fools in an insane minimum-deaths war theory at its academies; and is knowingly wasting the lives of our young and sacrificing our national interests.

4.) A federal judge has halted the implementation of parts of Arizona’s immigration law because they invade federal prerogatives. But the federal court did not order the federal government to immediately enforce the federal immigration laws Washington treats as optional and has ignored for 30-plus years. In other words, the federal court has said to Arizona: “You Arizonans cannot protect yourselves and their is no cause for the federal government to protect you.” In short, Arizonans are sunk if they behave as law-abiding citizens or, more accurately, if they behave as fools.

Let us hope the Arizona governor writes a polite note to the federal judge who issued the ruling and thanks him for his thoughts, rejects his ruling, informs him of her intention to protect those who elected her, and invites him to try to enforce his ruling against the resolve and police power of her state and its citizens (time, perhaps, to reestablish state militias?). She should draw the line here and now and not push the case to the U.S. Supreme Court which has become — like the Islamic scholars who issue ungrounded and absurd rulings to approve anything the Saudi regime wants — a rubber stamp for the growth of federal power. As Jefferson and other of the Founders said. self-defense is the first law of nature, and a more recent writer added that the constitution is not a “suicide pact” that prevents self-defense.

The bottom line: It is time for Arizona’s leaders to combine with the leaders of other states to honorably, politely, and resolutely remind the federal government that those things ordained by “nature and nature’s God” are eternally more important and worth defending than anything Washington thinks, says, or does.

These are but four points from a litany of federal “we-choose-failure decisions” that could run to many dozens of items. Look around and see for yourselves in how many venues our federal-level leaders are choosing failure, ignoring reality, and operating in a world that exists only in the minds of the half-baked professors who taught them.

How do we fix this disastrous situation? Clearly there is no resolution at the federal level; indeed, that is the level of government that must be dismantled. There is also the fact that there is not much policy left that can be controlled by voters without a potential federal veto hanging over their actions. Local school boards can still introduce meaningful civics classes, though, and there is no better place to begin immunizing our children against the clear intention of many of our universities to turn them into dangers to the republic. There are many subjects to be covered in civics classes, but here are five about foreign and national-security affairs that would be worth inculcating in young minds:

• America is a land of laws. Federal representatives who break or refuse to enforce the law should be prosecuted and publicly humiliated, not constantly re-elected.
• America is a model of self-governance to be imitated by foreigners if they so choose, not a system to be imposed on them by any U.S. president and his military.
• America is meant to mind its own business, not to intervene in foreign countries if their social, political, or economic affairs happen to displease — but not threaten — the U.S. government of the day.
• America must always see war as last resort to be used only if it is attacked or if it is clearly faced by an imminent attack. If war is necessary, it must be formally declared by Congress and fought with all the force available until the foe is annihilated; there must be no lingering U.S. presence in the land where the war was fought.
• In wartime, America’s interests and citizens must come first, last, and always; the value of a foreign life — or many foreign lives — is not even approximate to the worth a single American life.

As noted, there are many other lessons to be taught in civics classes, but a start must be made in educating our children — our future leaders — about America, its constitution, and why both are worth defending. It is not yet too late to start, but time is waning.