kenlacrosse

(Paul Mirengoff)

Caroline Glick presents a powerful indictment of the Obama administration’s foreign policy. Perhaps the most damning part of her indictment pertains to Syria, where Obama’s impotence in the face of Assad’s crossing of a “red line” by engaging in chemical warfare represents a national embarrassment and humanitarian disaster.

President Obama’s impotence stems from his well-justified fear that intervening against Assad would bring radical Islamists to power. But according to Glick, it is Obama’s fault that radicals have come to dominate the Syrian opposition:

At the outset of the Syrian civil war two-and-a-half years ago, Obama outsourced the development of Syria’s opposition forces to Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Erdogan. He had other options. A consortium of Syrian Kurds, moderate Sunnis, Christians and others came to Washington and begged for US assistance. But they were ignored. . . .

Obama embraced Erdogan, an Islamic fascist who has won elections, as his closest ally and most trusted adviser in the Muslim world.

And so, with the full support of the US government, Erdogan stacked Syria’s opposition forces with radical Muslims like himself. Within months the Muslim Brotherhood comprised the majority in Syria’s US-sponsored opposition.

The Muslim Brotherhood has no problem collaborating with al-Qaida, because the latter was formed by Muslim Brothers. It shares the Brotherhood’s basic ideology.

Since al-Qaida has the most experienced fighters, its rise to leadership and domination of the Syrian opposition was a natural progression.

In other words, Obama’s decision to have Turkey form the Syrian opposition led inevitably to the current situation in which the Iranian- and Russian-backed Syrian regime is fighting an opposition dominated by al-Qaida.

Halil Karaveli, a Senior Fellow at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute and the Silk Road Studies Program, which are affiliated with the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, supports the key elements of Glick’s indictment of Obama’s Syria policy — namely:

(1) that “the U.S. and Turkey have been closely coordinating their efforts to bring about regime change in Damascus;”

(2) that “Turkey, alongside Qatar, has continued to throw its weight behind the Muslim Brotherhood;” and

(3) that “owing in part to Turkish support, the Muslim Brotherhood has succeeded – even though its social base within Syria is relatively small – in eclipsing other groups, first in the Syrian National Council, which is headquartered in Istanbul, and then within the new opposition umbrella group that was assembled by the U.S. at the end of 2012.

To Obama’s credit, he has reacted to the ascent of the radical Islamists in Syria by backing away from the opposition, even in the face of his pal Erdogan’s advocacy for strongly supporting the opposition. But, as Glick notes, the ascent of the radicals leaves the U.S. with no good options in Syria and with egg on its face for proclaiming a red line that turned out to be meaningless.

Obama is not the first American president to lose his way in the thicket of Middle East politics. What is new, and particularly damning, is the source of Obama’s error of “outsourcing” U.S. policy to Erdogan. Glick ascribes it to the president’s twin goals of “demonstrating that the U.S. would no longer try to dictate international outcomes and of allying the U.S. with Islamic fundamentalists.”

Even if one buys Obama’s negative view of past instances in which America took the lead in dictating international outcomes, it’s difficult to understand why he would prefer Turkish dictation to the exercise of his own benign judgment. But if we acknowledge Obama’s desire to align the U.S. with Islamists — the “wave of the future” in his view — then we see that Obama was exercising substantive judgment by outsourcing his pro-Islamist policy to a pro-Islamist ally.

It’s possible to overstate this point. As noted, Obama has tried to pull back from the worst consequences of Erdogan’s Syria policy. This suggests either that he didn’t intend those consequences in the first place or that he decided later that they are unacceptable. It may be that Obama simply didn’t understand the horrors of modern Islamist radicalism, just as Jimmy Carter didn’t understand the horrors of Iranian Shiite radicalism until too late.

But ignorance on such a vital matter is no defense, especially when, even now, Obama seeks to advance the interests of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

And now for something completely different:

One of the least-known Monty Python rarities is “The Great Birds Eye Peas Relaunch of 1971,” a short advertising film that was made for the Birds Eye company’s internal use and then apparently locked away from the public eye (and probably the Python’s, too) until it magically appeared on YouTube.

Sit back and enjoy the show.

Forget — at least for the moment — Obamacare. Sure it can cause a lot of damage to our economy and health system, maybe even decimate the medical pool, but bad as it is, it can always be repealed.

Not so Iran obtaining nuclear weapons.

That catastrophe cannot be so easily rolled back. And no one has any idea what the mullahs might choose to do with the atom bomb or whom they might decide to give it to. The only thing we know is that thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands or even millions, could die, civilizations (ours) could be held hostage.

Don’t believe it?

Take a look at what’s been going on in Syria — Iran’s great friend and mentor — the last few days. Most of us have seen the photos and videos from suburban Damascus, some of the most horrifying images since Auschwitz with, according to some estimates, over a thousand dead from gas, the innocent corpses of children splayed out beneath white sheets. Your eyes turn away.

Even if this is some kind of bizarre “false flag” plot on the part of his adversaries — unlikely, as the Wall Street Journal is reporting otherwise and there are dozens of videos — the world knows that Bashar Assad has been using chemical weapons for nearly a year, long since crossing the “red line” putatively erected by our president.

Obama, despite his huffing and puffing, never acted, but now he is being presented with mass carnage not seen since Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurds in 1988. Will he do anything? Or will he leave it to the United Nations to “investigate” as he usually does?

Russia and China have already stymied a full-scale investigation in the Security Council. And the UN’s boots on the ground don’t amount to much. According to the New York Times, “It was not clear whether the team sent to Syria by the United Nations would be able to investigate the new reported attacks. The team arrived Sunday after months of negotiations with the Syrian government and is authorized to visit only three predetermined sites.”

In other words, the UN is puttering about handcuffed in a murderous dictatorship where over a 100,000 are believed to have died in the ongoing civil war, which only seems to be getting worse.

Jeff Jarvis, writing to President Obama for The Guardian:

Is this really the legacy you want for yourself: the chief executive who trampled rights, destroyed privacy, heightened secrecy, ruined trust, and worst of all, did not defend but instead detoured around so many of the fundamental principles on which this country is founded?

And I voted for you. I’ll confess you were a second choice. I supported Hillary Clinton first. I said at the time that your rhetoric about change was empty and that I feared you would be another Jimmy Carter: aggressively ineffectual.

Never did I imagine that you would instead become another Richard Nixon: imperial, secretive, vindictive, untrustworthy, inexplicable.

Jeff’s a very smart guy, but what took him so long? The first time I compared Obama to both Carter and Nixon was just six weeks into his first term. I even had Stacy Tabb put together this photoshop of the “Nixon-Carter-Mao.”

Good times, good times — where’ve ya been, Jeff?

HOPEY-CHANGEY: UPS To End Health Benefits For Spouses. “United Parcel Service has told its white-collar employees that it will stop providing health care coverage to their spouses who can obtain coverage through their own employers, joining an increasing number of companies that are restricting or eliminating spousal health benefits. U.P.S., the world’s largest package delivery company, said its decision was prompted in part by ‘costs associated with’ the federal health care law that is commonly called Obamacare.”

LAWS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Inspector General: IRS May Be Violating Copyright Law on 89% of its Software.

Like, you know, taxes.

FINANCES: New York, California, Illinois Hemorrhage Tax Dollars.

Blue states like California and Illinois are struggling meeting obligations for their own public pension funds, so they certainly don’t need this latest bit of news—their tax bases are shrinking drastically. A new study on state-by-state income migration from the Tax Foundation (h/t WSJ), found that New York, California, and Illinois—the largest blue states in the country—led the country in income flight during the last decade. New York was hit particularly hard, losing $46 billion dollars of taxable income to people leaving the state over the past ten years. And these states were not alone: blue stalwarts like Maryland, New Jersey, and Massachusetts were not far behind.

Red and purple destinations like Florida, Texas, Arizona and North Carolina led the pack of states benefiting from this migration, each gaining over $10 billion in taxable income due to new migrants from other states. Although the red/blue divide breaks down somewhat towards the middle of the group—red states like Louisiana saw some minor losses while blue states like Vermont enjoyed modest gains—the overall pattern is hard to miss.

One of the trends driving blue boosters to despair is that the most extensive government programs require taxes hikes which tend to cause businesses to flee, eventually taking residents and their tax dollars with them. This erosion of the tax base forces states to hike taxes further to keep the system running which only accelerates the process.

Then there are the businesses — like gunmakers — who have left in the face of cultural/legal pogroms. Either way, bring your jobs to Tennessee!

PROGRESS: A Nuclear Reactor Competitive with Natural Gas: General Atomics has applied for DOE funds to commercialize a nuclear reactor that could lower electricity costs by 40 percent.

IN 34 STATES AND THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, welfare pays better than a minimum-wage job.

COMPETENCE: Report: NSA doesn’t know the extent of Snowden damage. “The National Security Agency (NSA) doesn’t know how much information leaker Edward Snowden was able to obtain because of an underdeveloped capacity to audit its own data, according to a NBC News report released late Tuesday.”

This is criminal. Every single thing he did should have left an audit trail, both as a guard against misuse, and for damage assessment in a case just like this.

I didn’t say “criminal incompetence,” because if the need for an audit trail is obvious to such as me, it surely must have been obvious to higher-ups at NSA. If the systems lack the capacity for this, it’s because somebody doesn’t want the records kept. That suggests abuse at a systemic level. (It also undercuts claims of extensive auditing here.)

Then there’s the incompetence of letting someone like Snowden have such free-ranging access to the system: “The NSA had poor data compartmentalization, said the sources, allowing Snowden, who was a system administrator, to roam freely across wide areas. By using a ‘thin client’ computer he remotely accessed the NSA data from his base in Hawaii.” Snowden and Bradley Manning. That’s who’s in charge of our secrets?

Disgraceful. The whole operation needs to be reviewed at the highest levels. Instead, we’re more likely to see some cosmetic fixes and promises that this was a one-off.

TRANSPARENCY: Dana Milbank: The price Gina Gray paid for whistleblowing.

President Obama, in his news conference this month, said that Edward Snowden was wrong to go public with revelations about secret surveillance programs because “there were other avenues available for somebody whose conscience was stirred and thought that they needed to question government actions.”

This is a common refrain among administration officials and some lawmakers: If only Snowden had made his concerns known through the proper internal channels, everything would have turned out well. The notion sounds reasonable, as do the memorandums Obama signed supposedly protecting whistleblowers.

But it’s a load of nonsense. Ask Gina Gray.

Gray is the Defense Department whistleblower whose case I have been following for five years. She was the Army civilian worker who, before and after her employment, exposed much of the wrongdoing at Arlington National Cemetery — misplaced graves, mishandled remains and financial mismanagement — and she attempted to do it through the proper internal channels. Pentagon sources have confirmed to me her crucial role in bringing the scandal to light.

For her troubles, Gray was fired. . . . Sadly, Gray’s case is emblematic of the way this administration has handled whistleblowers. Obama came into office pledging transparency and professing admiration for government workers who expose abuses. But his administration has pursued more cases under the 1917 Espionage Act than all previous administrations combined (including the prosecution of National Security Agency workers who tried to register their objections through “proper” channels). And the alleged intimidation of would-be whistleblowers goes beyond those involved in sensitive intelligence. For example, diplomat Gregory Hicks told a House committee that he was demoted because he gave congressional investigators a description of the attack on Americans in Benghazi, Libya, that was at odds with the official version of events.

It’s Chicago Rules. You see something, you say nothing.

CENK UYGUR CALLS IT “BRAZEN,” AND HE’S RIGHT: Shakedown! Congress-sleazebag Eleanor Holmes Norton’s Voicemail To A Lobbyist. If I’m not mistaken, this isn’t the first time.

Mark Steyn argues that two things have happened simultaneously. America has “imploded on the world stage” while its current leaders have increased their power at home.

A couple of months back, I quoted Tocqueville’s prescient words from almost two centuries ago: Although absolute monarchy theoretically “clothed kings with a power almost without limits,” in practice “the details of social life and of individual existence ordinarily escaped his control.” In other words, the king couldn’t do it even if he wanted to. What would happen, Tocqueville wondered, if administrative capability were to evolve to bring “the details of social life and of individual existence” within His Majesty’s oversight? That world is now upon us.

Steyn was referring to the NSA. But speaking of instruments of control, Michael Ledeen reminds us not to forget the Big Lever: the IRS. “Benghazi is an event, a terrible event, but the systematic use of the IRS as an instrument of oppression, the omnipresent long arm of the state-to-be, is even worse. It’s a crucial instrument for redistributing wealth, for intimidating critics, and for preventing political opponents from amassing the wherewithal to challenge the would-be tyrants.”

American weakness abroad and the establishment’s attempt at omnipotence at home are two slices of a single pie; complementary aspects of the breakdown of American democracy.  Consider what they mean taken together. They raise the prospect of  foreign rulers buying influence over America — and Americans — while their minions put the whole of the nation at the disposal of the highest bidder through the magnificent tech instruments Americans themselves have built. What’s going to stop them? The scruples of politicians in Washington?

No. But maybe something else.

Events in the Middle East suggest that perhaps God does bless America in a way.  Checks and balances are coming in the form of rivalry between the foreign patrons of American politicians. The moneybags are fighting among themselves. The crisis in Egypt is a case in point. Washington is torn between the support for the Muslim Brotherhood (as supported by Qatar) and for the Egyptian military (read Saudi Arabia). Since this thread runs through Syria as well the Russians are trying to pull on it.  If they pull hard enough the whole fabric may unravel. Foreign Policy’s Zachary Keck writes:

On Thursday afternoon President Barack Obama announced that the U.S. would be cancelling a joint military exercise with the Egyptian Army over its violent crackdown on supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Shortly afterwards, Egypt Independent reported that Putin had called an extraordinary session in the Kremlin to put “all Russian military facilities ‘at the Egyptian military’s disposal.’” The report, which cited several sources without providing any further details about them, also said that “Putin will discuss Russian arrangements for joint-military exercises with the Egyptian army.”

What could be a more blatant attempt than that? If true then Putin’s openly trying to grab Egypt. Breitbart reports Egypt is sending a diplomatic mission to Russia. “Sadat threw Russia out of Egypt,” the source told Breitbart News. “Peace came from that. If Russia reenters Egypt, they reenter the world.”   Are the reports true?  But things may have reached a crisis. The Egyptian military is planning to outlaw the Muslim Brotherhood.

That would put Obama’s hand squarely in a vise. He may be forced to do what he loathes most: to take a definite, public stand that must alienate part of his international coalition. He has thrived so far by selling the same real estate to all comers; by being the blank slate who is each and every supplicant’s friend.

But now he must anger somebody. Now somebody’s asking for a refund. The web is rife with rumor that one side or the other is holding a scandal over the administration’s head. There is no proof that any such scandal exists.  But given the parade of scandals already too numerous to mention it cannot wholly be discounted that some such exists.

So Obama remains hunkered down in Martha’s Vineyard, emerging periodically from his vacation home, like a cuckoo from a clock, to make a statement no one appears to hear, playing for time. No one in the Beltway seems to know what line to take. Shall they restore democracy in Egypt by supporting the Muslims Bros, knowing they too will take their revenge on the generals and the Copts? Suspend aid to the Egyptian military and open the door to Russia, who might do a hat trick and scoop up Saudi Arabia into the bargain?

Choices. Choices. What happened to the good old days when one could vote “present”? The Beltway is reading the tea leaves for a sign. And all they’re getting is Jay Carney.

The interesting thing is that these policy dilemmas have not arisen from an internal debate within the institutions of the Republic but as a consequence of a crisis caused by the conflicting agendas of foreign interest groups. It’s a war among the lobbies, and Washington knows not how to caper to which tune.

What may happen next is hard to predict other than to say that the Chinese fire drill — did I mention China? — will get worse. The apparatchiks are paralyzed because their patrons are squabbling. The Narrative priority now is probably to keep the voters distracted so they don’t notice the men behind the curtain are scuffling on the floor. But that will only work for so long. Sooner or later the voters will notice. And if they’ve got no jobs or money they may not even care about threats from the IRS.  The next few weeks will probably see some kind of patch applied to cool things down. But eventually the crisis will intensify and the tension will rise again. There’s too much bad merchandise floating around for it not too. Iran’s nukes, Pakistan, Syria — to mention just a few. The cuckoo clock is broken. The Narrative is showing signs of dementia.

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(Steven Hayward)

Here’s a historical counter-factual thought experiment for you: suppose the German military, in the spring of 1933, decided that the ascension of Hitler and his Nazis was bad news for Germany, moved to remove Hitler by a coup, outlawed the Nazi party, and in ruling henceforth by military decree thereby ended more than a decade of democratic weakness that was the Weimar Republic.  What judgment would you cast?  (Turns out Tom Trinko over at AmericanThinker.com has wondered the same thing.)

Of course you can only approve of this course with the perfect hindsight of knowing what actually happened after 1933 (or after 1938, when the Munich agreement may have forestalled a military move against Hitler).  Without today’s hindsight, a Wilsonian idealist in 1933 might well have condemned the German military, just as today’s State Department can’t speak with a clear voice about how we should think about the problems in Egypt.

So let’s be clear: the Muslim Brotherhood is a fascist political faction with murderous intent.  Full stop.  They not only deserve to be put down; they need to be put down if Egypt—and possibly the region as a whole—is going to have a future in the modern world.   The military rulers are absolutely correct to outlaw the Muslim Brotherhood.  (Turkey actually has a specific article of its constitution banning sectarian political parties, sadly being undone bit by bit under the current regime.)  The loss of life in Egypt is horrible; but like Iran after 1979, we should reflect on how much more horrible it will be if the Muslim Brotherhood should gain complete power in Egypt (or elsewhere).  There can be little doubt that the current violence is a deliberate provocation of the Muslim Brotherhood.

It is perhaps worth recalling the view of John Stuart Mill from On Liberty:

[A] ruler full of the spirit of improvement is warranted in the use of any expedients that will gain an end, perhaps otherwise unobtainable.  Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.

It is far from clear the Egyptian military can meet this standard.  But what advice is Egypt getting from the United States about how to stabilize the situation?  It is hard to say from the outside, but it doesn’t appear we have given very good advice to Iraq or Afghanistan over the last decade on how to build a genuinely stable civil society, so I doubt we’re much better with Egypt.  The single most important reform the region needs is one that the United States, with its current wrongheaded multicultural sensitivities, seems unable to advocate: and end to all forms of sectarian rule.  In other words, the Arab nations need to understand the American principle of the mutual and reciprocal relation between religious freedom and civil rights, such that every election doesn’t risk the surrender of your civil rights if Sunnis defeat Shiites, or vice versa.  In other words, they need old-fashioned American constitutionalism.

That’s not the advice they have been receiving.  Law professor Ron Rotunda walked through the problem with his important article in the Wall Street Journal a month ago, and it’s worth revisiting:

Mr. Morsi tried to give his constitution a patina of respectability. Egypt invited U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to provide guidance during a four-day visit. Justice Ginsburg appeared on state television and said that, even though she much admires the U.S. Constitution, she “would not look to the United States Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012.” She recommended consulting several other countries’ documents instead, including South Africa’s. . .

Sadly, the Egyptians took Justice Ginsburg’s advice and did not follow the U.S. Constitution. Instead, the Morsi constitution granted muted rights, which other provisions limited even further. For instance, Article 2 said that “the principles of Islamic law” are the “main source of legislation.” Article 44 prohibited “insulting of prophets.” Article 11 added that the state shall protect “morality, decency, and public order.” Under the Morsi constitution, an Egyptian court sentenced a woman and her seven children—an entire family—to 15 years’ imprisonment for the crime of converting from Islam to Christianity. . .

Similarly, Article 48 of the Egyptian Constitution said, in effect, there is a free press as long as it does not contradict the Islamic religious laws known as Shariah. Under Article 81, rights and freedoms “shall be exercised insofar as they do not contradict the principles set out in the Chapter on State and Society in this constitution,” which declares that “Islam is the state’s religion” and Shariah is the main source of legislation.

Similarly our State Department “nation builders” in both Iraq and Afghanistan raised no objections to new constitutions that embraced Islam not only as a source of positive law, but as a pretext for restrictions on fundamental civil liberties.  Get ready for decades of sequels of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan is the region does not begin to embrace political modernization based, ironically, on the old liberal principles of constitutionalism and civil liberty.

For additional thoughts on the subject of Egypt and modernization, check in with our friend Herbert Meyer.  He was on to this problem two years ago (when everyone else was still celebrating the end of Mubarak), and Herb is not surprised by what is happening now.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Feds Threaten To Arrest Lavabit Founder For Shutting Down His Service. “It sounds like the feds were asking for a full on backdoor on the system, not unlike some previous reports of ISPs who have received surprise visits from the NSA.” And apparently you have a duty to stay in business to help them spy or something. Weak threat, but I’m not terribly surprised.

Somewhat related: Seeing threats, feds target instructors of polygraph-beating methods.

Federal agents have launched a criminal investigation of instructors who claim they can teach job applicants how to pass lie detector tests as part of the Obama administration’s unprecedented crackdown on security violators and leakers.

The criminal inquiry, which hasn’t been acknowledged publicly, is aimed at discouraging criminals and spies from infiltrating the U.S. government by using the polygraph-beating techniques, which are said to include controlled breathing, muscle tensing, tongue biting and mental arithmetic.

So far, authorities have targeted at least two instructors, one of whom has pleaded guilty to federal charges, several people familiar with the investigation told McClatchy. Investigators confiscated business records from the two men, which included the names of as many as 5,000 people who’d sought polygraph-beating advice. U.S. agencies have determined that at least 20 of them applied for government and federal contracting jobs, and at least half of that group was hired, including by the National Security Agency.

By attempting to prosecute the instructors, federal officials are adopting a controversial legal stance that sharing such information should be treated as a crime and isn’t protected under the First Amendment in some circumstances.

This is a disgrace. First, it’s a clear First Amendment violation. Second “lie detectors” are bits of lame pseudoscience that don’t work anyway. The feds’ heavy reliance on them in security cases is just further evidence of their incompetence and unseriousness here. Also, if you read the creative charges the feds are using here, it’s just more evidence that we need to rein in prosecutorial discretion.

And boy, doesn’t this Administration act like it’s got a lot to hide?

Related: NSA Whistleblower Reveals How To Beat A Polygraph Test.

The federal government currently administers polygraphs to government employees in a number of agencies, including the NSA and CIA. The polygraphs work by measuring and recording a person’s physiological responses—changes in a person’s pulse, breathing and blood pressure—to lying versus telling the truth.

Tice, who is now working on a Ph.D. in global security studies, says the NSA “routinely uses polygraphs to terrorize the rank and file of NSA employees” and to “gather very personal information on them that they can use to blackmail them into participating in illegal and unethical conduct.”

Not very impressive.

Gary Gambill at the Middle Eastern Forum  examines the logic of “Arms for Peace” that he claims is being mooted as a model in foreign policy circles to guide policy in Syria. Arms for peace. How does that work? Gambill explains:

As the Syrian civil war rages on with no end in sight, many advocates of U.S. intervention are claiming that an infusion of Western arms to carefully vetted rebel factions will help bring about a peaceful resolution of the conflict. Though hardly the first time that tools of war have been recast as instruments of peace, this curious proposition has gained unprecedented currency across the ideological spectrum, from liberal internationalists to conservative hawks.

Unfortunately, the magic bullets theory doesn’t hold much water. Arming the rebels might bring the war to a close sooner by helping “good” guys kill “bad” guys more efficiently, but there’s no compelling reason to believe it will entice them to stop fighting.

The superficial logic of arms-for-peace is elegant, to be sure, rooted in the classic diplomatic axiom that a political settlement to an armed conflict is possible only when, for all relevant players, the expected utility of a negotiated peace, E[u(p)], is greater than the expected utility of continued war, E[u(w)]. There are several arguments as to how a calibrated infusion of arms into Syria will help produce this rare condition (presumably absent from the large majority of civil wars in the modern era that ended in the military defeat of one side or the other).

Stripped of its quasi mathematical trappings the notion comes to this: if the administration can fix it so nobody can win in Syria then they’ll be forced to make peace. There is a facile appeal to this idea, but Gambill is unpersuaded, and rightly so.

Even if no one were actually considering this as a guide to Syrian policy the idea of negotiations as an end in itself already appeared in many guises. Today victory and it’s flipside, defeat, definitely have a bad name. It’s had a bad name since Vietnam when the sophisticated consensus was that War.Is.Good.For.Absolutely.Nothing.

All war and its outcomes do is perpetuate the Cycle of Violence. Therefore when victory is possible, it should be avoided at all costs. Forcing one side to surrender is now regarded as an immoral act, almost — if one may risk excessive irony — a war crime.

For example when the Tamil Tigers were on the verge of complete defeat in Sri Lanka, Marie Colvin, writing in the UK Times described how tragic that development would be. “Now that their military hopes are dashed, the fear in western capitals is that the Tamil Tigers will again turn to terrorism. If the Tamil leadership goes ahead with their threats of suicide will there be anyone left to negotiate with? ”

Colvin might be right, for judging by appearances the main task of diplomacy today is to keep wars going forever. The world is full of conflicts where the UN intervenes when one side or the other threatens to prevail.  When Israel fires back at rockets in Gaza, ceasefire! When the Hezbollah are getting worsted, ceasefire!

Older readers of this site may still remember the infamous Highway of Death.  During the first Gulf War, Saddam’s forces were using this road in their headlong flight from Kuwait, having singularly failed to administer the Mother of all Defeats to the US Armed Forces who were advancing on them.  The retreating columns were pasted by US airpower. “The scenes of devastation on the road are some of the most recognizable images of the war, and were publicly cited as a factor in President George H. W. Bush’s decision to declare a cessation of hostilities the next day.”

Bush had to stop because the US Armed Forces were beating Saddam’s forces too badly. It was hard to say which was more disturbing, the sight of so many thousands of charred and ruined vehicles or the explosion of the myth that America was a pitiful, helpless giant. “Many Iraqi forces, however, successfully escaped across the Euphrates river, and the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency estimated that upwards of 70,000 to 80,000 troops from defeated divisions in Kuwait might have fled into Basra, evading capture.”

Afterwards these surviving units went on to massacre the Marsh Arabs and then it was the international community’s turn to appeal to Saddam to stop. Of course Saddam didn’t stop. But that is another story.

Peace ain’t what it used to be. The fact that millions have perished in the process of achieving the not quite victories, not quite defeats of our time is nothing to the point. We meant well.

Gambill continued his examination of the “arms for peace” concept by examining some of the arguments for it.

The most common arms-for-peace argument, frequently invoked by Obama administration officials, is that arming the rebels will begin shifting the balance of power away from pro-government forces and signal Western resolve to tip it further, thereby diminishing E[u(w)] for the regime, its domestic supporters, and/or its Russian and Iranian backers. “Altering the balance of power on the ground … is the only way a politically negotiated transition can become possible,” writes Dennis Ross. Negotiations “will amount to little given the current power asymmetry,” concurs Elizabeth O’Bagy. …

A second family of arms-for-peace arguments hold that Western patronage of the rebels will increase E[u(p)] for the regime and/or its supporters (particularly lower echelon security personnel and civil servants). One strand of this reasoning holds that American sponsorship of the rebellion will alleviate their fears of Sunni domination and retribution by strengthening moderate rebels vis-à-vis extremists and obliging the former to act more responsibly. A second strand holds that equipping and supplying the rebels will unify their ranks so that they can make credible commitments to possible pro-regime interlocutors (at present, no one has the power to ensure that disparate rebel forces comply with anything).

There is something a little unsettling about hearing these sophisticated arguments, as if one had come into contact with an intelligence that had retained the ability to calculate while having utterly lost the ability to think. But it is easy to see how minds molded in that climate can create concepts like “leading from behind” or “responsibility to protect”. Their calculus is entirely consistent. But is arguably mad.

Just now the New York Times is reporting that thousands of refugees are pouring into Iraq. The BBC has further details of the human stream into Kurdistan, just a small part of the nearly 2 million Syrians who have fled the country. Photos at the BBC site show an astounding stream of refugees crossing a bridge on the Tigris. What does arms for peace do for them?

Patience friends. Arms for peace are on the way. Well not quite yet. The Los Angeles Times says the “U.S. has yet to deliver arms to Syria rebels”, adding “the Obama administration remains conflicted about sending weapons that could fall into the wrong hands, as is evident by the slow pace of delivering on its promise of military aid.” Perhaps they’re still trying to calculate the values for E[u(w)] and E[u(p)] to an acceptable number of digits. Until then, they remain ‘conflicted’.

Personally I think one can make the argument for sending arms if it will lead to the victory of the better and more humane side. But it seems eminently pointless and not a little cruel to dispatch deadly implements to Syria without any desire for seeing our guys — if one can use the word — on top.

The problem with the Obama administration’s policy in the Middle East is that is all cunning and no sense. It is a fine tuned watch that keeps 13 hour time. There is no real public consideration about the wisdom of installing one faction or the other in Damascus, nor is there the least consideration of what might be good for the people in the region and for American interests. What the public is offered instead is a kind of mad logic, if the term “logic” can be so abused.

But things are not so neat as they imagine in the real world. The BBC says the Syrian rebels and the Kurds are now fighting. “A number of fierce battles between jihadists and armed Kurdish groups in Syria have added another layer to what is increasingly being described as a civil war within a civil war.” Time to refine the model.

I would not be surprised to learn that some journalist, wandering unattended into the Oval Office, came across a ream of paper on which was meticulously typed, for some apparent reason in  single space  hundreds of pages of this repetitive script. “Hope and change and hope and change and hope and change …”

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(Paul Mirengoff)

Yesterday, Saudi Arabia promised to compensate Egypt for every bit of aid that the U.S. or other Western countries might withdraw in the response to the Egyptian military’s crackdown against its Muslim Brotherhood opponents. This move highlights the growing irrelevance of the U.S. in the Middle East — a positive development in the short-term, given that U.S. Middle East policy is set by President Obama. As we know, nature abhors a vacuum.

It’s worth noting, as the Washington Post does, just how unusual and risky the Saudi move is:

[T]he unusually bold foray into foreign policy represents a big risk for the traditionally staid and cautious kingdom, jeopardizing its reputation as the leader of the Muslim world, reigniting a simmering power struggle with rivals Qatar and Turkey, and potentially harming its relationship with Washington.

But the Saudis understand the stakes in Egypt. Indeed, says the Post, they view the struggle against the Muslim Brotherhood “in almost existential terms.”

What’s existential for the Saudi regime isn’t necessarily existential for the U.S. But America also has a strong interest in seeing the Brotherhood defeated. As I expressed it a few days ago:

World peace and order depend on the extent to which key nations are ruled by governments with no strong desire to wage or promote war. These days, fortunately, nearly all key nations are so ruled, including, I submit, Russia and China. Iran and, arguably, North Korea are the two exceptions.

Egypt’s military leadership has no strong desire to wage or promote war. We see this from its willingness to crack down on Islamist militants in the Sinai who are committed to provoking Israel.

The Muslim Brotherhood wants to wage war throughout the Middle East, at a minimum. Indeed, one of the military’s grievances against Morsi was his increasing willingness to have Egyptians pour into Syria to fight.

The standard line, by those who favor a cut-off of U.S. aid to Egypt, in response to Saudi financial backing of Egypt is that, sooner or later, Egypt will need Western support in the form of tourism, trade, and IMF assistance. This is probably true.

But the Egyptian military seeks a window during which it can crush the Muslim Brotherhood. If it achieves this non-negotiable priority, it can then attempt to negotiate its way back into the moderately good graces of Western liberals.

In this regard, it should be noted that, sooner or later, the U.S. may be governed by an administration that takes a more realistic, national interest-based view of the Middle East.

JOURNALISM: Christians Murdered All Over Egypt, New Puppy at White House.

SOMEHOW I HAD MISSED THIS: CDC Study Ordered by Obama Contradicts White House Anti-gun Narrative More here.

Here’s the full study. The science is settled. You don’t want to be anti-science, do you?

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: “That’s caudillo talk. That’s banana republic stuff. In this country, the president is required to win the consent of Congress first. At stake is not some constitutional curlicue. At stake is whether the laws are the law. And whether presidents get to write their own.”

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED REPUBLICAN, HERETICS AND APOSTATES AND UNBELIEVERS WOULD BE PUNISHED. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! “Excommunicated From The Clown Community.”

From the comments: “If Obama were a classy guy, he’d ask the folks that run the rodeo to un-fire the clown. He’d say, Hey, I can take a joke.” Well, that’s a conditional statement.

Weak enemies allow the dictator to flourish, despite his economic house of cards.

WHEN, OF COURSE, SHE KNEW THAT IT WAS JUST THAT: Hillary Clinton exploded at a congressman two days after Benghazi for suggesting that the attack was the work of terrorists, says GOP Rep.

An Illinois Republican congressman told constituents at a town hall meeting on Wednesday that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton screamed at a fellow member of Congress two days after a U.S. diplomatic station in Benghazi, Libya was destroyed, merely for saying aloud that the attack was carried out by terrorist groups.

The Obama administration later acknowledged that reality.

But White House officials initially maintained that the deaths of four Americans and the firebomb attack on the State Department mission was the result of a spontaneous protest against a low-budget YouTube film that was critical of the Muslim prophet Muhammad.

‘Two days after this attack,’ said Rep. Adam Kinzinger, ‘we were in a briefing with Hillary Clinton and she screamed at a member of Congress who’d dare suggest that this was a terrorist attack.’

‘Now we find out that while it was happening, they knew it was a terrorist attack. These are answers that we’re going to get to the bottom of.’

Kinzinger’s office told National Review Online that the meeting he referred to was a classified briefing held for all members of Congress.

The congressman appeared on the Fox News Channel on Friday, recalling Clinton ‘basically, in a very loud, angry voice, [saying] “It’s irresponsible to even suggest this is a terror attack. This is a YouTube video. We know that there are protests all over, and we need to be very careful how we’re saying this” — and basically chided this member of Congress.’

At least scapegoated filmmaker Nakoula is now out of jail.

DISGRACEFUL: Texas Police Hit Organic Farm With Massive SWAT Raid. “A small organic farm in Arlington, Texas, was the target of a massive police action last week that included aerial surveillance, a SWAT raid and a 10-hour search. Members of the local police raiding party had a search warrant for marijuana plants, which they failed to find at the Garden of Eden farm. But farm owners and residents who live on the property told a Dallas-Ft. Worth NBC station that the real reason for the law enforcement exercise appears to have been code enforcement.” Code enforcement.

TO BE FAIR, THAT’S A MAJOR PART OF THEIR SKILLSET: Egypt’s Embattled Coptic Church Lashes Out at Western Media for Giving ‘Political Cover’ to ‘Terrorist and Bloody Groups.’ I mean, if they reported accurately, Americans might get angry, and that’s not allowed unless it’s at Republicans.

GALLERY: 20 Historic Black-and-White Photos, Colorized.

(John Hinderaker)

Beats me. But Michael Ledeen thinks he knows, and he’s a pretty astute observer, so let’s turn the floor over to him for a while. First, Michael says, we need to stop looking at events country by country and recognize that a global war is in progress:

The war is easily described: there is a global alliance of radical leftists and radical Islamists, supported by a group of countries that includes Russia, at least some Chinese leaders, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua). The radicals include the Sunni and Shi’ite terrorist organizations and leftist groups, and they all work seamlessly with the narcotics mafias. Their objective is the destruction of the West, above all, of the United States.

That’s pretty straightforward, but the details can become dizzying, as events are constantly creating shifting patterns:

War is foggy, and alliances are often very unstable, especially at moments when the whole world is up for grabs. Look at Egypt, for example. At one level, it’s a sectarian fight: the “secular” military vs. the “Islamist” Muslim Brotherhood. So nobody should be surprised when the Brothers burn churches and murder Christians. But the top military dog, General Sissi, has some pretty impressive Islamist credentials. Indeed, his elevation at the time of the Brothers’ purge of Mubarak’s generals was frequently attributed to his close ties to the Brotherhood. …

A Saudi of my acquaintance showed up in Cairo a few days ago with a bunch of checks, some currently cashable, others postdated over the next twelve months, all hand-delivered to Sissi and his guys. Their advice to the Egyptian military is to mercilessly crush the Brothers, and their advice will likely be adopted, both because the junta knows that death awaits them if they lose (2 Egyptian major generals and 2 brigadier generals, along with many colonels, have been assassinated by the Brothers in the current spasm), and because only the Saudis can foot the huge bill facing Egypt just to provide the basics for the people. …

Notice that this bloody confrontation has nothing to do with the celebrated Sunni-Shi’ite war that is so often invoked to “explain” current events. It’s all happening within Sunni Egypt (although the Shi’ite Iranians are certainly meddling–surprise!–on behalf of the very Sunni Brothers). And there are plenty of “foreign fighers,” just as there were in Iraq, just as there are in Afghanistan….

Things get even more confusing if you move from Egypt to Syria and Iraq:

Assad is actually a figurehead, the real capital of Syria is in an office of the Iranian supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. A leader of the Syrian opposition made this clear, saying that Hezbollah and Iran were the real powers in Syria, and there’s plenty of evidence for his assertion, including dead Hezbollahis and Quds Forcers.

So Al Qaeda’s fighting Iran in Syria, right? That fits nicely into the Sunni vs. Shi’ite meme, thereby relieving a mental cramp or two. But wait: our very own Treasury Department, which is as good as we’ve got when it comes to deciphering the crazy quilt network of global terrorism, told us in no uncertain terms a couple of years ago that there was a secret deal between AQ and the mullahs. Moreover, the tidal wave of terrorism that has crashed on Iraq is universally termed a resurgence of Al Qaeda in Iraq, which has been Iranian-sponsored since Day One (just ask the late unlamented Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, sent to paradise by US Special Forces). Which gives us a big mental cramp indeed: an Iranian (Shi’ite)-sponsored (Sunni) Al Qaeda assault against (Shi’ite) Iraq, and right next door an Iranian-assisted (Sunni) Al Qaeda, alongside other (mostly Sunni) foreign and domestic fighters against a (kinda Shi’ite) regime under the control of (totally Shi’ite) Tehran.

Best to get back to the big picture, where things, happily, are not too bleak:

Let’s get outside these little boxes and look at the big board. There’s an alliance plotting against us, bound together by two radical views of the world that share a profound, fundamental hatred of us. If they win, it’s hell to pay, because then we will be attacked directly and often, and we will be faced with only two options, winning or losing.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that they’re divided, and slaughtering each other. And it’s not always possible for us to sort out what “each other” even means. But one thing is quite clear, and I know it’s an unpopular idea, but it’s a true fact: they’re not an awesome force. The radical left has failed everywhere, and so have the radical Islamists. Both claim to have history (and/or the Almighty) on their side, but they go right on failing. The left is now pretty much in the garbage bin of history (you can hire Gorbachev for your next annual meeting if you can afford his speaking fee), and the “Muslim world”–sorry to be so blunt–is a fossilized remnant of a failed civilization. Look at the shambles in Iran, look at the colossal mess the Brothers unleashed on a once-great nation.

So we’ve got opportunities, lots of them.

Michael has believed for a long time that the main key to the puzzle is Iran, and that America’s policy toward Iran should be to ally itself with the dissident majority, consisting largely of young people, who want to rid themselves of the mullahs and rejoin civilization. Bringing about reform in Iran may or may not defuse the left-Islam alliance that is the main threat to world peace, but it would undoubtedly be a huge step in that direction.

NPR thinks that there are three scenarios in Egypt but there is only one scenario.

1. Reconciliation between the military and the Muslim Brotherhood (I do not think this is possible)
2. Military Rule.
3. Civil War

2 and 3 and really one scenario of all out fighting and suppression until there is uncontested military rule.

This reuters analysis makes more sense.

In power, Mursi and his backers in the Brotherhood proved unable to collaborate with either Islamist allies or secular adversaries and fatally alienated an army they first tried to co-opt.

"The Brotherhood have committed political suicide. It will take them decades to recover ... because a significant number of Egyptians now mistrust them. Al-Ikhwan is a toxic brand now in Egypt and the region," said academic Fawaz Gerges, adding that the damage goes beyond Egypt to its affiliates in Tunisia, Jordan and Gaza, where the ruling Hamas evolved from the Brotherhood.

Deposed President Mohamed Mursi alienated all but a hard-core constituency by devoting his energy to seizing control of Egypt's institutions rather than implementing policies to revive its paralysed economy and heal political divisions, analysts say.

"I was surprised by the rapid fall of the Islamists," said Jamel Arfaoui, an analyst on Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab Spring uprisings.

PJMedia also has information on while there will be a merciless purge of the Brotherhood

Saudi money is being given to the Egyptian military and advice to merciless crush the Brotherhood. Their advice will likely be adopted, both because the junta knows that death awaits them if they lose (2 Egyptian major generals and 2 brigadier generals, along with many colonels, have been assassinated by the Brothers in the current spasm), and because only the Saudis can foot the huge bill facing Egypt just to provide the basics for the people. Most of whom, to the evident surprise of Western leaders and journalists, seem inclined to support the junta (neighborhood militias have taken on the Brothers throughout the country, for example).

Read more »

HOPEY-CHANGEY: CBO Report: Deficit Was $1.087 Trillion In 2012, All Four Years of Obama’s First Term Saw Deficits In Excess of $1 Trillion.

(Steven Hayward)

There’s the old joke I heard way back in college that was more or less rendered obsolete in the 1980s, but which has made a comeback of sorts in the era of Obama’s crypto-socialist crony-capitalism: “The trouble with capitalism is that it’s people exploiting other people; the  trouble with socialism is just the opposite.”  Of course this is false: it is capitalism, not government control of the economy, that has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty–especially in China–over the last 25 years.  It seems silly to have to repeat this over and over again, but the socialist impulse is irrepressible, along with the sentimental ignorance that fuels the socialist impulse.

But it is fun to point out, as the Wall Street Journal does today, that one of the biggest beneficiaries of socialism turns out to be capitalists.  Just as the Soviet Union suffered something like 75 years of “bad weather” on its farms following the revolution, much the same is happening in tropical Venezuela:

U.S. Rice Farmers Cash in on Venezuelan Socialism: U.S. Exporters Benefit as Production Falls in Latin American Country

STUTTGART, Ark.—Steve Orlicek, a rice farmer here, is living the American dream. He owns a thriving business; he vacations in the Bahamas.

His good fortune springs from many roots, including an unlikely one: He is a prime beneficiary of the socialist economic policies of Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s late president and critic of what he called U.S. “imperialism.”

It is a paradoxical legacy of Mr. Chávez’s self-styled socialist revolution that his policies became a moneymaker for the capitalist systems he deplored. During his 14 years in power, he nationalized large farms, redistributed land and controlled food prices as part of a strategy to help the poor. But these policies turned Venezuela from a net exporter to a net importer of rice—from farmers like Mr. Orlicek. “The rice industry has been very good to us,” Mr. Orlicek said, sitting in his newly renovated home, appointed with a baby grand piano played by his wife, Phyllis.

It isn’t just rice. Production of steel, sugar and many other goods has fallen in Venezuela, leading to occasional shortages. Until recently, Venezuela was largely self-sufficient in beef and coffee. Now it imports both.

Memo to socialists everywhere: You can’t win.