Should English Be America's Official Language?

Victor Davis Hanson adds some reality and perspective. (See 1 below.)

Ralph Peters explains why he still believes the Iraq War was justified but goes into great detail why he is discouraged by the way D.C. and Bush basically failed the troops. Peters writes in a passionate way and says what needs saying if anyone is open and objective enough to listen. (See 2 below.)

Harold Meyerson begins with a tongue in cheek sentence but then launches into the subject of what Democrats must do to offer a: "New New Deal." Meyerson obviously has liberal leanings and I do not necessarily buy his "schtick" but I am always willing to expose memo readers to other sides.(See 3 below.)

A review of some of Obama's thinking and votes. They basically place him very far Left. This was gleaned from a source I deem reliable. Most Senate Democrats do not believe English should be the official language and recently so voted. Sen. Obama was one of them. (See 4 below.)

Russia seeks to get involved by holding its own "Annapolis" conference before year end and Peres tell's Russia's Lavrov that it is convinced Syria continues to be an arms supplier to terrorists. Also, it has been revealed that Iran has provided Syria with probably $1 billion in weapons funding. ((See 5 below.)

Knesset Member has some advice for Israel's current leadership - quit acting like wimps. (See 6 below.)

Dick


1) Hope & Change Amid Despair
By Victor Davis Hanson

"I think the magic is over." That's what French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner recently said about the United States' global reputation.

It's never been a great idea to rely on the assessments of French politicians, but the daily news coming out of the U.S. -- in terms of our image overseas and beyond -- does indeed seem bleak.

Oil has climbed over $100 a barrel. Gas is nearing $4 a gallon. Gold is at $1,000 an ounce -- a telltale sign the public is losing trust in paper money, stocks and bonds.

Housing prices still slump. Foreclosures are on the rise. The huge Wall Street firm Bear Stearns nearly collapsed before being bought out for a fraction of its former worth.

Seven years ago, the Euro was worth about 90 cents. Now it's soared past $1.50. Staples like wheat and corn cost more than at anytime in our history. Foreign creditors hold $12 trillion in U.S. government securities, the result of decades of staggering trade deficits.

We are still fighting to secure constitutional governments in Afghanistan and Iraq. Iran, contrary to headlines drawn from the recent National Intelligence Estimate, is likely still betting the U.S. can't prevent it from getting the bomb.

No one knows how many illegal aliens are in the United States --11, 15, 18 million? -- only that we can neither go on with open borders nor apparently close them.

Only a third of the public approves of the Bush administration. The ratings of Congress are even lower.

Our self-proclaimed reformers turn out to have feet of clay. New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer made a career of taking on Wall Street greed -- in between spending laundered money on high-priced call girls.

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., promised a new politics of racial healing and political honesty. Yet despite eloquent speeches, he still cannot adequately explain why for 20 years he attended and subsidized a church whose fiery preacher spewed the worst sort of racial hatred and divisiveness.

So, is the "magic over"?

Not quite yet. The remedies for our current maladies require a moderate curbing of our extravagant lifestyle and voracious consumption. Given the vast size of the U.S. economy, we could easily restrain spending and begin paying off our debts at a rapid clip. Inflation and unemployment are still relatively low.

Over ninety-four percent of Americans with home mortgages meet their monthly obligations. More Americans own homes than ever before. More immigrants seek out America than any other nation.

We have not been hit by terrorists in over six years. And, slowly, both Afghanistan and Iraq are showing political progress and declining violence, despite recent suicide bombings.

In a relative sense, our problems pale in comparison to our past world wars and depressions, or those of our current competitors.

Unlike the United States, which is funding democratic change in Afghanistan and Iraq, Russia and China offer only brutal solutions to quench Islamic separatists in Chechnya and Xinjiang province. Neither country can square economic progress with human rights. Both have polluted their natural environment in ways inconceivable here.

Meanwhile, a shrinking Europe is disarmed in a dangerous world and can't assimilate its growing minorities.

We are still the world's third-largest petroleum producer with vast amounts of untouched oil. We have the world's largest coal reserves. Americans could use coal and nuclear power to generate most of our electrical needs and to charge hybrid electric cars.

Our universities remain the world's best, and we lead the world in cutting-edge technological innovation.

American elections are more wide open than ever before. Our next president will either be the first septuagenarian (when taking office), woman or African-American in the job.

America remains a meritocracy where no one is above the law. Unlike so many other places, success is predicated more on ability than race, class, tribe, religion or gender.

So while we exhibit outward symptoms of sickness, our inner constitution -- the real barometer of the health of a civilization -- is sound.

More importantly, there is a growing sense that Americans want to sacrifice to ensure our pre-eminence. Many conservatives are accepting that they can't just cut taxes without spending limits. And many liberals are seeing that more federal programs mean more dependency and debt for our children.

Divisive race and gender identity politics are becoming tired. A multi-racial America in a strife-filled world works. So why copy the tribal separatism and divisions of the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda or most of the Middle East?

Because the United States is so huge, free, wealthy and dynamic, we can cause enormous problems overnight. But by the same token, we can curb these excesses quickly. The solution to so many of the hopeless headlines is entirely in our hands.

2) SHOCK AND AWFUL
IRAQ: JUSTIFIABLE WAR, PLAGUED BY DC INCOMPETENCE
By Ralph Peters


March 20, 2008 -- ON the fifth anniversary of our campaign to remove Saddam Hussein's monstrous regime from power, it's hard not to despair - not because of the situation in Iraq, which has improved remarkably, but because so few American politicians in either party appear to have drawn the right lessons from our experience.

For the record, I still believe that deposing Saddam was justified and useful. He was a Hitler, and he was our enemy. But I'm still reeling from the snotty incompetence with which the Bush administration acted. Above all, I'm ashamed that I trusted President Bush and his circle to have a plan for the day after Baghdad fell.

All of our other failures in Iraq stemmed from this fundamental neglect of a basic requirement: Our soldiers and Marines reached Baghdad without orders or strategic guidance. We became the dog that caught the fire truck. The tragedy is that it didn't have to be that way: One thing our military knows how to do is plan.

But the relevant staffs were prevented from doing so. Ideologues and avaricious friends of the administration wanted the war for their own reasons, and they didn't intend to alarm Congress with high cost estimates. So they trusted the perfumed tales of a convicted criminal, Ahmad Chalabi, rather than the professional views of the last honorable generals then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had not yet removed.

Even on the purely military side, the White House put its faith in hopeless gimmicks, such as "Shock and Awe," convincing itself that ground troops were an afterthought. Of course, it was the old-fashioned grunts, tankers, gunners and supply sergeants who had to get us to Baghdad.

Iraq just didn't have to be this hard. We made it immeasurably more difficult by trying to make war on the cheap, then turning the war's aftermath into a looting orgy for well-connected contractors.

The fundamental requirement to provide security for the population - a troop-intensive endeavor - went ignored, while grandiose reconstruction projects drained the pockets of American taxpayers, only to come to nothing. Our troops and their battlefield leaders did all they could under Rumsfeld's yes-man generals, but every other branch of our government ducked. The "inter-agency effort" was a joke.

Back home, Congress indulged in cheap partisanship. The State Department concentrated on building the world's largest and most-expensive embassy - a project worthy of Saddam himself - and let the spectacularly incompetent Ambassador L. Paul Bremer wreck what little hope of maintaining peace remained.

The administration's solution to worsening conditions was to send more compliant generals, to continue listening to think-tank "experts" who had never served in uniform, to keep cutting fat checks for contractors and to let our troops bleed between photo ops.

None of us should mistake the fundamental truth: The only reason our efforts in Iraq have not failed completely has been the sustained valor and commitment of those in uniform. Our military was the only government entity that did its job. Its thanks have been betrayal by the political opposition at home, a rash of movies portraying our troops as psychotics and crocodile tears from protesters who secretly delight in US casualties.

In 2007, after four bloody years of denial, a desperate administration finally got serious about military requirements, sending the additional troops (now weary) who should have been deployed in 2003. With the wretched Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld headed out the door, the president also permitted a serious soldier, Gen. David Petraeus, to take charge in Iraq.

We got lucky, too. Our global enemies in al Qaeda alienated Iraq's Sunni Arabs in record time, indulging in grotesque forms of oppression and terror even Saddam and his sons had never dared to inflict. Those who recently had sided with al Qaeda against us found that we were their only hope to be rid of al Qaeda. The Sunni-Arab flip in Iraq has been a great strategic victory that resounds throughout the Muslim world.

The troop surge also had a powerful psychological effect, convincing enemies, fence-sitters and local allies alike that we weren't quitting - despite the results of the US midterm elections. And the Iraqi people were just sick of the violence. By 2007, most had gotten the worst bile out of their systems and wanted normal lives.

Even the often chaotic, corruption-addled Iraqi legislature managed to pass more major bills in 2007 than the US Congress sent to the president's desk.

The situation in Iraq is improving, as I've seen with my own eyes. Despite our cavalcade of errors, there's hope (no audacity required) for a reasonable outcome: an Iraq that treats its citizens decently and that neither harbors terrorists nor menaces its neighbors.

We'll need to sustain a longer commitment than would have been the case had the administration's know-it-alls not regarded our best generals as fools back in 2003. The administration's disgraceful treatment of then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki was paradigmatic of its arrogance.

Meanwhile, those who held power over our military and misused it so disgracefully will never suffer as our military casualties and their families will for the rest of their lives. At most, those privileged men will experience disappointing sales of their self-serving memoirs. Cowards sent heroes to die.

I cannot help repeating the heartbreaking truth that it didn't have to be this hard, this bloody, or this expensive. This is what happens when war is made by amateurs. Has anyone in Washington learned that lesson?

It's a lesson that the left, as well as the right, needs to take to heart. While the Bush administration deserves every lash it gets, domestic opponents of the war have been hypocritical, dishonest and destructive. As this column long has maintained, had President Bill Clinton sent our troops to depose Saddam Hussein, Democrats would have celebrated him as the greatest liberator since Abraham Lincoln.

The problem for the left wasn't really what was done, but who did it. And hatred of Bush actually empowered him - the administration had no incentive to reach out to those who wouldn't reach back, so it just did as it pleased. Today's "antiwar" left also contains plenty of politicians who backed interventions in the Balkans and Somalia, who would be glad to send American troops to Darfur today and who voted for war in Iraq.

Both parties are quick to employ our military. It's the only foreign-policy tool we have that works. Neither party is a peace party - each just wants to pick its own wars. The hypocrisy in Washington is as astonishing as the dishonesty about security needs.

Through it all, amazingly, our young men and women in uniform continue to serve honorably and skillfully, holding together not just Iraq but a fractured world. We whine and bicker. They re-enlist and go back to Iraq and Afghanistan. Where they're targets of scorn for our elitist media.

Given all our mistakes and partisan agendas, it's amazing Iraq is going as well as it is today. The improved conditions in Baghdad and most of the provinces verge on the miraculous, given the situation a year ago. But we've paid a needlessly high price.

As for President Bush, let's face it: He's been our most-inept wartime leader since James Madison fled the White House, leaving his wife behind to save what she could before the British troops arrived with torches.

That said, Bush has displayed one single worthy characteristic (one he shares, oddly enough, with Madison): He won't surrender.

As horribly as Bush performed for our first four years in Iraq, it's still possible to do worse. Both of the Democratic Party's presidential aspirants believe that the answer is to flee, handing the terrorists we've defeated a strategic victory, inviting a genocidal civil war, further destabilizing the Middle East, and sending the message to the world that Americans lack the courage and staying power of our enemies.

Declaring failure isn't the correct response to failure narrowly avoided. Both Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton would kill a struggling convalescent. Bush's shambles would become the next administration's catastrophe. As president, Obama or Clinton would finish with far more blood on his or her hands than President Bush has on his.

Was deposing Saddam Hussein a good idea? Yes. I still believe that. It was an act of vision and virtue. It's only a shame we didn't do it competently.


3) A New New Deal
By Harold Meyerson


Putting together everything we've learned over the past 10 days about high finance in Manhattan, one thing is clear: If Eliot Spitzer had saved all the money he apparently paid "Kristen" and her co-workers at the Emperors Club, he could have bought Bear Stearns.

Manhattan's culture of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous collapse has been on display in recent days as it has not since 1929. Now, as then, an edifice of shaky credit is toppling. Now, as then, what we took to be prosperity turns out to have been a bubble.

The key lesson Americans need to learn from today's troubles is how to distinguish faux prosperity from the genuine article. Over the past hundred years, we've experienced both. In the three decades after World War II we had the real thing. Led by our manufacturing sector, productivity increased at a rapid clip and median family incomes rose at a virtually identical rate. The value of the American work product grew significantly and that value was shared with American workers.

But we've had other periods of apparent prosperity that were based not on broad increases in personal income but on the inflation of assets. So it was with stocks in the late 1920s, a time when most Americans lacked substantial purchasing power. So it was with the dot-com bubble of the late '90s. And so it was with the rising value of American homes in recent years.

In the broadest sense, the American economy over the past three decades has been powered by ever more ingenious extensions of credit to a people whose incomes were going nowhere, unless they were in the wealthiest 10 percent of the population. There were some limits, as a result of New Deal regulations, on how old-line banks could extend credit, but investment banks and other institutions not legally obliged to keep a certain amount of cash in reserve operated under no such constraints. The risk was that one day, burdened by debt and static incomes, American homeowners would have trouble making their payments and the house of cards would come tumbling down. But what were the odds of that?

Pretty good, it turns out. And out of this debacle emerge two paramount lessons for our highest-ranking policymakers: Regulate the American financial sector, which is now turning to the government for a bailout. And commit the government to doing all in its power to generate broad-based prosperity, through laws enabling workers to bargain collectively, through a massive public commitment to projects "greening" the economy, through provision of universal health coverage and affordable college educations.

These are themes that should be central to the candidacies of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. If the Democrats are to win this year and then govern effectively, they need to offer a new New Deal to the American people. John McCain is at a distinct disadvantage in such a discussion: As the self-proclaimed heir to Ronald Reagan's legacy, he's no friend of the original New Deal, much less a new one.

On the regulatory front, now that the Federal Reserve is extending credit to the 20 largest dealers in securities -- affording them the same advantages it had hitherto extended only to regulated commercial banks -- it's only proper that those firms be subjected to regulations similar to those under which banks operate (which themselves need strengthening). Otherwise, the government is assuming risks incurred by the wildest operators on the Street.

Which, of course, is exactly what the Fed did in agreeing to take $30 billion of Bear Stearns's riskiest securities off J.P. Morgan's hands as a condition of its purchase of Bear. The Fed justifies these extensions of credit and assumptions of risk as necessary to prevent a financial meltdown, and the Fed is probably right. But what about the issue of equity, in both senses of that word -- ownership and fairness?

Specifically, if the Fed's role in the Bear buyout is a model for its dealings in future Wall Street failures, it could well pay good money for warehouses of worthless paper while future J.P. Morgans make off with the money-making sides of the beleaguered banks. This solution doesn't look to be a great deal for the American public. It looks even worse when we recall that other governments -- including those of China, Abu Dhabi and Kuwait -- have also been bailing out our banks, through sovereign wealth funds, while getting shares in those companies in return.

Can't the American people get as good a deal as the Chinese when our government bails out a major American bank? At minimum, some public representation on the bank's board? Reshaping the U.S. economy, now part of the global economy, so that it actually benefits Americans won't be easy. But it must be done. Bring on the new New Deal.


4) Obama's voting record and possible insights into what to expect from an Obama Presidency. The only comment I will make is that it is evident he is politically far to the left.

· He voted against banning partial birth abortion.
· He voted no on notifying parents of minors who get out-of-state abortions.
· Supports affirmative action in Colleges and Government.
· In 2001 he questioned harsh penalties for drug dealing.
· Says he will deal with street level drug dealing as a minimum wage affair.
· Admitted marijuana and cocaine use in high school and in college.
· His religious convictions are nebulous.
· He says he will meet with Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Kim Jung Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
· Has said that one of his first goals after being elected would be to have a conference with all Muslim nations.
· Opposed the Patriot Act.
· First bill he signed that was passed was campaign finance reform.
· Voted No on prohibiting law suits against gun manufacturers.
· Supports universal health-care.
· Voted yes on providing habeas corpus for Guantanamo detainees.
· Supports granting driver's licenses to illegal immigrants.
· Supports extending welfare to illegal immigrants.
· Voted yes on comprehensive immigration reform.
· Voted yes on allowing illegal aliens to participate in Social Security.
· Wants to make the minimum wage a "living wage".
· Voted with Democratic Party 96 percent of 251 votes.
· Is a believer in the separation of church and state.
· Opposed to any efforts to Privatize Social Security and instead supports increasing the amount of tax paid.
· He voted No on repealing the Alternative Minimum Tax
· He voted No on repealing the "Death" Tax
· He wants to raise the Capital Gains Tax.
· Has repeatedly said the surge in Iraq has not succeeded.
· He is ranked as the most liberal Senator in the Senate today and that takes some doing. His record in Illinois was rather benign voting present� 100 times.

5) Peres to Lavrov: Syria still supplying Hizbullah with arms

President Shimon Peres told visiting Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that Syria was continuing to transfer weapons to Hizbullah in Lebanon.

Lavrov, who had arrived in Israel on Thursday after meeting exiled Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal and Syrian President Basher al-Assad in Damascus, told Peres that his country had no information regarding the matter.

Earlier, it was revealed that the future of the Golan Heights will be centerpiece of a peace conference Russia hopes to host during 2008.

The conference, Reuters reported, is intended by the Russians as a direct continuation of the Annapolis peace conference hosted by US President George W. Bush late in 2007.

Lavrov referred to the planned conference his meeting with Mashaal and Assad in Damascus.

According to the report, Mashal told the Russian official that Hamas was ready for a truce with Israel under the condition that an agreement was "comprehensive, simultaneous and reciprocal."

During their meeting Wednesday, Mashaal also told Lavrov that Hamas was also ready to hold talks with Fatah. Lavrov will meet with Fatah officials on Friday.

The Al-Jazeera report came on the same day that London-based daily Asharq Al-Awsat cited Mashaal as saying that "there will never be any contact between us and Israel!"

"More than one Arab and international official has contacted Hamas. Our response to them is that we are not initiating any calm, because we are the nation that is being attacked, and therefore it is our right to protect ourselves," Mashaal told Asharq Al-Awsat. Mashaal explained that "Anyone who is interested in speaking about calm should first speak to the side of the aggressor and the conqueror, and after that we can consider it seriously."

"Any discussion of a calm has to guarantee that Israel will stop every type of occupation in Gaza and in the West Bank, and will open the border crossings," Mashaal continued. "Only then will we be able to discuss it." When the senior Hamas figure was asked if any contacts were taking place between Israel and Hamas, he responded "No, No. There will never be any contact between us and Israel!"

However, Mashaal stated that "Egypt is investing effort [to implement a cease fire]. We said to them what I just said now. Those are the things that they heard from us."

Assad, who also met with Lavrov, discussed the option of holding a Middle East peace conference in Russia. They also spoke of the political crisis in neighboring Lebanon.

Meanwhile, the London-based daily Al-Hayat quoted sources stating that senior members of the Americans and Egyptian administrations were holding discussions in order to set a time for Egyptian intelligence chief Omer Suleiman's upcoming visit to Washington.

According to the sources, the Egyptian intelligence chief's visit is related to various topics, mainly to the connection between the two countries, American aid to Egypt, obtaining American support for Egyptian efforts to reach calm between Israel and the Palestinians, and the question of supervision of the border with Gaza.

Suleiman, the sources claimed, will call for the Americans to encourage Israel to agree to Egyptian demands to bolster its forces along the border with the Gaza Strip, in order to prevent incidences of smuggling or infiltration via Sinai. The sources mentioned that increasing Egyptian presence at the border with the Gaza Strip will require approval by the Knesset, as it will require a change in the Peace Agreement of 1978 between Israel and Egypt.

The sources also claimed that the issue of bolstering Egyptian presence at the Gaza border was not discussed during Tuesday's talks between Suleiman and the head of the Defense Ministry's diplomatic security bureau, Maj -Gen (res.) Amos Gilad. According to sources, during these talks the two leaders discussed the topic of attaining calm [between Israel and the Palestinians], and the revocation of the blockade on the Palestinians.


6)Time to change direction: We need leadership that doesn’t convey sense of weakness or cling to flawed notions
By Benyamin Elon


Purim is a holiday of great salvation. A comprehensive plan for exterminating the Jews was placed on the agenda, endorsed by the leader of a superpower, and at the last moment was averted as a result of quick action by Mordechai, the devotion of Esther, and plenty of covert help from above. All of the above facilitated developments that prevented the story from having an utterly different ending – had such ending materialized, we would not be here today.


And still, despite the great salvation, the Talmud rules that in Purim we should refrain from reciting “Hallel” – the psalms expressing praise for God and thanksgiving, which are recited in all the holidays. Why? The Talmudic Sage Raba says that “we are still the slaves of Ahasuerus.” The people of Israel was indeed spared the extermination decree, but it remained in the Diaspora under the regime of the Persian king and subject to his caprices.


This year, we shall be celebrating Purim in the State of Israel, which is celebrating 60 years of independence. Yet sadly, in many ways it appears that we are not yet free. The terrible massacre in the Mercaz Harav yeshiva attests first and foremost to the great weakness conveyed by the State of Israel both to the outside world and domestically.


Failure in Gaza

What is important here is not the question of why an east Jerusalem Arab can walk around freely in the State of Israel or where the security guard was, but rather, what formed the impression that one can hit Israel with impunity.


This impression started emerging far away from Jerusalem, in the north and south, where the enemy learned that it can attack us after we withdraw, wear us down, and irritate us, while we don’t know how to respond. Our leadership conveys a sense of weakness and confusion. We erased the entire settlement enterprise in the Gaza region in order to “disengage,” even though it was clear to anyone with eyes in their head that Gaza would not disappear – rather, it would only become more difficult to access. Now, those who led this move find it difficult to recognize the mistake and change direction.


Yet we must make no mistake about it: Tel Aviv and Sderot are two sides of the same coin. If we can be hit in Sderot, we can be attacked in Tel Aviv too. If the State of Israel conveys a sense of weakness even its Arab citizens, who are torn between loyalty to their people and loyalty to their country, will choose the former option.


This weakness can only be defeated by leadership with a vision that would be able to leave behind old notions proven as failures. Recycling futile and dangerous peace processes, or alternately, clinging to a policy of unilateralism will leave all of us embroiled in this bloody cycle for many years to come.


Following an arid and painful winter, our people deserves a spring that presents a new horizon and a new hope.