Hamas snow Job on Carter and Obama on us?

Sent to me by a fellow memo reading who claims: " there is an acute mis-understanding of international law and Fukiyama's Thesis." What Kagan is suggesting is that autocracy is being made to work and both the leaders of China and Russia have concluded, if their nations are strong and their people economically comfortable, they can withstand the West's demand for democratization. (See 1 below.)

The second is also from a fellow memo reader and is a tongue in cheek piece equating casualties rates in Iraq with those in DC and concludes DC is safer. Photo not showing depicts U.S.soldier shaking hands with Sen. Clinton and signaling being done under duress. (See 2 below.)

Israel commander sacked over Hamas oil depot incursion. (See 3 below.)

Carter accomplished his goal - Hamas will agree to a cease fire if Israel gives back all land captured in the '67 War and allows the Palestinians to establish a capital in Jerusalem. Hamas, however, will not recognize Israel. Carter can now claim the Apartheid nation of Israel is being intransigent.

Perhaps Carter could work a deal with Mexico that it would take back its 12 million citizens if we give back Texas and New Mexico. Go Jimmy! (See 4 and 5 below.)

Ickes sticks. (See 6 below.)

Tuesday is countdown time for Hilary and even if she wins in Pennsylvania, there is no way she can win more delegates by the time Puerto Rico votes unless she gets more than 60% of the remaining vote. Pressure will re-mount, if she does not win big in Pa., to quit. Hillary, on the other hand, figures if she stays in, and Obama keeps making mistakes, super-delegates may, themselves, be forced to do some some re-thinking. The problem is, what it has been all along - the Party cannot dump Obama who has the largest vote without alienating future voters and their Black constituents. Party big-wigs may have backed themselves into riding a horse with weak legs because the Far Left controls their Party.

So the Democrats could be fielding a presidential candidate who attended a church for twenty years whose Reverend has serious issues with our country, a wife who is ashamed of our nation, associations who are fairly nefarious and one in particular who would love to continue bombing out nation's buildings and from the candidates own lips words suggesting he does not understand why many believe in God and worship guns! Hell, Democrats could run me and probably be safer.

Then why go with Obama? Because Obama has garnered more votes than his competition, has gotten a boost from a fawning press and media who became so embarrassed by Hillary and Aw Shucks Bill, they chose to dump them and finally because he raised more money and was able to finesse who he is. Pretty amazing!

Now the question is can McCain capitalize on this foolishness and will American voters continue to allow themselves to be snowed?



1) The End of The End of History: Why the 21st Century Will Look Like the Nineteenth
By Robert Kagan



I.

In the early 1990s, optimism was understandable. The collapse of the Communist Empire and the apparent embrace of democracy by Russia seemed to augur a new era of global convergence. The great adversaries of the Cold War suddenly shared many common goals, including a desire for economic and political integration. Even after the political crackdown that began in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and the disturbing signs of instability that appeared in Russia after 1993, most Americans and Europeans believed China and Russia were on a path toward liberalism. Boris Yeltsin's Russia seemed committed to the liberal model of political economy and closer integration with the West. The Chinese government's commitment to economic opening, it was hoped, would inevitably produce a political opening, whether Chinese leaders wanted it or not.

Such determinism was characteristic of post-Cold War thinking. In a globalized economy, it was widely believed, nations had no choice but to liberalize--first economically, then politically--if they wanted to compete and to survive. As national economies approached a certain level of per capita income, growing middle classes would demand legal and political power, which rulers would have to grant if they wanted their nations to prosper. Since democratic capitalism was the only model of success for developing societies, all societies would eventually choose such a path. In the battle of ideas, liberalism had triumphed. "At the end of history," as Francis Fukuyama famously put it, "there are no serious ideological competitors left to liberal democracy. "

The economic and ideological determinism of the early post-Cold War years produced two broad assumptions that shaped both policies and expectations. One was an abiding belief in the inevitability of human progress, the belief that history moves in only one direction--a faith born in the Enlightenment, dashed by the brutality of the twentieth century, and given new life by the fall of communism. The other was a prescription for patience and restraint. Rather than confront and challenge autocracies, it was better to enmesh them in the global economy, support the rule of law and the creation of stronger state institutions, and let the ineluctable forces of human progress work their magic.

But the grand expectation that the world had entered an era of convergence has proved wrong. We have entered an age of divergence. Since the mid-1990s, the nascent democratic transformation in Russia has given way to what may best be described as a "czarist" political system, in which all important decisions are taken by one man and his powerful coterie. Vladimir Putin and his spokesmen speak of "democracy," but they define the term much as the Chinese do. For Putin, democracy is not about competitive elections so much as the implementation of popular will. The regime is democratic because the government consults with and listens to the Russian people, discerns what they need and want, and then attempts to give it to them. As Ivan Krastev notes, "The Kremlin thinks not in terms of citizens' rights but in terms of the population's needs. " Elections do not offer a choice, but only a chance to ratify choices made by Putin, as in the recent "selection" of Dmitry Medvedev to succeed Putin as president. The legal system is a tool to be used against political opponents. The party system has been purged of political groups not approved by Putin. The power apparatus around Putin controls most of the national media, especially television.

A majority of Russians seem content with autocratic rule, at least for now. Unlike communism, Putin's rule does not impinge much on their personal lives, as long as they stay out of politics. Unlike the tumultuous Russian democracy of the 1990s, the present government, thanks to the high prices of oil and gas, has at least produced a rising standard of living. Putin's efforts to undo the humiliating post-Cold War settlement and restore the greatness of Russia is popular. His political advisers believe that "avenging the demise of the Soviet Union will keep us in power."

For Putin, there is a symbiosis between the nature of his rule and his success in returning Russia to "great power" status. Strength and control at home allow Russia to be strong abroad. Strength abroad justifies strong rule at home. Russia 's growing international clout also shields Putin's autocracy from foreign pressures. European and American statesmen find they have a full plate of international issues on which a strong Russia can make life easier or harder, from energy supplies to Iran . Under the circumstances, they are far less eager to confront the Russian government over the fairness of its elections or the openness of its political system.



Putin has created a guiding national philosophy out of the correlation between power abroad and autocracy at home. He calls Russia a "sovereign democracy," a term that neatly encapsulates the nation's return to greatness, its escape from the impositions of the West, and its adoption of an "eastern" model of democracy. In Putin's view, only a great and powerful Russia is strong enough to defend and advance its interests, and also strong enough to resist foreign demands for western political reforms that Russia neither needs nor wants. In the 1990s, Russia wielded little influence on the world stage but opened itself wide to the intrusions of foreign businessmen and foreign governments. Putin wants Russia to have great influence over others around the world while shielding itself from the influence of unwelcome global forces.

Putin looks to China as a model, and for good reason. While the Soviet Union collapsed and lost everything after 1989, as first Mikhail Gorbachev and then Boris Yeltsin sued for peace with the West and invited its meddling, Chinese leaders weathered their own crisis by defying the West. They cracked down at home and then battened down the hatches until the storm of Western disapproval blew over. The results in the two great powers were instructive. Russia by the end of the 1990s was flat on its back. China was on its way to unprecedented economic growth, military power, and international influence.

The Chinese learned from the Soviet experience, too. While the democratic world waited after Tiananmen Square for China to resume its inevitable course upward to liberal democratic modernity, the Chinese Communist Party leadership set about shoring up its dominance in the nation. In recent years, despite repeated predictions in the West of an imminent political opening, the trend has been toward consolidation of the Chinese autocracy rather than reform. As it became clear that the Chinese leadership had no intention of reforming itself out of power, Western observers hoped that they might be forced to reform despite themselves, if only to keep China on a path of economic growth and to manage the myriad internal problems that growth brings. But that now seems unlikely as well.

Today most economists believe that China 's remarkable growth should be sustainable for some time to come. Keen observers of the Chinese political system see a sufficient combination of competence and ruthlessness on the part of the Chinese leadership to handle problems as they arise, and a population prepared to accept autocratic government so long as economic growth continues. As Andrew J. Nathan and Bruce Gilley have written, the present leadership is unlikely to "succumb to a rising tide of problems or surrender graciously to liberal values infiltrated by means of economic globalization." Until events "justify taking a different attitude, the outside world would be well advised to treat the new Chinese leaders as if they are here to stay."

Growing national wealth and autocracy have proven compatible after all. Autocrats learn and adjust. The autocracies of Russia and China have figured out how to permit open economic activity while suppressing political activity. They have seen that people making money will keep their noses out of politics, especially if they know their noses will be cut off. New wealth gives autocracies a greater ability to control information--to monopolize television stations, and to keep a grip on Internet traffic--often with the assistance of foreign corporations eager to do business with them.

In the long run, rising prosperity may well produce political liberalism, but how long is the long run? It may be too long to have any strategic or geopolitical relevance. As the old joke goes, Germany launched itself on a trajectory of economic modernization in the late nineteenth century and within six decades it became a fully fledged democracy: the only problem was what happened in the intervening years. So the world waits for change, but in the meantime two of the world's largest nations, with more than a billion and a half people and the second-and third-largest militaries between them, now have governments committed to autocratic rule and may be able to sustain themselves in power for the foreseeable future.

The power and the durability of these autocracies will shape the international system in profound ways. The world is not about to embark on a new ideological struggle of the kind that dominated the Cold War. But the new era, rather than being a time of "universal values," will be one of growing tensions and sometimes confrontation between the forces of democracy and the forces of autocracy.

During the Cold War, it was easy to forget that the struggle between liberalism and autocracy has endured since the Enlightenment. It was the issue that divided the United States from much of Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It divided Europe itself through much of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Now it is returning to dominate the geopolitics of the twenty-first century.



II.

The presumption over the past decade has been that when Chinese and Russian leaders stopped believing in communism, they stopped believing in anything. They had become pragmatists, without ideology or belief, simply pursuing their own and their nation's interests. But the rulers of China and Russia , like the rulers of autocracies in the past, do possess a set of beliefs that guides them in both domestic and foreign policy. It is not an all-encompassing, systematic worldview like Marxism or liberalism. But it is a comprehensive set of beliefs about government and society and the proper relationship between rulers and their people.

The rulers of Russia and China believe in the virtues of a strong central government and disdain the weaknesses of the democratic system. They believe their large and fractious nations need order and stability to prosper. They believe that the vacillation and chaos of democracy would impoverish and shatter their nations, and in the case of Russia that it already did so. They believe that strong rule at home is necessary if their nations are to be powerful and respected in the world, capable of safeguarding and advancing their interests. Chinese rulers know from their nation's long and often turbulent history that political disruptions and divisions at home invite foreign interference and depredation. What the world applauded as a political opening in 1989, Chinese leaders regard as a near-fatal display of disagreement.

So the Chinese and Russian leaders are not simply autocrats. They believe in autocracy. The modern liberal mind at "the end of history" may not appreciate the attractions of this idea, or the enduring appeal of autocracy in this globalized world; but historically speaking, Russian and Chinese rulers are in illustrious company. The European monarchs of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries were thoroughly convinced, as a matter of political philosophy, of the superiority of their form of government. Along with Plato, Aristotle, and every other great thinker prior to the eighteenth century, they regarded democracy as the rule of the licentious, greedy, and ignorant mob. And in the first half of the twentieth century, for every democratic power like the United States , Great Britain , and France , there was an equally strong autocratic power, in Germany , Russia , and Japan . The many smaller nations around the world were at least as likely to model themselves on the autocracies as on the democracies. Only in the past half-century has democracy gained widespread popularity around the world, and only since the 1980s, really, has it become the most common form of government.

The rulers of Russia and China are not the first to suggest that it may not be the best. It is often claimed that the autocrats in Moscow and Beijing are interested only in lining their pockets--that the Chinese leaders are just kleptocrats and that the Kremlin is "Russia, Inc." Of course the rulers of China and Russia look out for themselves, enjoying power for its own sake and also for the wealth and luxuries it brings. But so did many great kings, emperors, and popes in the past. People who wield power like to wield power, and it usually makes them rich. But they also often believe they are wielding it in the service of a higher cause. By providing order, by producing economic success, by holding their nations together and leading them to a position of international influence, respectability, and power, they believe that they are serving their people. Nor is it at all clear, for the moment, that the majority of people they rule in either China or Russia disagree.



If autocracies have their own set of beliefs, they also have their own set of interests. The rulers of China and Russia may indeed be pragmatic, but they are pragmatic in pursuing policies that will keep themselves in power. Putin sees no distinction between his own interests and Russia 's interests. When Louis XIV remarked, "L'Etat, c'est moi," he was declaring himself the living embodiment of the French nation, asserting that his interests and France 's interests were the same. When Putin declares that he has a "moral right" to continue to rule Russia, he is saying that it is in Russia's interest for him to remain in power; and just as Louis XIV could not imagine it being in the interests of France for the monarchy to perish, neither can Putin imagine it could be in Russia's interest for him to give up power. As Minxin Pei has pointed out, when Chinese leaders face the choice between economic efficiency and the preservation of power, they choose power. That is their pragmatism.

The autocrats' interest in self-preservation affects their approach to foreign policy as well. In the age of monarchy, foreign policy served the interests of the monarch. In the age of religious conflict, it served the interests of the church. In the modern era, democracies have pursued foreign policies to make the world safer for democracy. Today the autocrats pursue foreign policies aimed at making the world safe, if not for all autocracies, then at least for their own.

Russia is a prime example of how a nation's governance at home shapes its relations with the rest of the world. A democratizing Russia , and even Gorbachev's democratizing Soviet Union , took a fairly benign view of NATO and tended to have good relations with neighbors that were treading the same path toward democracy. But today Putin regards NATO as a hostile entity, calls its enlargement "a serious provocation," and asks, "Against whom is this expansion intended?" In fact, NATO is no more aggressive or provocative toward Moscow today than it was in Gorbachev's time. If anything, it is less so. NATO has become more benign, just as Russia has become more aggressive. When Russia was more democratic, Russian leaders saw their interests as intimately bound up with the liberal democratic world. Today the Russian government is suspicious of the democracies, especially those near its borders.

This is understandable. For all their growing wealth and influence, the twenty-first-century autocracies remain a minority in the world. As some Chinese scholars put it, democratic liberalism became dominant after the fall of Soviet communism and is sustained by an "international hierarchy dominated by the United States and its democratic allies," a "U.S.-centered great power group." The Chinese and Russians feel like outliers from this exclusive and powerful clique. "You western countries, you decide the rules, you give the grades, you say, 'you have been a bad boy,'" complained one Chinese official at Davos this year. Putin also complains that "we are constantly being taught about democracy."

The post-Cold War world looks very different when seen from autocratic Beijing and Moscow than it does from democratic Washington , London , Paris , Berlin , or Brussels . For the leaders in Beijing , it was not so long ago that the international democratic community, led by the United States , turned on China with a rare unity, imposing economic sanctions and even more painful diplomatic isolation after the crackdown at Tiananmen Square . The Chinese Communist Party, according to Fei-Ling Wang, has had a "persisting sense of political insecurity ever since," a "constant fear of being singled out and targeted by the leading powers, especially the United States," and a "profound concern for the regime's survival, bordering on a sense of being under siege."

In the 1990s, the democratic world, led by the United States , toppled autocratic governments in Panama and Haiti and twice made war against Milosevic's Serbia . International nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), well-funded by western governments, trained opposition parties and supported electoral reforms in Central and Eastern Europe and in Central Asia . In 2000, internationally financed opposition forces and international election monitors finally brought down Milosevic. Within a year he was shipped off to The Hague , and five years later he was dead in prison.

From 2003 to 2005, western democratic countries and NGOs provided pro-western and pro-democratic parties and politicians with the financing and organizational help that allowed them to topple other autocrats in Georgia , Kyrgyzstan , and Ukraine . Europeans and Americans celebrated these revolutions and saw in them the natural unfolding of humanity's destined political evolution toward liberal democracy. But leaders in Beijing and Moscow saw these events in geopolitical terms, as western-funded, CIA-inspired coups that furthered the hegemony of America and its European allies. The upheavals in Ukraine and Georgia , Dmitri Trenin notes, "further poisoned the Russian-Western relationship" and helped to persuade the Kremlin to "complete its turnaround in foreign policy."

The color revolutions worried Putin not only because they checked his regional ambitions, but also because he feared that the examples of Ukraine and Georgia could be repeated in Russia . They convinced him by 2006 to control, restrict, and in some cases close down the activities of international NGOs. Even today he warns against the "jackals" in Russia who "got a crash course from foreign experts, got trained in neighboring republics and will try here now." His worries may seem absurd or disingenuous, but they are not misplaced. In the post-Cold War era, a triumphant liberalism has sought to expand its triumph by establishing as an international principle the right of the "international community" to intervene against sovereign states that abuse the rights of their people. International NGOs interfere in domestic politics; international organizations like the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe monitor and pass judgment on elections; international legal experts talk about modifying international law to include such novel concepts as "the responsibility to protect" or a "voluntary sovereignty waiver."

In theory, these innovations apply to everyone. In practice, they chiefly provide democratic nations the right to intervene in the affairs of non-democratic nations. Unfortunately for China , Russia , and other autocracies, this is one area where there is no great transatlantic divide. The United States , though traditionally jealous of its own sovereignty, has always been ready to interfere in the internal affairs of other nations. The nations of Europe, once the great proponents (in theory) of the Westphalian order of inviolable state sovereignty, have now reversed course and produced a system, as Robert Cooper has observed, of constant "mutual interference in each other's domestic affairs, right down to beer and sausages." This has become one of the great schisms in the international system dividing the democratic world and the autocracies. For three centuries, international law, with its strictures against interference in the internal affairs of nations, has tended to protect autocracies. Now the democratic world is in the process of removing that protection, while the autocrats rush to defend the principle of sovereign inviolability.

For this reason, the war in Kosovo in 1999 was a more dramatic and disturbing turning point for Russia and China than was the Iraq war of 2003. Both nations opposed NATO's intervention, and not only because China 's embassy was bombed by an American warplane and Russia 's distant Slavic cousins in Serbia were on the receiving end of the NATO air campaign. When Russia threatened to block military action at the U.N. Security Council, NATO simply sidestepped the United Nations and took it upon itself to authorize action, thus negating one of Russia 's few tools of international influence. From Moscow 's perspective, it was a clear violation of international law, not only because the war lacked a U.N. imprimatur but because it was an intervention into a sovereign nation that had committed no external aggression. To the Chinese, it was just "liberal hegemonism." Years later Putin was still insisting that the western nations "leave behind this disdain for international law" and not attempt to "substitute NATO or the EU for the U.N."

The Russians and the Chinese were in good company. At the time, no less an authority than Henry Kissinger warned that "the abrupt abandonment of the concept of national sovereignty" risked a world unmoored from any notion of international legal order. The United States , of course, paid this little heed: it had intervened and overthrown sovereign governments dozens of times throughout its history. But even postmodern Europe set aside legal niceties in the interest of what it regarded as a higher Enlightenment morality. As Robert Cooper puts it, Europe was driven to act by "the collective memory of the Holocaust and the streams of displaced people created by extreme nationalism in the Second World War." This "common historical experience" provided all the justification necessary. Kissinger warned that in a world of "competing truths, " such a doctrine risked chaos. Cooper responded that postmodern Europe was "no longer a zone of competing truths."

But the conflict between international law and liberal morality is one that the democracies have not been able to finesse. As Chinese officials asked at the time of Tiananmen Square and have continued to ask, "What right does the U. S. government have to ... flagrantly interfere in China 's internal affairs?" What right, indeed? Only the liberal creed grants the right--the belief that all men are created equal and have certain inalienable rights that must not be abridged by governments; that governments derive their power and legitimacy only from the consent of the governed and have a duty to protect their citizens' right to life, liberty, and property. To those who share this liberal faith, foreign policies and even wars that defend these principles, as in Kosovo, can be right even if established international law says they are wrong. But to the Chinese, the Russians, and others who do not share this worldview, the United States and its democratic allies succeed in imposing their views on others not because they are right but only because they are powerful enough to do so. To non-liberals, the international liberal order is not progress. It is oppression.

This is more than a dispute over theory and the niceties of international jurisprudence. It concerns the fundamental legitimacy of governments, which for autocrats can be a matter of life and death. China 's rulers have not forgotten that if the democratic world had had its way in 1989, they would now be out of office, possibly imprisoned or worse. Putin complains that "we are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law," and he does not mean just the illegal use of force but also the imposition of "economic, political, cultural and educational policies." He decries the way "independent legal norms" are being re-shaped to conform to "one state's legal system," that of the western democracies, and the way international institutions such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe have become "vulgar instruments" in the hands of the democracies. As a result, Putin exclaims, "no one feels safe! Because no one can feel that international law is like a stone wall that will protect them."

The western democracies would deny any such intention, but Putin, like the leaders of China , is right to worry. American and European policymakers constantly say they want Russia and China to integrate themselves into the international liberal democratic order, but it is not surprising if Russian and Chinese leaders are wary. How can autocrats enter the liberal international order without succumbing to the forces of liberalism?



III.

Afraid of the answer, the autocracies are understandably pushing back, and with some effect. Rather than accepting the new principles of diminished sovereignty and weakened international protection for autocrats, Russia and China are promoting an international order that places a high value on national sovereignty and can protect autocratic governments from foreign interference.

And they are succeeding. Autocracy is making a comeback. Changes in the ideological complexion of the most influential world powers have always had some effect on the choices made by leaders in smaller nations. Fascism was in vogue in Latin America in the 1930s and 1940s partly because it seemed successful in Italy , Germany , and Spain . Communism spread in the Third World in the 1960s and the 1970s not so much because the Soviet Union worked hard to spread it, but because government opponents fought their rebellions under the banner of Marxism-Leninism and then enlisted the aid of Moscow . When communism died in Moscow , communist rebellions around the world became few and far between. And if the rising power of the world's democracies in the late years of the Cold War, culminating in their almost total victory after 1989, contributed to the wave of democratization in the 1980s and 1990s, it is logical to expect that the rise of two powerful autocracies should shift the balance back again.

It is a mistake to believe that autocracy has no international appeal. Thanks to decades of remarkable growth, the Chinese today can argue that their model of economic development, which combines an increasingly open economy with a closed political system, can be a successful option for development in many nations. It certainly offers a model for successful autocracy, a template for creating wealth and stability without having to give way to political liberalization. Russia 's model of "sovereign democracy" is attractive among the autocrats of Central Asia . Some Europeans worry that Russia is "emerging as an ideological alternative to the EU that offers a different approach to sovereignty, power and world order." In the 1980s and 1990s, the autocratic model seemed like a losing proposition as dictatorships of both right and left fell before the liberal tide. Today, thanks to the success of China and Russia , it looks like a better bet.

China and Russia may no longer actively export an ideology, but they do offer autocrats somewhere to run when the democracies turn hostile. When Iran 's relations with Europe plummeted in the 1990s after its clerics issued a fatwa calling for the death of Salman Rushdie, the influential Iranian leader Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani made a point of noting how much easier it is to maintain good relations with a nation like China . When the dictator of Uzbekistan came under criticism in 2005 from the administration of George W. Bush for violently suppressing an opposition rally, he responded by joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and moving closer to Moscow. The Chinese provide unfettered aid to dictatorships in Asia and Africa, undermining the efforts of the "international community" to press for reforms--which in practical terms often means regime change--in countries such as Burma and Zimbabwe . Americans and Europeans may grumble, but autocracies are not in the business of overthrowing other autocrats at the democratic world's insistence. The Chinese, who used deadly force to crack down on student demonstrators not so long ago, will hardly help the West remove a government in Burma for doing the same thing. Nor will they impose conditions on aid to African nations to demand political and institutional reforms they have no intention of carrying out in China .

Chinese officials may chide Burma 's rulers, and they may urge the Sudanese government to find some solution to the Sudan conflict. Moscow may at times distance itself from Iran . But the rulers in Rangoon , Khartoum , Pyongyang , and Tehran know that their best protectors--and in the last resort, their only protectors--in a generally hostile world are to be found in Beijing and Moscow . One wonders how much Beijing officials can chastise Burmese generals for crushing Buddhist monks' protests when the Chinese are themselves crushing Buddhist monks in Tibet . In the great schism between democracy and autocracy, the autocrats share common interests and a common view of international order. As China 's Li Peng told Iran 's Rafsanjani , China and Iran are united by a common desire to build a world order in which "the selection of whatever social system by a country is the affair of the people of that country."



In fact, a global competition is under way. According to Sergei Lavrov, Russia 's foreign minister, "For the first time in many years, a real competitive environment has emerged on the market of ideas" between different "value systems and development models." And the good news, from the Russian point of view, is that "the West is losing its monopoly on the globalization process." Today when Russians speak of a multi-polar world, they are not only talking about the redistribution of power. It is also the competition of value systems and ideas that will provide "the foundation for a multi-polar world order."

This comes as a surprise to a democratic world that believed such competition ended when the Berlin Wall fell. The world's democracies do not regard their own efforts to support democracy and Enlightenment principles abroad as an aspect of a geopolitical competition, because they do not see "competing truths," only "universal values." As a result, they are not always conscious of how they use their wealth and power to push others to accept their values and their principles.

In their own international institutions and alliances, they demand strict fidelity to liberal democratic principles. Before opening their doors to new members and providing the vast benefits that membership offers in terms of wealth and security, they demand that nations that want to enter the EU or NATO open up their economies and political systems. When the Georgian president called a state of emergency at the end of 2007, he damaged Georgia 's chances of entering NATO and the EU anytime soon. As a result, Georgia may now live precariously in the nether region between Russian autocracy and European liberalism. Eventually, if the democracies turn their backs on Georgia , it may have no choice but to accommodate Moscow .

Again, this competition is not the Cold War redux. It is more like the nineteenth century redux. In the nineteenth century, the absolutist rulers of Russia and Austria shored up fellow autocracies in post-revolutionary France and used force to suppress liberal rebellions in Germany , Poland , Italy , and Spain . Palmerston's Britain used British power to aid liberals on the continent; the United States cheered on liberal revolutions in Hungary and Germany and expressed outrage when Russian troops suppressed liberal forces in Poland . Today Ukraine has already been a battleground between forces supported by the West and forces supported by Russia , and it could well be a battleground again in the future. Georgia could be another. It is worth contemplating what the world would look like, what Europe would look like, if democratic movements in Ukraine and Georgia failed or were forcefully suppressed, and the two nations became autocracies with close ties to Moscow . It is worth considering what the effect would be in East Asia if China used force to quash a democratic system in Taiwan and install a friendlier autocracy in its place.

The global competition between democratic governments and autocratic governments will become a dominant feature of the twenty-first-century world. The great powers are increasingly choosing sides and identifying themselves with one camp or the other. India , which during the Cold War was proudly neutral or even pro-Soviet, has begun to identify itself as part of the democratic West. Japan in recent years has also gone out of its way to position itself as a democratic great power, sharing common values with other Asian democracies but also with non-Asian democracies. For both Japan and India the desire to be part of the democratic world is genuine, but it is also part of a geopolitical calculation--a way of cementing solidarity with other great powers that can be helpful in their strategic competition with autocratic China .

There is no perfect symmetry in international affairs. The twin realities of the present era--great power competition and the contest between democracy and autocracy--will not always produce the same alignments. Democratic India in its geopolitical competition with autocratic China supports the Burmese dictatorship in order to deny Beijing a strategic advantage. India 's diplomats enjoy playing the other great powers against each other, sometimes warming to Russia , sometimes to China . Democratic Greece and Cyprus pursue close relations with Russia partly out of cultural solidarity with Eastern Orthodox cousins, but more out of economic interest. The United States has long allied itself with Arab dictatorships for strategic and economic reasons, as well as to successive military rulers in Pakistan . As in the Cold War, strategic and economic considerations, as well as cultural affinities, may often cut against ideology.

But in today's world, a nation's form of government, not its "civilization" or its geographical location, may be the best predictor of its geopolitical alignment. Asian democracies today line up with European democracies against Asian autocracies. Chinese observers see a "V-shaped belt" of pro-American democratic powers "stretching from Northeast to Central Asia ." When the navies of India , the United States , Japan , Australia , and Singapore exercised in the Bay of Bengal last year, Chinese and other observers referred to it as the "axis of democracy." Japan 's prime minister spoke of an "Asian arc of freedom and prosperity" stretching from Japan to Indonesia to India . Russian officials profess to be "alarmed" that NATO and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe are "reproducing a bloc policy" not unlike that of the Cold War era, but the Russians themselves refer to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as an "anti-NATO" alliance and a "Warsaw Pact 2." When the Shanghai Cooperation Organization met last year, it brought together five autocracies-- China , Russia , Uzbekistan , Kazakhstan , and Tajikistan --as well as Iran . When the ASEAN nations attempted to address the problem of Burma last year, the organization split down the middle, with democratic nations like the Philippines and Indonesia, backed by Japan, seeking to put pressure on Burma, and the autocracies of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, backed by China, seeking to avoid setting a precedent that could come back to haunt them someday.



IV.

The global divisions between the club of autocrats and the axis of democracy have broad implications for the international system. Is it possible any longer to speak of an "international community"? The term implies agreement on international norms of behavior, an international morality, even an international conscience. But today the world's major powers lack such a common understanding. On the large strategic questions, such as whether to intervene or to impose sanctions or to attempt to isolate nations diplomatically, there is no longer an international community to be summoned or led. This was exposed most blatantly in the war over Kosovo, which divided the democratic West from both Russia and China , and from many other nonEuropean autocracies. Today it is apparent on the issues of Darfur , Iran , and Burma .

One would imagine that on such transnational issues as disease, poverty, and climate change the great powers ought to be able to work together despite their diverging interests and world views. But even here their differences complicate matters. Disputes between the democracies and China over how and whether to condition aid to poor countries in Africa affect the struggle against poverty. Geopolitical calculations affect international negotiations over the best response to climate change. The Chinese, along with the Indians, believe the advanced industrial nations of the West, having reached their present heights after decades of polluting the air and emitting unconscionable levels of greenhouse gases, now want to deny others the right to grow in the same way. Beijing suspects a western attempt to restrict China 's growth and to slow its emergence as a competitive great power. Similarly, the nuclear nonproliferation regime will continue to suffer as the clashing interests of great powers and differing forms of government overwhelm what might otherwise be their common interests in preventing other nations from obtaining nuclear weapons. Russia and China have run interference for Iran . The United States has run interference for India , in order to enlist New Delhi 's help in the strategic competition with China .

The demise of the international community is most clearly on display at the U.N. Security Council, which, after a brief post-Cold War awakening, is slipping back into its long coma. The artful diplomacy of France and the tactical caution of China for a while obscured the fact that on most major issues the Security Council has been sharply divided between the autocracies and the democracies, with the latter systematically pressing for sanctions and other punitive actions against autocracies in Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Burma, and the former just as systematically resisting and attempting to weaken the effect of such actions. This rut will only deepen in the coming years.

Calls for a new "concert" of nations including Russia , China , the United States , Europe , and other great powers are unlikely to be successful. The early-nineteenth-century Concert of Europe operated under the umbrella of a common morality and shared principles of government. It aimed not only at the preservation of a European peace but also, and more important, at the maintenance of a monarchical and aristocratic order against the liberal and radical challenges presented by the French and American revolutions and their echoes in Germany, Italy, and Poland. The concert gradually broke down under the strains of popular nationalism, fueled in part by the rise of revolutionary liberalism. The great power concert that Franklin Roosevelt established at the U.N. Security Council similarly foundered on ideological conflict.

And now, once more, there is little sense of shared morality and common values among the great powers. Instead there is suspicion and growing hostility, and the well-grounded view on the part of the autocracies that the democracies, whatever they say, would welcome their overthrow. Any concert among these states would be built on a shaky foundation likely to collapse at the first serious test.



Can these disagreements be overcome by expanding trade ties and growing economic interdependence in this ever more globalized world? Clearly economic ties can help to check tendencies toward great-power conflict. Chinese leaders avoid confrontation with the United States today both because they could not count on a victory and because they fear the impact on the Chinese economy and, by extension, the stability of their autocratic rule. American, Australian, and Japanese dependence on the Chinese economy makes these nations cautious, too, and the powerful influence of American big business makes American leaders take a more accommodating view of China . In both China and Russia , economic interests are not just national, they are also personal. If the business of Russia is business, as Dmitri Trenin argues, then its leaders should be reluctant to jeopardize their wealth with risky foreign policies.

Yet history has not been kind to the theory that strong trade ties prevent conflict among nations. The United States and China are no more dependent on each other's economies today than were Great Britain and Germany before World War I. And trade relations are not without their own tensions and conflicts. Those between the United States and China are becoming increasingly contentious, with Congress threatening legislation to punish China for perceived inequities in the trade relationship. In both Europe and the United States , concerns about the growing strategic challenge from China are increasingly joined or even outstripped by fears of the growing economic challenge it poses. Fifty-five percent of Germans believe China 's economic growth is a "bad thing," up from 38 percent in 2005, a view shared by Americans, Indians, Britons, the French, and even South Koreans. Today 60 percent of South Koreans think China 's growing economy is a "bad thing."

The Chinese, meanwhile, may still tolerate pressure to adjust their currency, crack down on piracy, and increase quality standards for their products, as well as all the other hectoring they receive from the United States and Europe . But they are starting to feel that the democratic world is ganging up on them and using these disputes as a way of containing China not only economically but strategically. And there is also the matter of the international scramble for energy resources, which is becoming the primary arena for geopolitical competition. The search for reliable sources of oil and gas shapes China 's policies toward Iran , Sudan , Burma , and Central Asia . Russia and the democracies led by the United States compete to build oil and gas pipelines that will provide them leverage and influence, or deny it to their competitors.

Commercial ties alone cannot withstand the forces of national and ideological competition that have now so prominently re-emerged. Trade relations do not take place in a vacuum. They both influence and are influenced by geopolitical and ideological conflicts. Nations are not calculating machines. They have the attributes of the humans who create and live in them, the intangible and immeasurable human qualities of love, hate, ambition, fear, honor, shame, patriotism, ideology, and belief--the things people fight and die for, today as in millennia past.



V.

Nowhere are these human qualities more on display than in the Islamic world, especially the Middle East . The struggle of radical Islamists against the powerful and often impersonal forces of modernization, capitalism, and globalization that they associate with the Judeo-Christian West is the other great conflict in the international system today. It is also the most dramatic refutation of the convergence paradigm, since it is precisely convergence, including the liberal world's conception of "universal values," that the radical Islamists reject.

As a historical phenomenon, the struggle between modernization and Islamic radicalism may ultimately have less impact on international affairs than the struggle among the great powers and between the forces of democracy and autocracy. After all, Islamic resistance to westernization is not a new phenomenon, though it has taken on a new and potentially cataclysmic dimension. In the past, when old and less technologically advanced peoples confronted more advanced cultures, their inadequate weapons reflected their backwardness. Today the more radical proponents of Islamic traditionalism, though they abhor the modern world, are using against it not only the ancient methods of assassination and suicidal attacks, but also modern weapons. The forces of modernization and globalization have inflamed the radical Islamist rebellion and also armed them for the fight.

But it is a lonely and ultimately desperate fight, for in the struggle between traditionalism and modernity, tradition cannot win--even though traditional forces armed with modern weapons, technologies, and ideologies can do horrendous damage. All the world's rich and powerful nations have more or less embraced the economic, technological, and even social aspects of modernization and globalization. All have embraced, with varying degrees of complaint and resistance, the free flow of goods, finances, and services and the intermingling of cultures and lifestyles that characterizes the modern world. Increasingly, their people watch the same television shows, listen to the same music, and go to the same movies. Along with this dominant modern culture, they have accepted--even as they may also deplore--the essential characteristics of a modern ethics and aesthetics. Modernity means, among other things, the sexual as well as political and economic liberation of women; the weakening of church authority and the strengthening of secularism; the existence of what used to be called the counterculture; and the exercise of free expression in the arts (if not in politics), which includes the freedom to commit blasphemy and to lampoon symbols of faith, authority, and morality. These are the consequences of liberalism and capitalism unleashed and unchecked by the constraining hand of tradition, or a powerful church, or a moralistic and domineering government. Even the Chinese have learned that while it is possible to have capitalism without political liberalization, it is much harder.

Today, radical Islamists are the last holdout against these powerful forces of modernity. For Sayyid Qutb, one of the intellectual fathers of Al Qaeda, true Islam could be salvaged only by warring against the modern world on all fronts. He wanted to "take apart the entire political and philosophical structure of modernity and return Islam to its unpolluted origins." A very different kind of Muslim leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, clearly identified modernity with the Enlightenment and rejected both. "Yes, we are reactionaries, " he told his opponents, "and you are enlightened intellectuals: You intellectuals do not want us to go back 1,400 years."

These most radical Islamists, along with Osama bin Laden, also reject that great product of the Enlightenment and modernity: democracy. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi denounced elections in Iraq on the grounds that "the legislator who must be obeyed in a democracy is man, and not God." Democratic elections were "the very essence of heresy and polytheism and error," for they made "the weak, ignorant man God's partner in His most central divine prerogative--namely, ruling and legislating." As Bernard Lewis has written, the aim of Islamic revolution in Iran and elsewhere has been to "sweep away all the alien and infidel accretions that had been imposed on the Muslim lands and peoples in the era of alien dominance and influence and to restore the true and divinely given Islamic order." One of those "infidel accretions" is democracy. The fundamentalists want to take the Islamic world back to where it was before the Christian West, liberalism, and modernity polluted what they regard as pure Islam.

Their goal is impossible to achieve. The Islamists could not take their societies back 1,400 years even if the rest of the world would let them. And it will not let them. Neither the United States nor any of the other great powers will turn over control of the Middle East to these fundamentalist forces. Partly this is because the region is of such vital strategic importance to the rest of the world. But it is more than that. The vast majority of the people in the Middle East have no desire to go back 1,400 years. They oppose neither modernity nor democracy. Nor is it conceivable in this modern world that a whole country could wall itself off from modernity, even if the majority wanted to do so. Could the great Islamic theocracy that Al Qaeda and others hope to erect ever completely block out the sights and sounds of the rest of the world, and thereby shield its people from the temptations of modernity? The mullahs have not even succeeded in doing that in Iran . The project is fantastic.

The world is thus faced with the prospect of a protracted struggle in which the goals of the extreme Islamists can never be satisfied because neither the United States , nor Europe, nor Russia , nor China , nor the peoples of the Middle East have the ability or the desire to give them what they want. The modern great powers will never retreat as far as the Islamic extremists require. Unfortunately, they may also not be capable of uniting effectively against the threat. Although in the struggle between modernization and tradition the United States, Russia, China, Europe, and the other great powers are roughly on the same side, the things that divide them from one another--the competing national ambitions, the divisions between democrats and autocrats, the transatlantic disagreement over the use of military power--undermine their will to cooperate.

This is certainly true when it comes to the unavoidable military aspects of a fight against radical Islamic terrorism. Europeans have been and will continue to be less than enthusiastic about what they emphatically do not call "the war on terror." As for Russia and China , it will be tempting for them to enjoy the spectacle of the United States bogged down in a fight with Al Qaeda and other violent Islamist groups in the Middle East and South Asia, just as it is tempting to let American power in that region be checked by a nuclear-armed Iran . The willingness of the autocrats in Moscow and Beijing to protect their fellow autocrats in Pyongyang , Tehran , and Khartoum increases the chances that the connection between terrorists and nuclear weapons will eventually be made.

Indeed, one of the problems with making the struggle against Islamic terrorism the sole focus of American foreign policy is that it produces illusions about alliance and cooperation with other great powers with whom genuine alliance is becoming impossible. The idea of genuine strategic cooperation between the United States and Russia or the United States and China in the war on terror is mostly a fiction. For Russia , the war on terror is about Chechnya . For China , it is about the Uighurs of Xinjiang province. But when it comes to Iran , Syria , and Hezbollah , Russia and China tend to see not terrorists but useful partners in the great power struggle.



The great fallacy of our era has been the belief that a liberal international order rests on the triumph of ideas alone, or on the natural unfolding of human progress. It is an immensely attractive notion, deeply rooted in the Enlightenment world view of which all of us in the liberal world are the product. Our political scientists posit theories of modernization, with sequential stages of political and economic development that lead upward toward liberalism. Our political philosophers imagine a grand historical dialectic, in which the battle of world views over the centuries produces, in the end, the correct liberal democratic answer. Naturally, many are inclined to believe that the Cold War ended the way it did simply because the better world view triumphed, and that the international order that exists today is but the next stage forward in humanity's march from strife and aggression toward a peaceful and prosperous co-existence.

Such illusions are just true enough to be dangerous. Of course there is strength in the liberal democratic idea, and in the free market. It is logical, too, that a world of liberal democratic states would gradually produce an international order that reflected those liberal and democratic qualities. This has been the enlightenment dream since the eighteenth century, when Kant imagined a "perpetual peace" consisting of liberal republics and built upon the natural desire of all peoples for peace and material comfort. Although some may scoff, it has been a remarkably compelling vision. Its spirit animated the international arbitration movements at the end of the nineteenth century, the worldwide enthusiasm for a League of Nations in the early twentieth century, and the enthusiasm for the United Nations after World War II. It has also been a remarkably durable vision, withstanding the horrors of two world wars, one more disastrous than the other, and then a long Cold War that for a third time dashed expectations of progress toward the ideal.

It is a testament to the vitality of this Enlightenment vision that hopes for a brand new era in human history again took hold with such force after the fall of Soviet communism. But a little more skepticism was in order. After all, had mankind really progressed so far? The most destructive century in all the millennia of human history was only just concluding; it was not buried in some deep, dark ancient past. Our supposedly enlightened modernity had produced the greatest of horrors--the massive aggressions, the "total wars," the famines, the genocides, the nuclear warfare. After the recognition of this terrible reality--the relationship of modernity not only to good but also to evil--what reason was there to believe that humankind was suddenly on the cusp of a brand new order? The focus on the dazzling pageant of progress at the end of the Cold War ignored the wires and the beams--the actual historical scaffolding--that had made such progress possible. It failed to acknowledge that progress toward liberalism was not inevitable, but was contingent on events--battles won or lost, social movements successful or crushed, economic policies implemented or discarded. The spread of democracy was not merely the unfolding of certain ineluctable processes of economic and political development. We do not know whether such an evolutionary process--with predictable stages, with known causes and effects--even exists.

What we do know is that the global shift toward liberal democracy coincided with the historical shift in the balance of power toward those nations and peoples who favored the liberal democratic idea, a shift that began with the triumph of the democratic powers over fascism in World War II and that was followed by a second triumph of the democracies over communism in the Cold War. The liberal international order that emerged after these two victories reflected the new overwhelming global balance in favor of liberal forces. But those victories were not inevitable, and they need not be lasting. Now the re-emergence of the great autocratic powers, along with the reactionary forces of Islamic radicalism, has weakened that order, and threatens to weaken it further in the years and decades to come. The world's democracies need to begin thinking about how they can protect their interests and advance their principles in a world in which these are, once again, powerfully contested.

Robert Kagan is senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and senior transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund. His new book, The Return of History and the End of Dreams, will be published by Knopf later this month.



2) Hillary Clinton (D-NY) started her 2008 presidential campaign by aligning herself with the military and pretending to be tough on "terror". Fortunately, the ultra-liberal Hillary has yet to brainwash all of the voting public into believing that her symbolism is substance. Many have never forgotten that when she was co-president for eight years she was quoted as saying : ' I loathe the military.'

Soldiers, who have been thru Survival School learned their lessons well. By giving the sign of 'coercion' with his left hand this soldier was obviously being coerced into shaking hands with Hillary Clinton. It's ironic how little she knew that he would so inform us about the photo--- because she's never understood our military to begin with.

Consider something please- There have been an average of 160,000 troops in the Iraq theater of operations during the last 22 months, and a total of 2112 deaths, that gives a firearm death rate of 60 per 100,000. The rate in Washington D.C is 80.6 per 100,000. That means that you are about 25% more likely to be shot and killed in our Nation's Capitol, which has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation, than you are in Iraq.........Conclusion: We should immediately pull out of Washington.

3)Israel's Lt. Col Yair Burns sacked over Hamas' Nahal Oz fuel terminal raid 12 days ago


Half a dozen Hamas raiders cut through the Gaza border fence on April 9, attacked the Nahal Oz oil terminal in Israel and murdered two workers, Oleg Lipson and Lev Cherniak. IDF chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gaby Ashkenazi decided April 21 to fire the commander of the 9th Armored Battalion which secured the crossing for its failure to fight off the infiltrators and prevent their escape after the murders. The episode could have ended in a greater calamity had the terrorists stayed on to either kill or abduct the rest of the staff and set the fuel terminal on fire. Gen. Ashkenazi took this action, the first dismissal of a senior officer since the 2006 Lebanon War and rare for the IDF, on the basis of the findings of a panel of two high-ranking officers.

The inquiry established that the fuel facility owners, Dor Energy, were responsible for security inside the facility alone, while it was up to the army to secure the environment against attack. This they failed to do.

4)Meshal offers to wait 10 years to destroy Israel in return for full withdrawal to pre-1967 borders


Hamas' political leader Khaled Meshal on Monday said Hamas would accept a
Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip along Israel's pre-1967
borders, and would grant Israel a 10-year hudna, or truce, as an implicit
proof of recognition if Israel withdraws from those areas.

Meshal's comments were one of the clearest outlines Hamas has given for what
it would do if Israel withdrew from the territories it captured in the 1967
Six Day War. He suggested Hamas would accept Israel's existence alongside a
Palestinian state on the rest of the lands Israel has held since 1948.

However, Meshal told reporters in Damascus that Hamas would not formally
recognize Israel.

"We agree to a [Palestinian] state on pre-67 borders, with Jerusalem as its
capital with genuine sovereignty without settlements but without recognizing
Israel," Meshaal said.

"We have offered a truce if Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders, a truce of
10 years as a proof of recognition," he said. He said he made the offer to
former U.S. President Jimmy Carter during talks Friday and Saturday in the
Syrian capital.

Meshal used the Arabic word hudna, meaning truce, which is more concrete
than tahdiya - a period of calm - which Hamas often uses to describe a
simple cease-fire. Hudna implies a recognition of the other party's
existence.

A government spokesman also said Israel was unimpressed by Meshaal's
statement.

"Israel is targeted on a daily basis by rocket barrages from Hamas
controlled territory in the Gaza Strip. Israel sees no change in Hamas's
extremist positions," said David Baker, a spokesman in Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert's office.

In Washington, the U.S. State Department said there is no indication that
Hamas wants peace with Israel. "It is pretty clear to us that there is no
acceptance on the part of Hamas of any kind of negotiated settlement," said
deputy spokesman Tom Casey.

Casey said there had been contradictory statements from Hamas officials over
whether they would accept the result of a referendum on a peace deal.

Earlier in Jerusalem, Carter said that Hamas is prepared to accept the
Israel's right to "live in peace" within 1967 borders.

"There's no doubt that both the Arab world and the Palestinians, including
Hamas, will accept Israel's right to live in peace within the 1967 borders."

Hamas has previously claimed all of what is now Israel and the West Bank and
Gaza, and its charter calls for the destruction of Israel. Meshal did not
address whether the group would consider changing it. But his comments were
one of the strongest Hamas statements in favor of a two-state solution.

"This is Hamas' clear vision," Meshal added. He said the future Palestinian
state must have Jerusalem as its genuine, sovereign capital. He appeared to
be referring to East Jerusalem, since Israel held west Jerusalem before
1967.

Carter's comments came after he met after he met last week with the top
Hamas leaders, including Meshal, in Syria.

Carter was back in Jerusalem this week to brief Israeli leaders on his talks
with Meshal regarding a proposed truce between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza
Strip as well as an exchange of prisoners between them.

Carter: Hamas would accept Israel-PA deal if Palestinians vote for it

The former U.S. president told reporters in Jerusalem on Monday that Hamas
leaders said they would accept a peace agreement negotiated by their rival,
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, if Palestinians approved the deal in a
vote.

"They said they would accept a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders if
approved by Palestinians ... even though Hamas might disagree with some
terms of the agreement," Carter said in a speech, after talks in Syria and
Egypt with Hamas leaders.

"It means that Hamas will not undermine Abbas' efforts to negotiate an
agreement and Hamas will accept an agreement if the Palestinians support it
in a free vote," he said.

But Carter said he was told by Hamas that a referendum on a peace deal must
be preceded by reconciliation between the group and Abbas' Fatah faction.
Hamas seized the Gaza Strip from Fatah in fighting in June.

A Hamas official in the Gaza Strip also referred to a series of
preconditions raised by the Islamist group for assenting to a deal with
Israel.

Sami Abu Zuhri said Palestinian refugees living in exile must be included in
the voting - a condition that could complicate approval of a deal.

Abu Zuhri also noted that Hamas, which refuses to recognize Israel, would
regard any future Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip,
territories Israel captured in the 1967 Six Day War, as "transitional".

Speaking later to reporters, Carter said Hamas leaders whom he met "didn't
say anything about transitional".

Unlike Abbas, who sought a Palestinian state side-by-side with Israel, Abu
Zuhri said Hamas's outstanding position not to recognize Israel's right to
exist remained unchanged despite of its acceptance of a state in 1967
borders.

Carter said Hamas turned down his proposal for a 30-day unilateral
cease-fire with Israel but Egypt would continue its efforts to mediate a
truce.

"I did the best I could on that," Carter said of his failure to persuade
Hamas to halt rocket fire from the Gaza Strip.

Carter: Hamas ready to release letter from Shalit

Carter also told Trade Minister Eli Yishai on Monday that Hamas was prepared
to release another letter from abducted Israel Defense Forces soldier Gilad
Shalit to his family.

According to Carter, Meshal has promised that Shalit - who was kidnapped by
Hamas militants in a cross-border raid in June 2006 - is in good physical
health.

Carter told Yishai that Hamas was prepared to transfer Shalit into Egyptian
hands as part of a packaged deal which would include the release of
Palestinian prisoners.

The former U.S. leader said the Islamists had no opposition to releasing the
soldier as part of a prisoner swap. He also asked Yishai to consider meeting
with officials in Egypt regarding Shalit's release.

Yishai responded that he has already met with Egyptian President Hosni
Mubarak and the Egyptian intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, on the matter,
but said he would consider another meeting.

The former U.S. leader told Yishai that Meshal had appreciated Yishai's
offer to meet with the Islamist group regarding the Shalit deal, but did not
want to compromise Egyptian mediation by doing so.

'Problem is refusal of U.S., Israel to meet Hamas'

Carter also told reporters following his return to Israel on Monday the
"problem" was not his decision to meet with the Islamist group, but rather
the refusal of Israel and the U.S. to do the same.

"The problem is not that I met with with Hamas in Syria. The problem is that
Israel and the United States refuse to meet with someone who must be
involved," the former U.S. leader said during a speech in Jerusalem.

He urged Israel to engage in direct negotiations with Hamas, saying failure
to do so was hampering peace efforts.

"We do not believe that peace is likely and certainly that peace is not
sustainable unless a way is found to bring Hamas into the discussions in
some way," he said. "The present strategy of excluding Hamas and excluding
Syria is just not working."

In his comments Monday, Carter said Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking has
regressed since a U.S.-hosted Middle East conference in Annapolis, Maryland,
in November.

Speaking about the possibility of renewed peace talks between Israel and
Syria, he said Syria wants the U.S. to play a strong role in bringing to two
sides together.

Both the Israeli and U.S. governments disapprove of Carter's overtures to
Hamas. Over the weekend, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said he decided not to
meet with Carter in Israel because he does not wish to be seen as
participating in any negotiations with Hamas.


5) Hamas's Apologist


Jimmy Carter, the 83-year-old former US president, has been on a "study mission" to our region, visiting Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Syria and Jordan. On Monday, back in Jerusalem, Carter announced what he'd learned: The Arabs want peace; the problem is Israel.

Carter met with Hamas leaders in Cairo and Damascus and held a joint session with both factions in Damascus. He came out of those sessions convinced that Hamas wants peace.

The former president sounds like a moral relativist, for whom there are no universal truths by which to judge behavior. This is manifested in the juxtapositions he so effortlessly makes. Speaking Monday, he denounced the Palestinians' "despicable terrorism" against Sderot. Yet when Israel tracks down and arrests the "despicable" terrorists, Carter gets equally passionate about the need to release them - 11,600 (Carter's numbers) now in Israeli prisons, "many of them women and children."

To Carter's muddled thinking, Palestinians and Israelis are equally responsible for the conflict. After all, Palestinians launch Kassams into Israeli kindergartens, and Israelis live over the Green Line.

Since Annapolis, Carter claims, there's been no real progress because of "settlements" and "roadblocks" and because Israel has turned Gaza into one big prison. That Jews also have claims in Judea and Samaria, that checkpoints have proven to keep terrorists from blowing up buses and cafes, that every last Israeli soldier and "settler" has been yanked out of Gaza - none of this turned up in Carter's study mission.

But he did conclude that "despair leads some people on both sides to resort to violence."

Carter professes to understand why Israel is "reluctant" to negotiate with Hamas. The organization refuses to renounce violence, has "yet" to recognize Israel and doesn't accept the 1993 Oslo Accords. But Carter forgives all this. He "understands" that Hamas feels "some violence is necessary" to keep the Palestinian issue alive, and that when the organization is sidelined, the "cycle of violence" is exacerbated.

Carter spent seven hours with Hamas leaders during which they told him they would accept Israel's existence if it withdrew to the 1949 Armistice Lines; if any deal reached between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and PA President Mahmoud Abbas was approved in a Palestinian referendum; and if Hamas had the prerogative to disagree with the referendum results.

To sum up Carter's assessment: Hamas wants peace. It is ready now for a cease-fire - even one that doesn't immediately include the West Bank. It also supports the Arab League peace plan that could flood Israel with millions of refugees - a scheme no Israeli government could accept.

That Hamas carried out an attack against the Kerem Shalom border crossing on Saturday, wounding 13 soldiers - while its leaders were telling Carter they supposedly wanted peace - is irrelevant, Carter insists, because the mission had been planned "months in advance."

WE ARE grateful to Carter for raising the issue of Gilad Schalit with his interlocutors. The former president promises that Hamas will now allow the kidnapped soldier to write a second letter to his parents. At the same time, he should know that Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails have routine access to the Red Cross and can write to their loved ones even without presidential intervention.

Carter, of all people, ought also to know how far Israel is prepared to go for peace. It ceded every inch of the Sinai to Anwar Sadat. But the Egyptian leader first demonstrated that he genuinely sought an accommodation with Israel.

When King Hussein embraced Yitzhak Rabin, a peace treaty resulted 100 days later.

One could imagine a situation in which Israel would talk with Hamas. After all, when Yasser Arafat claimed to be ready to end the "armed struggle," Israelis desperately tried to reach an accord with him. A Hamas that is prepared for real compromise will always find Israel ready.

Shortly after meeting with Carter, though, a Hamas spokesman declared that the Islamists remained committed to "resistance" and opposed Egyptian cease-fire proposals.

Carter's "study mission" failed to uncover the obvious: Hamas is a toxic opponent of peace. Too bad that in the twilight of his public life, Carter has undermined the relative moderates among the Palestinians and become an apologist for violent religious fanatics.

6) Spinnsylvania
By Lloyd Grove

A Clinton loyalist’s best-case scenario on the campaign’s final stretch.


In January, Harold Ickes, who was Bill’s deputy White House chief of staff, left his lobbying firm to corral super delegates for Hillary’s campaign. On the eve of the Pennsylvania primary, he spoke to Lloyd Grove about Hillary’s tenacious endgame.

Give me your sense of the state of play.
It’s a virtual dead heat, and with 3,100 delegates having chosen sides, Hillary is trailing Obama by a little over 130 delegates. She’s going to narrow that gap. If virtually all of the super delegates remain uncommitted until the fourth of June, after every last jurisdiction has voted, neither candidate will have enough delegates to clinch the nomination.

Howard Dean says he thinks it should be resolved by July 1. Is that the working deadline?
No, I don’t have any working deadline. My best guess is it’ll be resolved before the convention.

How do you think she’ll do in Pennsylvania?
We say that she’s going to do very well.

What’s “very well”? Six points?
I’m not going to put a number on it.



What do super delegates want to hear from you?
There are two big categories. One is members of Congress. Their primary interest is in getting reelected. They want to know which of the two will help them most or, conversely, which one will hurt them least. And then the two-thirds remaining are the members of the DNC, primarily. So what they are looking at is more which candidate can better pull together the swing states needed to win 270 electoral votes.

Are you arguing to super delegates that Obama can’t win the general election?
I don’t think anybody would argue that he can’t win.

What is the argument for making Hillary the nominee if she’s behind in pledged delegates and the popular vote?
We expect her to be ahead in the popular vote. The key argument is who is going to be able to stand up to the incoming fire from the Republicans. And it will be withering.

But not sniper fire.
Well, even sniper fire—when it’s around. The press, by and large, has been a lapdog for Mr. Obama. The press has not done its due diligence, has not scrutinized him. Look at what a group of draft dodgers, led by Five-Time-Deferment Cheney and President Bush, did to a genuine war hero, John Kerry. Hillary is a known quantity.

She’s kind of inoculated against it, having suffered from the disease already?
Your words, not mine.

You worked in the presidential campaigns of Ted Kennedy and Jesse Jackson, who both support Obama. Ever think of joining them?
My heart is with Hillary. That’s where I’ve been; that’s where I intend to stay.