The Middle East's Four Truths and Quantanamo!

If you get tired of reading my memos you can stay within the family writing circle and click on my authoress daughter's web site - debradarvick.wordpress.com

Obama likes repeating what he deems is a clever catchy line - McCain is the same as re-electing GW. Makes a great sound bite but is far from the truth.

McCain could respond, but won't, electing Obama is re-electing Jimmy Carter. Has more of a ring of truth in my book.

Today's WSJ Editorial a must read. (See 1 below.)

Jonathan Tobin poses the question of Israel's negotiations with Syria in the face of the U.S.'s displeasure. (See 2 below.)

They say "truth is in the eye of the beholder." In The Middle East, as anywhere in the world, there are multiple levels of truth. In the Middle East truth rests on at least four foundations: one is theologically based and the Jews and Muslims are conflicted by trying to determine who are the closest to God/Mohammad. Then there is the archaeological truth which contests/supports theological truth. Third, is the historic truth which is a combination of fact and myth and finally political truth which is shaped according to the needs of the one espousing it and is always buttressed by the former three.

Theological, archaeological and historical truths largely support the Jews but political truth has been propagandized to support the Arabs, Palestinians and Muslims. The world tends to support and empathize with victims and thus the Jews were permitted to return to their biblical land. However, over time, another truth, the political truth, has shifted in favor of new victims - the Palestinians and Arabs who lost every war they started but possess oil and thus,a stranglehold on Western World commercial viability.

Energy independence will not resolve all of the conflicting issues because occupation and possession of sandy sacred land will always serve to gum the gears because hatred and distrust continuously lie beneath the human surface in The Middle East. The ability to crush your adversary is the best basis on which to build whatever peace can be carved out of these marbled ancient and varied truths. This is why Iran and Syria, Hezballah and Hamas must be crushed. This is why GW's sojourn into Iraq even has relevance and more importantly how we exit and what we leave when we do. (See 3 below.)

There is another excellent article in today's WSJ op ed section by Admiral. Mark Buzby entitled: "Guantanamo Is A Model Prison (Really)." Guatanamo is used by liberals as an afghan in which to cloak their desire to turn the other cheek. War is hell, mistakes happen, terrorists belong to no nation and thus complicate the definition of their legal status in a sane society which adheres to various conventions and rules of law even in wartime. That said I daresay we treat terrorist prisoners better in Guantanamo than we domestic prisoners stateside. They receive better medical care than our own citizens who have none, meals in accordance with their religious beliefs and physical space that is clean.

Adm. Busby writes: "...my troopers perform their mission honorably, professionally and to a level that would make any American proud..." except, of course, many liberals who have a Soros/Hollywood agenda, which is depicting America as the criminal, and our troops as the terrorists.

Dick

1) The Obama We Don't Know

With Barack Obama clinching the Democratic Party nomination, it is worth noting what an extraordinary moment this is. Democrats are nominating a freshman Senator barely three years out of the Illinois legislature whom most of America still hardly knows. The polls say he is the odds-on favorite to become our next President.

Think about this in historical context. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were relatively unknown, but both had at least been prominent Governors. John Kerry, Walter Mondale, Al Gore and even George McGovern were all long-time Washington figures. Republican nominees tend to be even more familiar, for better or worse. In Mr. Obama, Democrats are taking a leap of faith that is daring even by their risky standards.


No doubt this is part of his enormous appeal. Amid public anger over politics as usual, the Illinois Senator is unhaunted by Beltway experience. His personal story – of mixed race, and up from nowhere through Harvard – resonates in an America where the two most popular cultural icons are Tiger Woods and Oprah. His political gifts are formidable, especially his ability to connect with audiences from the platform.

Above all, Mr. Obama has fashioned a message that fits the political moment and the public's desire for "change." At his best, he offers Americans tired of war and political rancor the promise of fresh national unity and purpose. Young people in particular are taken by it. But more than a few Republicans are also drawn to this "postpartisan" vision.

Mr. Obama has also shown great skill in running his campaign. No one – including us – gave him much chance of defeating the Clinton machine. No doubt he benefited from the desire of even many Democrats to impeach the polarizing Clinton era. But he also beat Hillary and Bill at their own game. He raised more money, and he outworked them in the small-state caucuses that provided him with his narrow delegate margin. Even now, he is far better organized in swing states than is John McCain's campaign. All of this speaks well of his preparation for November, and perhaps for his potential to govern.

Yet govern how and to what end? This is the Obama Americans don't know. For all of his inspiring rhetoric about bipartisanship, his voting record is among the most partisan in the Senate. His policy agenda is conventionally liberal across the board – more so than Hillary Clinton's, and more so than that of any Democratic nominee since 1968.

We can't find a single issue on which Mr. Obama has broken with his party's left-wing interest groups. Early on he gave a bow to merit pay for teachers, but that quickly sank beneath the waves of new money he wants to spend on the same broken public schools. He takes the Teamsters line against free trade, to the point of unilaterally rewriting Nafta. He wants to raise taxes even above the levels of the Clinton era, including a huge increase in the payroll tax. Perhaps now Mr. Obama will tack to the center, but somehow he will have to explain why the "change" he's proposing isn't merely more of the same, circa 1965.

There is also the matter of judgment, and the roots of his political character. We were among those inclined at first to downplay his association with the Trinity United Church. But Mr. Obama's handling of the episode has raised doubts about his candor and convictions. He has by stages moved from denying that his 20-year attendance was an issue at all; to denying he'd heard Rev. Jeremiah Wright's incendiary remarks; to criticizing certain of those remarks while praising Rev. Wright himself; to repudiating the words and the reverend; and finally this weekend to leaving the church.

Most disingenuously, he said on Saturday that the entire issue caught him by surprise. Yet he was aware enough of the political risk that he kept Rev. Wright off the stage during his announcement speech more than a year ago.

A 2004 Chicago Sun-Times interview with Mr. Obama mentioned three men as his religious guides. One was Rev. Wright. Another was Father Michael Pfleger, the Louis Farrakhan ally whose recent remarks caused Mr. Obama to resign from Trinity, but for whose Chicago church Mr. Obama channeled at least $225,000 in grants as a state senator. Until recently, the priest was connected to the campaign, which flew him to Iowa to host an interfaith forum. Father Pfleger's testimony for the candidate has since been scrubbed from Mr. Obama's campaign Web site. A third mentor was Illinois state Senator James Meeks, another Chicago pastor who has generated controversy for mixing pulpit and politics.

The point is not that Mr. Obama now shares the radical views of these men. The concern is that by the Senator's own admission they have been major moral influences, and their views are starkly at odds with the candidate's vision as a transracial peacemaker. Their patronage was also useful as Mr. Obama was making his way in Chicago politics. But only now, in the glare of a national campaign, is he distancing himself from them. The question is what in fact Mr. Obama does believe.

The young Senator has been a supernova exploding into our politics, more phenomenon than conventional candidate. His achievement in winning the Democratic nomination has been impressive. Now comes a harder audience. The presidency has to be earned, and Americans have a right to know much more about the gifted man who is the least tested and experienced major party nominee in modern times.



2) Misgivings on the Road to Damascus
By Jonathan Tobin


Is it right for Israel to cross the United States by engaging in talks with Syria?


When you live in a dangerous neighborhood, having big, strong friends is a must. But what happens when you disagree with that friend over something important?

The dilemma that is always faced by small nations that come to depend on larger friends is a delicate one. Even when such friendships are built upon a solid foundation of common values, such as those shared by the United States and Israel, sovereign nations are bound to find themselves marching in different directions from time to time.

That's the situation that Israel has recently found itself in as its government has pursued negotiations with Syria, despite the fact that the United States had signaled its displeasure with that move.

JUNIOR AXIS MEMBER
Syria is viewed in Washington as a junior member of the "Axis of Evil" club, along with its ally, Iran. As a client of Tehran and a family-run dictatorship, the Damascus regime is a nasty piece of work. Syria's troublemaking in both Iraq (where it has served as a conduit for the insurgents) and Lebanon have marked it for isolation by the Bush administration.

Lebanon is particularly disappointing to the Americans since the forced pullout of Syrian troops, who occupied the nation since the 1970s, was an event that Washington could point to as one of its few post Sept. 11 triumphs.

Unfortunately, the Syrians have rebounded since the "Cedar revolution" that followed their assassination of Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. With the aid of the Hezbollah terrorists, the Syrians have been able to thwart those Lebanese who thought they were on the verge of finally breaking free from domination by Damascus.

At the same time, international efforts to force Iran to end its drive to attain a nuclear capability have stalled.

So the news that America's one loyal ally in the region was now reaching out to Syria was not well-received in Washington.

The "land for peace" formula that would have Israel trade the strategic Golan Heights in return for diplomatic relations, and normalization of relations has been on the table for decades. What's new is that Israel now also hopes to detach Syria from Iran's sphere of influence.

Though the talks were being facilitated by Turkey, there were few indications that Damascus was seriously contemplating a future in which they would join the ranks of Arab "moderates," and face the wrath of both Iran and Hezbollah.

While the United States made no public fuss over the indirect negotiations with Syria, the word out of Washington was that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's timing was far from helpful to the goal of isolating Iran and its allies.

For those wondering what would happen if progress in talks with Syria resulted in an open dispute between Jerusalem and Washington, the answer is: We'll probably never know.

Aside from the fact that the Syrians are themselves probably not serious (Assad needs the conflict with Israel to justify his despotic minority rule regime more than he needs the Golan), there is the fact that Olmert himself is almost certainly on the way out. Indeed, the allegations of ethical misdeeds that have rendered his attempt to hold on to power an increasingly dismaying spectacle led many Israelis to believe he authorized the talks in an effort to distract the public from the scandals.

But even if this initiative is doomed to failure, that still leaves us pondering the question of what the obligations of the United States and Israel are to each other.

Given that both countries want to see Islamist states like Iran defeated, and that they both see peace between Israel and its neighbors as a strategic imperative, such disputes ought to be rare. But even in the closest of friendships between nations, the interests of the two are not always identical.

As much as every president (and would-be president) speaks of Israel's security as the starting point of U.S. foreign policy in the region, most of the disputes that have come up between the two countries have been a matter of the Americans trying to push peace deals the Israelis might not think are prudent.

At such moments, Israeli leaders have been forced to weigh the obligation to defend their national interests against the need to never allow any daylight between their positions and those of the Americans. Thus, every Israeli government has, at times, been prepared to say no to American entreaties. For all of its dependence on U.S. support and military aid, Israel is an independent nation, not a client state.

But what has happened under Olmert has been something entirely new. Though American supporters of Israel reflexively fear that the Syrian talks or the current round of futile negotiations with the Palestinian Authority is the result of U.S. pressure, virtually no one in the know in either Washington or Jerusalem believes that these are the result of Bush or Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice strong-arming Olmert. Rather, it's Olmert who has forced the Americans to follow along.

In the case of Syria, there was good reason for the Americans to be perturbed. At a time when the United States is seeking to bring maximum pressure on such regimes, Israel's opening worked against that goal.

Olmert may have believed the reported Israeli destruction of a Syrian nuclear site last September as a good reason to talk to Assad while he was still smarting. But the Americans view that episode in the larger context of Iranian and North Korean nuclear proliferation. Since the Israelis themselves see the threat from a nuclear Iran as the No. 1 strategic problem their nation faces, freelancing on that front is probably a blunder.

The point is, if Jerusalem is going to talk about being on the frontline of the Western democracies battle against Islamism, they need to take the broader interests of that war into consideration. Like the Olmert government's disastrous failure against Hezbollah, which surprised and disappointed its U.S. friends, the Syria initiative was a needless irritant to the alliance.

But that doesn't mean they didn't have the right to do it.

Just as when the situation was reversed and the United States pushed Israel into pointless peace talks, there are times when Israel can - and indeed, must -- assert its sovereign rights.

If an Israeli government sees a genuine opportunity for peace, it is absurd for the United States, which has tried many times to orchestrate Israeli concessions for peace deals with the Palestinians that were just as ill-conceived as the current Syrian talks to cry foul. No American has the right to "save Israel from itself," whether the policy it is attempting to impose mandates talks or opposes them.

No amount of American aid requires any Israeli leader to sacrifice citizens' lives in order to win favor with the White House. But the same principle applies when it is the Israelis who want to take a chance, even if their reasoning is just as foolish.

3) Why We Went to Iraq
By FOUAD AJAMI

Of all that has been written about the play of things in Iraq, nothing that I have seen approximates the truth of what our ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, recently said of this war: "In the end, how we leave and what we leave behind will be more important than how we came."

It is odd, then, that critics have launched a new attack on the origins of the war at precisely the time a new order in Iraq is taking hold. But American liberal opinion is obsessive today. Scott McClellan can't be accused of strategic thinking, but he has been anointed a peer of Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft. A witness and a presumed insider – a "Texas loyalist" – has "flipped."


Mr. McClellan wades into the deep question of whether this war was a war of "necessity" or a war of "choice." He does so in the sixth year of the war, at a time when many have forgotten what was thought and said before its onset. The nation was gripped by legitimate concern over gathering dangers in the aftermath of 9/11. Kabul and the war against the Taliban had not sufficed, for those were Arabs who struck America on 9/11. A war of deterrence had to be waged against Arab radicalism, and Saddam Hussein had drawn the short straw. He had not ducked, he had not scurried for cover. He openly mocked America's grief, taunted its power.

We don't need to overwork the stereotype that Arabs understand and respond to the logic of force, but this is a region sensitive to the wind, and to the will of outside powers. Before America struck into Iraq, a mere 18 months after 9/11, there had been glee in the Arab world, a sense that America had gotten its comeuppance. There were regimes hunkering down, feigning friendship with America while aiding and abetting the forces of terror.

Liberal opinion in America and Europe may have scoffed when President Bush drew a strict moral line between order and radicalism – he even inserted into the political vocabulary the unfashionable notion of evil – but this sort of clarity is in the nature of things in that Greater Middle East. It is in categories of good and evil that men and women in those lands describe their world. The unyielding campaign waged by this president made a deep impression on them.

Nowadays, we hear many who have never had a kind word to say about the Iraq War pronounce on the retreat of the jihadists. It is as though the Islamists had gone back to their texts and returned with second thoughts about their violent utopia. It is as though the financiers and the "charities" that aided the terror had reconsidered their loyalties and opted out of that sly, cynical trade. Nothing could be further from the truth. If Islamism is on the ropes, if the regimes in the saddle in key Arab states now show greater resolve in taking on the forces of radicalism, no small credit ought to be given to this American project in Iraq.

We should give the "theorists" of terror their due and read them with some discernment. To a man, they have told us that they have been bloodied in Iraq, that they have been surprised by the stoicism of the Americans, by the staying power of the Bush administration.

There is no way of convincing a certain segment of opinion that there are indeed wars of "necessity." A case can always be made that an aggressor ought to be given what he seeks, that the costs of war are prohibitively high when measured against the murky ways of peace and of daily life.

"Wars are not self-starting," the noted philosopher Michael Walzer wrote in his seminal book, "Just and Unjust Wars." "They may 'break out,' like an accidental fire, under conditions difficult to analyze and where the attribution of responsibility seems impossible. But usually they are more like arson than accident: war has human agents as well as human victims."

Fair enough. In the narrow sense of command and power, this war in Iraq is Mr. Bush's war. But it is an evasion of responsibility to leave this war at his doorstep. This was a war fought with congressional authorization, with the warrant of popular acceptance, and the sanction of United Nations resolutions which called for Iraq's disarmament. It is the political good fortune (in the world of Democratic Party activists) that Sen. Barack Obama was spared the burden of a vote in the United States Senate to authorize the war. By his telling, he would have us believe that he would have cast a vote against it. But there is no sure way of knowing whether he would have stood up to the wind.

With the luxury of hindsight, the critics of the war now depict the arguments made for it as a case of manipulation and deceit. This is odd and misplaced: The claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were to prove incorrect, but they were made in good faith.

It is also obtuse and willful to depict in dark colors the effort made to "sell" the war. Wars can't be waged in stealth, and making the moral case for them is an obligation incumbent on the leaders who launch them. If anything, there were stretches of time, and critical turning points, when the administration abdicated the fight for public opinion.

Nor is there anything unprecedented, or particularly dishonest, about the way the rationale for the war shifted when the hunt for weapons of mass destruction had run aground. True, the goal of a democratic Iraq – and the broader agenda of the war as a spearhead of "reform" in Arab and Muslim lands – emerged a year or so after the onset of the war. But the aims of practically every war always shift with the course of combat, and with historical circumstances. Need we recall that the abolition of slavery had not been an "original" war aim, and that the Emancipation Proclamation was, by Lincoln's own admission, a product of circumstances? A war for the Union had become a victory for abolitionism.

America had not been prepared for nation-building in Iraq; we had not known Iraq and Iraqis or understood the depth of Iraq's breakdown. But there was nothing so startling or unusual about the connection George W. Bush made between American security and the "reform" of the Arab condition. As America's pact with the Arab autocrats had hatched a monster, it was logical and prudent to look for a new way.

"When a calf falls, a thousand knives flash," goes an Arabic proverb. The authority of this administration is ebbing away, the war in Iraq is unloved, and even the "loyalists" now see these years of panic and peril as a time of exaggerated fear.

It is not easy to tell people of threats and dangers they have been spared. The war put on notice regimes and conspirators who had harbored dark thoughts about America and who, in the course of the 1990s, were led to believe that terrible deeds against America would go unpunished. A different lesson was taught in Iraq. Nowadays, the burden of the war, in blood and treasure, is easy to see, while the gains, subtle and real, are harder to demonstrate. Last month, American casualties in Iraq were at their lowest since 2003. The Sunnis also have broken with al Qaeda, and the Shiite-led government has taken the war to the Mahdi Army: Is it any wonder that the critics have returned to the origins of the war?

Five months from now, the American public will vote on this war, in the most dramatic and definitive of ways. There will be people who heed Ambassador Crocker's admonition. And there will be others keen on retelling how we made our way to Iraq.