By failing to pull the trigger - McCain shot himself!

An analysis of the Genesis of our problem by a thoughtful executive of a superbly managed company. Smith's most telling observation is that bank assets became so leveraged they were turned into liabilities. (See 1 below.)

If McCain flew his jet just as he has failed to respond to blatant attacks and outright lies it is no wonder he was shot out of the skies. By failing to pull the trigger he has shot himself. (See Saturday's WSJ lead editorial, 2 below.)

In a move of desperation or playing to the historians, GW and Sec. Rice seem willing to make bed with Iran, Hamas and accept Syria's move into Lebanon as a sign Assad is ready to block arm sales to Hezballah. Based on past experience there are other ways to interpret our reliance on Assad's word. More importantly, GW's actions could be tying the hands of the incoming president, whomever, in a direction that could prove fruitful or a bigger disaster waiting to happen for Lebanese and Israelis. Syria evinces no reliable sign they are willing to separate from Iran but if the next president can levy a crippling economic effect on Iran this might be an incentive for Syria to finally cast its lot with the West. But, then how is this possible if recognition of Iran and re-establishment of diplomatic ties are around the corner? Stay tuned. (See 3 and 3a below.)

Amotz Asa-El portrays GW as a tragic figure lacking the necessary ingredients for the problems he confronted. (See 4 below.)

One day my suspicions might be proven but it will all come after the fact - Obama and his money and Islamic ties. (See 5 below.)

Game the system, write a book(s), hire Robert Barnett and the rest can be history. (See 6 below.)

Does Melanie Smith know more than Dennis Ross? (See 7 below.)

Dick

1)Washington Is the Problem: FedEx's CEO on McCain, free trade and the tax bias against capital-intensive industries.
By STEPHEN MOORE

Fred Smith is in an agitated state. He's just returned from a Washington Redskins game -- played in FedEx field in Washington -- and the team has been upset by the Arizona Cardinals. "It was just awful," he grouses. "My son's one of the coaches, and he was ready to jump off the ledge of the stadium."

There are few better people to ask about our current economic precipice than Mr. Smith -- or, as some people call him, "Fred Ex." His company has $38 billion in sales, employs four football stadiums full of workers, owns 300 jet airplanes, and tens of thousands of trucks and vehicles. FedEx moves an incomprehensible seven million packages each day to every corner of the globe. And the good news is that Fred is optimistic -- sort of.
[The Weekend Interview] Ismael Roldan

"Oh, the country is going to get through this and the financial markets will stabilize," he assures me, but only after we go through a period of "trauma and readjustment."

I ask him just what he means by "trauma." He attributes the financial crisis to "the intersection of four long-term developments." Reckless mortgage lending policies; high energy prices; mark-to-market accounting rules; and national policies that favor what he calls "the financial sector over the industrial sector."

"Rather than in our business where you have to have a dollar of equity for, 10 cents or 15 cents of debt," he explains, "it's exactly the opposite in the financial sector where you have one dollar of equity for 10, 25, 50 times risk." "Things became so flipped upside down," he explains, that "the assets at these banks became the liabilities and the liabilities became the assets. These people were making these fantastic returns -- at places like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- but in reality they weren't adding a lot of value. I have said time and again that there is a fundamental tendency in good times in the financial sector to over-leverage. Our national policies actively encouraged all this debt."

How so? "The United States has a completely uncompetitive tax structure in general and it has a particularly onerous tax structure for firms that are asset-intensive. If you run an industrial company like FedEx, which employs 290,000 folks, most of whom are blue-collar people, the way we have to run this business is to equip those workers with billions of dollars of assets that allow them to pick up and deliver millions of things around the world."

His theory is that the tax bias against capital explains why so much top U.S. talent got whisked off to become investment bankers. "Not too many young people coming out of school are studying to be production managers at General Motors." He says that most of FedEx's first line managers come not from the top flight universities, but out of community colleges and the military. "The top talent has wanted to go to Wall Street."

He has come to hold the get-rich-quick Wall Street financiers in more than a little disdain. He views the heroes of the U.S. economy as the companies that actually produce real goods and services. He sees the Wall Street collapse as an inevitable byproduct of investment bankers building multitrillion dollar debt pyramid structures.

So how do we fix this problem and retool our industrial sector in a pro-competitive fashion? "We've got to reduce the taxes on equity. Let companies expense their capital purchases."

He uses an example from FedEx. "Look, our capital budget as we went into this year was about $3 billion. We went out to Boeing in July for our board meeting to see the new triple seven, [the Boeing 777] which we have bought. If we had a lower corporate tax rate with the ability to expense capital expenditures, guess what? We'd buy more triple sevens. We absolutely have to cut the corporate tax. Our current tax rate is about 38%. Even Germany has a 25% rate."

We turn to the election. Mr. Smith is one of the most enthusiastic supporters of John McCain among the Fortune 50 CEOs. When I ask why, he says instantly: "Because I agree with him on trade, taxes, energy and health care."

Next I ask Mr. Smith about the class warfare theme of the political debate. "The politicians deplore the fact that we have a disparity of income," he says, but "the only way to make a blue-collar person earn more is to invest in capital, training and infrastructure. So the more you tax capital, the more you hurt workers." He estimates that about 70% of the return from FedEx capital expenditures is captured by workers in the form of higher wages as their productivity rises.

He sees a big problem in that so few Americans now pay any income tax. "We're now at a point where a very large part of the population pays no federal income tax at all. When you have a majority of the population that realizes that you can transfer money from the productive to themselves, that's one of the great questions for the future of civilization, as far as I'm concerned."

As for CEO pay, Mr. Smith concedes that in some cases corporate management pay scales have gotten far out of line with shareholder interests. But he is quick to add: "I don't think anybody begrudges somebody making a large amount of money as long as it benefits everyone else. The problem is when they make a large amount of money and the shareholders get clobbered." As he sees it, "There's only one solution, and that is for a competent board of directors to oversee managers and give them incentives which are long-term in nature and which are irrevocably tied to the fortunes of the shareholders."

I tour the FedEx command and control center outside the Memphis airport. It's an awesome sight. FedEx operates its own air traffic control system and its own weather monitoring services. It takes over whole airports at night, and it operates its own risk mitigation operation to prepare for every possible contingency. "We have to know instantly how we reroute our planes if that storm in Tulsa turns into a tornado," the operations manager explains. There's a massive screen covering an entire wall that monitors the location and progress of every FedEx plane in the sky.

The computer technicians show me a jaw-dropping display on the computer screen of a fast-motion day of FedEx plane travel. Starting in the wee hours of the morning, the planes descend from all over the country into the Memphis airport. A few hours later, after being loaded with packages, the jets begin their assault on the major cities of the nation and world. They call this the "ant farm," because it resembles armies of ants scurrying to every corner of the globe. This is a company that has staked its entire reputation on getting packages to their appointed destination, "absolutely, positively overnight."

I keep thinking how many tens of billions of dollars Uncle Sam would save if it were one-third this efficient. These are the people that should have been in charge of the rescue operation during Hurricane Katrina. "We got all our people out -- no problem," Mr. Smith tells me.

Considering FedEx's world-wide operations, and its rapid expansion in China, it occurs to me that there is perhaps no other company in the world more dependent on international trade. Sure enough, Fred Smith is a fanatical supporter of free trade. So much so that he says, "I think the best thing the United States could do is to unilaterally disarm. It should open up markets. The agricultural subsidies are terrible. They're just immoral."

On economic grounds, he continues, "I think the history is very clear, that trade is the main reason that the world has enjoyed the prosperity. Look at China. They've drug hundreds of millions of people out of poverty through trade."

Trade aside, no issue is of greater consequence to FedEx than energy policy. FedEx consumes 1.3 billion gallons of jet fuel a year, and is the largest user of energy in the world next to the U.S. military. Mr. Smith sits on the board of the Energy Security Leadership Council, which issued a report a few months ago advocating a huge expansion of domestic energy supply. How do we do this?

"Two things," he insists. "The first is we should maximize oil production in the United States in every respect. Everything, offshore, Alaska, shale, nonconventional, coal to liquid, gas to liquid, and nuclear. Let the market work.

"Second, and this is where I am an apostate on the free market, and also where I disagree in the main with, with Boone Pickens," Mr. Smith adds. "The United States has only one real way to reduce our dependence on foreign petroleum, in terms of reducing demand while we're increasing our domestic supply, and that is to electrify the short haul transportation system, to go to battery powered cars. The technology that brought us laptops and cell phones has reached a point where these lithium ion batteries can now produce cars like the Chevy Volt and the new plug-in Toyota Prius." Many FedEx trucks are already using this technology, though he admits they aren't yet cost efficient but are 42% more fuel efficient.

Mr. Smith ends our interview with a little sermon about what the U.S. must do to retain its global economic superpower status. "Many of our current policies are not conducive to continued economic leadership. We restrict immigration when we have thousands of highly educated people that want to come to the United States, and some of our greatest corporations [are] crying out that we don't have the scientific talent that we need to develop the next generation of innovations and inventions . . .

"That's where all wealth comes from . . . It's not from the government. It's from invention and entrepreneurship and innovation. And our policies promote a legal and regulatory system which impedes our ability to grow entrepreneurship. Lastly, if we want to make [America's workers] wealthier we have to quit demonizing quote, big corporations."

As I walk out the door I ask Mr. Smith if he's communicated these ideas directly to Barack Obama. "I haven't met Barack Obama," he replies. "He's certainly a charismatic fellow and well-spoken. I just disagree with him on trade and taxes and energy and health care."

2)Obama vs. His Advisers: On health care, they once liked McCain's principles.

One underreported story of this election is how heavily John McCain has been damaged by Barack Obama's television ad assault on his health-care plan. A lot of voters seem to believe the Democrat when he says that Mr. McCain wants to deny them coverage or bankrupt them with crushing hospital bills.

Mr. McCain has himself to blame for not defending his own reform ideas, during the debates and in TV ads, against attacks that have been misleading when not flat-out false. Even so, Mr. Obama's tactics are especially cynical because his own health-care advisers support plans much like Mr. McCain's. Or at least they did before joining up with Mr. Obama.

Put simply, the McCain plan seeks to remedy a distortion in the health-care market that economists have spent decades begging politicians to fix: The tax code subsidizes insurance only if it is provided through employers. Individuals can't take the same tax deduction for buying insurance that businesses can. So Mr. McCain wants to "spread the wealth" of these tax breaks to individuals of any income through a refundable tax credit, no matter where they get coverage.

"The fact that the tax subsidy, which supports the employer-sponsored system, is better than nothing is a feeble excuse for resisting any changes to the status quo." That's not John McCain's judgment. It's a quote from Jason Furman, who happens to be Mr. Obama's economic policy director. In a cri de coeur published in the journal Democracy in 2006, Mr. Furman implored fellow Democrats and other progressives to confront "a critical missing link" in their health ideology -- the same link his boss now spends most of his time demagoguing.

Mr. Furman used to portray the current system as regressive, inequitable and a subsidy for health plans that insulate consumers from the cost of their care, thus inflating health spending. When he was director of the Brooking Institution's Hamilton Project, Mr. Furman outlined a health reform -- again using tax credits -- that took the "sensible approach" of "exposing individuals to the price of health care through greater cost sharing."

When President Bush unveiled a health reform similar to Mr. McCain's in 2007, Mr. Furman co-authored a Tax Policy Center paper that called it "innovative and a step in the right direction." As recently as May, he published a long article in Health Affairs on the possibilities of health-care tax reform.

What a difference an election makes. "The choice you'll have," Mr. Obama warned of the McCain plan during one of the debates, "is having your employer no longer provide you health care." Sounds terrible. But wait, let's consult another one of Mr. Obama's advisers. David Cutler, the Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics at Harvard, put it this way: "Health insurance is not something that is made better by tying it to employment. As a result, essentially all economists believe that universal coverage should be done outside of employment."

That passage comes from Mr. Cutler's 2004 book, "Your Money or Your Life," which outlined a strategy for universal health care. Not surprisingly, Professor Cutler's plan, like Mr. McCain's, also applied subsidies such as "tax credits -- people get a lower tax bill, or a refund from the government, to be used to purchase insurance." In this he was echoing many other liberal health experts such as MIT's Jonathan Gruber, another Democratic policy star.

These advisers know that Mr. Obama's claim that Mr. McCain will tax health benefits "for the first time in history" is particularly disingenuous. For people who stick with employer coverage under the McCain plan, the money employers take out of wages to pay for insurance would be taxed, but the new credit more than covers the bill. The people who decide to buy coverage on their own would see their wages rise. And everyone who joins the individual market -- many of them uninsured now -- would be equipped with new health dollars, instead of paying with after-tax income.

Obviously neither Mr. Furman nor Mr. Cutler would endorse the McCain plan outright. They are, after all, Democrats. Liberals who support rearranging the tax code for health care think it must be accompanied by other insurance reforms to protect families in the individual market that Mr. McCain doesn't include. Even so, speaking on a Tax Policy Center panel on taxes and health insurance in February of this year, Mr. Furman said that "I think we should be cheerleading" the emphasis on tax reform, "not writing it off."

He even prefaced his remarks by joking, "this talk might actually sound like a John McCain rally." Maybe Mr. Obama should be running attack ads against his own economic guru.

3) Syrian Troops Enclose Lebanon, Rice Contacts Hamas


As part of the incipient thaw in US relations with Damascus, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has relayed a friendly message to Hamas political leader Khalid Meshaal through Syrian foreign minister Walid Muallem’s aides.

The message, described by Moussa Abu Marzouk, one of the heads of Hamas’ Damascus headquarters, as a “verbal communication.” was received as four Syrian divisions completed their deployment on Lebanon’s borders last week. In the message, Rice praised the Palestinian terrorist group for halting its missile fire into Israel.

Intelligent sources exposed the complete deployment - from the Syrian 4th Division along Lebanon’s northern border and the 10th, 12th and 14th Divisions on Lebanon’s eastern frontier opposite the Hermil mountains and the Beqaa Valley, and down to the Hermon Mountains facing South Lebanon and northern Israel.

Neither the Americans nor the Israelis had expected Damascus to round off this troop concentration so fast. It was taken for granted that Damascus would wait to the spring of 2009, after the rainy season. However, president Bashar Assad saw two advantages in going ahead before the Nov. 4 US presidential election:

First, Israel would be unlikely to strike in the days leading up to the US election and, second, Damascus would present the new man in the White House with a fait accompli.

The first concentration of 6-8,000 Syrian troops was evident when two Syrian commando brigades of the 4th Mechanized Division took up positions along 2 km of the El Kebir River which marks that sector of the border - opposite northern Lebanon and its largest town of Tripoli.

Then, last week, Damascus consigned the 12th Mechanized Division to the border of the Lebanese Beqaa Valley and its central mountains, so completing the encirclement.

Syrian military positions now range from points opposite the northern Lebanese town of Al Qaa on Mt. Hermil to points further south up to the Massena border crossing 50 km north of Beirut. The Syrian 4th and 12th Divisions abut on the 10th Division ranged opposite South Lebanon and the disputed Shebaa Farms enclave. The military chain continues with the 14th commando division positioned on the Syrian slopes of Mt Hermon opposite Israeli military positions.

Not only are Lebanon’s borders enclosed, but Syria, in conjunction with Iran, has also established a military presence inside Lebanon. In the summer, they emplaced radar stations on the tall Lebanese peaks of Mt. Sannine and Barukh of the central mountain range, giving them a detailed view of every move on Lebanese territory, in northern Israel and on the eastern Mediterranean.

All these movements were performed with a nod and a wink from Washington.

Three years after forcing Syria to quit Lebanon, the Bush administration was ready to okay Syria’s massed troop concentration on Lebanese borders. Permission was granted in an apparently cursory meeting between Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Syrian foreign minister Walid Muallem on Sept. 27 at UN Center in New York.

Damascus counted this as validation of its drive for restored domination of Lebanon by dint of its military.

Washington also satisfied itself that the deal promised major profits:

1. The Assad government sounded willing for the first time to obstruct Hizballah and hold up its supplies of military hardware.

Syria’s 4th and 12 Divisions are in position for blocking Hizballah’s primary smuggling routes.

2. It was inferred that Damascus was at last beginning, albeit two years late, to honor UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which banned arms supplies to Hizballah as part of the ceasefire which ended the Israel-Lebanon war. Syria and Iran mocked that resolution for two years by smuggling weapons in bulk to the Shiite terrorists.

3. Damascus’ implied willingness to go against Hizballah was taken by Washington as a measure of Assad’s readiness to stand up to Iran at present - and break away in the future.

4. And might not that willingness be extended to embrace Tehran’s other terrorist protégés, the Palestinian Hamas and Jihad Islami, both of whose headquarters have long been welcome in Damascus?

Middle East sources stressed, for the time being, all these exciting benefits are no more than fond hopes, which the Bush administration cannot hope to see fully developed in the short months remaining of its term - if at all. Bashar Assad’s relations with the United States are littered with a trail of broken promises, as Rice’s predecessor, Colin Powell, can affirm.

Nevertheless, the secretary of state keeps pushing on.

Washington and Middle East sources reveal the message she addressed to Hamas’ political chief Khaled Meshaal in Damascus was the first communication ever from a senior US official to the Palestinian fundamentalists, which Washington lists as a terrorist group. Rice even complimented Hamas for halting its missile and rocket fire into Israel and voiced the hope that Palestinian organization would go further and join Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy.

After Moussa Abu Marzouk on Oct. 22, spilled the beans of what he called American recognition of his organization, the state department issued a hurried denial and set up an interview for Assistant Secretary of State David Welch with the London-based Saudi paper Shawq al Awsat.

The interviewer, Manal Lutfi, pushed hard for an admission of the US-Syrian détente, citing examples. But Welch stuck to his guns: “…I say there is no revision of our policies towards Syria.”

Formally speaking, he was truthful. However, the groundwork has certainly been laid for the major revision which he denied. Syrian troops have been allowed to openly close in on Lebanon without a demurral from the Bush administration. Washington has been caught out communicating with Bashar Assad’s extremist Palestinian guest, Hamas, for the first time.

The outcome of these preliminaries - milestone in themselves – will no doubt come to light only when a new president sits in the White House and Israel has a new government after a general election early next year.

3a) Report: Bush to declare renewal of ties with Iran
By Yossi Melman

Several American media outlets reported on Saturday that President George Bush is likely to announce after next month's presidential elections that he intends to restore the diplomatic relations with Iran, almost 30 years after they were suspended.

Quoting U.S. civil servants, the reports said that Bush's decision to postpone the announcement until after the elections was meant to rid the two presidential candidates of having to deal with the controversial move.

In the first stage, the American administration allegedly seeks to appoint a low-level diplomatic delegation, and has already started the recruitment process.

Tehran has already been informed of the initiative, but its view on the matter remains unclear. Similar reports were published a few months ago, but the plan was then put on hold.

Earlier this month, the American Iranian Council, a U.S.-based organization, was banned from operating in Iran. However, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said during a U.S. tour last month that he would consider restoring his country's relations with the U.S.

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki has said Tehran would favorably consider such proposal, as long as it was to be carried out bilaterally.

U.S. sources said the purpose of the diplomatic effort is to better communicate American messages to the Iranian people, which are largely hostile to the U.S. They said that it does not signal a conciliatory approach to the Iranian regime or any change of policy vis-à-vis the contentious issues that are on the table, namely Iran's nuclear program.

The United States severed its diplomatic ties with Iran in 1979, in the wake of the Islamic revolution that ousted the Shah and brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power. A group of Iranian students, supported by the Islamists, took over the American embassy and held its workers hostage for over a year.

4) Middle Israel: George Bush as a tragic figure
By AMOTZ ASA-EL

Nothing in his upscale upbringing, cushioned career, narrow horizons and pedestrian character could prepare him for the crusading zealots, billowing battlefields, collapsing skyscrapers, rising superpowers, gushing markets and soaring ocean waves that awaited him as leader of the free world
Bush met historic forces he had no chance of confronting.


'A perfect tragedy is the noblest production of human nature," wrote English essayist and dramatist Joseph Addison.

Ordinarily, to fully appreciate this observation one would need to probe complex literary images like Samson, Oedipus, Agamemnon or Hamlet. But ours are no ordinary times, and we need look no further than the White House and consider the years its current tenant has spent there.

To literary purists, the term "tragedy" is often misused, as it is routinely attached to pretty much anything bad that happens to anyone good under whatever circumstances, from the disappearance of a house in an earthquake to the loss of a friend on a battlefield. Yet the perfect tragedy is more than that, as it involves people larger than most others and calamities that are their own doing. At the same time, tragic heroes' flaws are universal and their downfalls unavoidable.

Now, as speculation mounts concerning the next US president's identity, plans and ability to extract America from the black hole where it has arrived, the outgoing presidency's balance sheet can already be written. Sadly, no matter which accountants, historians or dramatists ultimately compose it, its bottom line will always be painted in one color: red.

IN A SENSE, the Bush years are even more tragic than the American presidencies that ended in assassination.

Bush has been anything but a James Garfield, whose several months in the White House were too brief to matter, nor was he a John Kennedy or a William McKinley, whose departures left millions feeling bereaved and their presidencies recalled fondly. And he certainly was no Abraham Lincoln, whose rise to the occasion was among history's most memorable, nor was he even a Richard Nixon, whose legal record was ultimately overshadowed by his geopolitical success.

Bush's drawbacks were slow to surface and, as tragedies go, their full scope emerged only once the size of the challenges he faced, which no one had fully foreseen, became apparent.

The sages said that some win and some lose entire worlds in one moment. Bush lost his in four: 9/11, the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina, and the '08 crash. In all these he demonstrated profound deficits of knowledge and intuition, without which even the most resolute and charismatic leader cannot deliver the goods.

The 9/11 challenge caught Bush so badly off guard that it took him precious time to just define the enemy, and even that he did in a way that largely defeated the purpose. The enemy was, and remains, Islamism, but Bush defined the enemy as terror. Telling the American people that the enemy was terror was as if Churchill would have told the British that the enemy is the Luftwaffe, not Nazism, and FDR would have told the Americans that their enemy is the Kamikaze pilots, not Japan.

This was not semantics. Beyond it lurked a failure to understand history and read the world that an American president is demanded to lead. All this should not have come as a surprise considering the geopolitical ignorance Bush had already displayed as a candidate. His aides at the time, still deep in the Cold War victors' hangover, thought it was all anecdotal and even funny. In fact, it was about as funny, and fateful, as Jimmy Carter's failure in his time to understand the world in general, and the Islamist threat it produced in particular.

Had Nixon, Churchill or Roosevelt populated the Oval Office at the time, the response to 9/11 would have been different, one that would enlist the people and instill a sense of volunteerism and sacrifice, whether militarily or financially. But Bush was a tragic figure, one who reflected an entire civilization's post-Cold War denial that it still had to fight expensive wars.

THE KATRINA challenge was different, as it had nothing to do with understanding the world. This one was about detecting in advance cracks in America's civil bedrock, and mending them before rather than after catastrophe struck. But Bush was a tragic figure, and as such was almost predestined to preside over an astonishing administrative helplessness that was reminiscent of the dying USSR's impotence in the face of the Armenian earthquake in 1988.

Meanwhile, the soldiers Bush sent to war were facing an enemy Bush had failed to expect. In a speech delivered aboard the - of all names - USS Abraham Lincoln a mere several weeks after the invasion of Iraq, he declared major combat operations there over. As if assembled into one stage by its cruel playwright, the Bush tragedy's hero spoke in front of cameras, to the entire world, from under a glaring sign that proudly, innocently and so utterly ignorantly read "mission accomplished." It took hardly a year for the world to understand that the mission remained hopelessly unaccomplished, that Iraq was no Falklands and that Bush was no Margaret Thatcher.

Now, to top it all, came the market collapse that has altogether undone the thinking with which America elected Bush and Bush led America, an interpretation of the tempers of the time that insisted all was already well in the kingdom and could only get better in the future. In fact, America got caught so unprepared for the market mayhem that its president, who had once been compared with Ronald Reagan, was now being compared with Herbert Hoover, and seeing the British prime minister unwittingly fill the leadership vacuum created by the confused American leader, the same who had once purported to reshape the world.

AS IT draws to a close, the Bush presidency looms ominously as a Greek tragedy, where innocent heroes like Oedipus or Antigone are maneuvered by their ignorance and obligations into crises that invariably end badly; or like a Shakespearean tragedy, where the trials of prominent but imperfect characters like Hamlet or Caesar unwittingly call into question an entire social order.

More broadly, literary tragedies call into question the role of chance, error, fate and destiny in human life, as they pit man against forces hopelessly stronger than him. The forces George Bush met, and stood no chance of confronting, were of historic, even biblical dimensions, from crusading zealots, billowing battlefields and collapsing skyscrapers to rising superpowers, gushing markets and soaring ocean waves. There was nothing in his upscale upbringing, cushioned career, narrow horizons and pedestrian character that could prepare him for any of this.
Bush met historic forces he...


Bush's original sin, therefore, did not lie in anything he did or didn't do as leader of the free world; it was in his very decision to apply for the job.

5) Obama Office Operates in Philly's Islamist Corridor
by David J. Rusin


When Barack Obama's campaign needed a base for harvesting votes from the southern precincts of Philadelphia, it set up shop in a building owned and managed by controversial real estate baron Kenny Gamble. Also known as Luqman Abdul Haqq, Gamble holds a senior position with the Muslim Alliance in North America (MANA), whose founding is traced to a convicted cop-killer and whose leadership is stacked with radicals. He likewise serves as a community organizer of sorts — one who has been accused of slowly transforming his neighborhood into a "black Muslim enclave."

The office opened on August 21 at 1501 Christian Street, with Gamble himself cutting the ceremonial ribbon. Makeshift banners proclaim it the "South Philly Obama Headquarters," the address of which is listed on the Obama-Biden website as a field office for the Pennsylvania Campaign for Change. Philadelphia tax records identify Gamble as the owner of the property, while signage indicates that the building is home to Universal Educational Management, part of his Universal Companies conglomerate.

Gamble's associates and agendas expose him as a dubious figure that politicians seeking to present an image of inclusion would be wise to avoid. This is doubly true for a campaign like Obama's that already has suffered serious missteps in its interaction with the Muslim community.

Best known for his work in the music business, Gamble has held high-ranking posts with the Muslim Alliance in North America, which focuses on African-American converts to Islam. That description fits Gamble and most of the group's senior members, some of whom also have roots in the Nation of Islam and Black Panther movement. Indeed, the formation of MANA was inspired by Jamil Al-Amin, the onetime Panther "justice minister" H. Rap Brown. MANA's enthusiasm for Al-Amin remains untainted in the wake of his conviction for the 2000 murder of a sheriff's deputy. He has even addressed, by telephone, MANA meetings at Gamble's United Muslim Masjid.

MANA's governing bodies teem with Islamists: Siraj Wahhaj, the organization's amir, was named as a potential unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, supports Shari'a-prescribed punishments, and predicts America's demise unless it "accepts the Islamic agenda." Johari Abdul-Malik directs outreach activities for a Virginia mosque repeatedly tied to terrorism cases. Abdul Alim Musa promotes anti-Semitic and anti-American conspiracy theories and has expressed admiration for Hamas, Hezbollah, and Osama bin Laden.

Musa's radical As-Sabiqun group advises Muslims to assemble self-contained strongholds, a strategy similar to what Gamble is pursuing in Philadelphia. As he explained in an interview with Saudi TV, "One of the intentions that we had from the beginning was to create a model, so that, in the coming years, Muslims would be able to live close to each other, that they would live closer to the masjid [mosque], that they would eventually be able to open up businesses so that they would be able to employ each other and develop community life." More darkly, Philadelphia magazine has reported that some South Philly denizens "fear that Gamble, a convert to Islam, is inclined toward racial and religious segregation" and aims to carve out a "black Muslim enclave."

The Obama office resides at the center of this storm. Gamble's mosque is just a few doors to the north. On the same block stands the headquarters of his Universal Companies, a local giant that specializes in urban renewal projects and runs a vast array of housing, businesses, and other facilities — even a charter school. Records of 1501 Christian also highlight Gamble's modus operandi for growing his empire: get land and buildings dirt cheap from the city, which often seizes them through eminent domain for the express purpose of having Universal renovate them. According to the Board of Revision of Taxes website, Gamble bought the property now hosting Team Obama for one dollar in 1991. (The database labels the plot as 822 South 15th, but the available information makes it the only possible match for 1501 Christian.)

It is not just the heavily Islamic atmosphere of the surrounding neighborhood — complete with men in traditional dress praying on the sidewalks — that feeds speculation about a veiled agenda. Gamble's bizarre statements to Philadelphia magazine last year added more fuel to the fire: "You don't see the lion with the tiger. You don't see the tiger with the panther," he said. "You don't have people selling goods and services in the Irish community from some other community. In the Russian community, you don't have people from other communities. In the Puerto Rican community, the Puerto Ricans have their own economy, they have their own stores." The article notes that Gamble's musings sound like an endorsement of segregation and a desire to engineer a zone exclusively for black Muslims.

The placement of an Obama field office in Philly's Islamist corridor is not the first link between questionable representatives of Muslim America and the senator's presidential campaign. Mazen Asbahi, Obama's initial Muslim-outreach coordinator, stepped down in August for connections to a controversial Islamic investment fund and Illinois imam. His successor, Minha Husaini, then "accidentally" attended a meeting with the Council on American-Islamic Relations and Muslim American Society, two groups tied to the Muslim Brotherhood. In addition, Muslim-Americans for Obama has peddled a policy wish list colored with Islamism and run partisan voter registration drives from swing state mosques, which would appear to violate their tax-exempt status.

Obama's staff could be forgiven for accepting contributions from Gamble, but renting office space from him at the heart of his troubling socioreligious enterprise falls well beyond the boundaries of good judgment. Simply put, the campaign is doing business with someone who may embody the type of change that Islamists and racial separatists can believe in.

6) The Washington insider who made Obama rich
By D.D. Guttenplan



Barack Obama and John McCain don’t agree about much, but when, in the middle of one of their debates this month, Obama referred to “those of us, like myself and Senator McCain, who don’t need help [financially]”, his opponent nodded. Whoever comes out ahead in 10 days time, the next president of the United States will be a rich man. McCain made his first million the old-fashioned way: he married the daughter of a wealthy businessman. But Barack Obama, the son of an absent African father and a mother who relied on government-issued food stamps to feed her children, became a millionaire in a more modern manner – on the back of a book deal.

It happened circuitously. In 1990, Obama was already enough of a celebrity – the first black president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review – for the New York publishers Simon & Schuster to offer a “six-figure contract” for a proposed autobiography. The only problem was that Obama was too busy finishing law school to write the book, and the contract was eventually cancelled. By the time Obama finished Dreams From My Father – published by Times Books in 1995 – his advance was only $40,000. In 2004, Obama – now a state senator in Illinois and a candidate for the US senate – was chosen to be the keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention, but his book was long out of print. Yet when he arrived in Washington, the $169,300 senator’s salary was not going to be his mainstay: two weeks before he was sworn in, Crown Books announced a $1.9m three-book contract with the senator-elect.

As The Audacity of Hope shot up the bestseller lists, taking a reprint of Dreams From My Father along with it, Obama became a rich man. But like McCain, he had help: before that deal with Crown, he left his longtime book agent for Robert Barnett, a Washington lawyer also responsible for negotiating Tony Blair’s £4.5m contract with Random House a year ago today. It was a move that revealed a streak of ruthless calculation that may help land Obama in the White House. But to Washington insiders it was far from surprising. “Nobody games the system better than Bob Barnett,” says Peter Osnos, a former Washington Post journalist and head of Times Books when the company acquired Dreams From My Father.

Barnett does more than handle book contracts; he negotiated Blair’s consulting contracts with Morgan Stanley (reported at £2m a year) and Zurich Financial Services (more than £500,000 a year) as well as lucrative speaking engagements – last November, a single speech to Chinese businessmen earned the former PM a reported $500,000. Barnett tailors his service to the client’s priorities, playing career coach as much as book agent. With his well-cut suits and Savile Row shirts, his tortoiseshell glasses and ornate antique cufflinks, Barnett seems at home in the corridors of power. “Many of these people who come out of government have an enormous number of offers,” he says. “The first thing we do is sit down and say ‘What are your goals? Do you want to live here or live there? You wanna make money or have fun?’”

. . .

When Robert Barnett was a young lawyer, his firm had offices in the Hill Building, a few blocks from the White House. Just across the street was a People’s Drugstore, and every day at lunchtime, Clark Clifford, the legendary capital insider, “dressed to the nines, wearing a hat, would go in, sit at the lunch counter and eat a tuna sandwich. So if you wanted to see him you could just go to People’s and there he’d be, eating his sandwich and reading The Washington Post,” Barnett remembered. Clifford advised US presidents from Harry Truman to John Kennedy to Jimmy Carter, served as secretary of defence in the Johnson administration and was widely regarded as the most influential attorney in Washington – a description many people now apply to Barnett, whose client list includes Bill and Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush and her daughter Jenna, Dick and Lynne Cheney and their daughter Mary, Paul Wolfowitz, Karl Rove and Alan Greenspan – as well as Blair and Obama.

Barnett resists the comparison. “Clark served at high governmental positions. I’ve never done that. Clark Clifford is well above my pay grade.” He also refrains from pointing out that after four decades as the capital’s prime fixer, Clifford, who died in 1998, ended his career in disgrace thanks to his involvement in the BCCI scandal, where his role as front man for the bank’s American operations left him, as he later lamented, with the “choice of either seeming venal or stupid”. Not even his harshest critics would accuse Robert Barnett of stupidity.

As for venal, Bob Woodward, the reporter whose stories brought down Nixon and who has been a Barnett client for 20 years, describes him as “the last bargain in Washington”. Now a managing partner at Williams & Connolly, the capital’s best-connected, most-feared law firm, Barnett commands fees at the top end of the scale: reports range from $750 to $1,000 an hour. “He charges a lot by the hour,” says Woodward. “But he doesn’t take 10 or 15 per cent [of book advances and profits, as most agents do]. And when you get an hour of his time you are getting all of the knowledge and the experience that he has.” Not to mention the contacts. On any given Sunday in America, it is not unusual for a television talk show to feature one of Barnett’s clients refereeing a debate between two others.

Normally, the man who The New York Times has dubbed “the Kingpin of Washington book deals” and “the doorman” of the capital’s revolving-door culture, prefers to remain in the background. And yet at the debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, Barnett became something of a pundit himself, his comments being quoted on Sky News and numerous websites. Although most of the stories identified Barnett as a long-time Democratic adviser, none of them noted that Gwen Ifill, host of PBS’s Washington Week and moderator of the debate, is also a Barnett client.

All Washington lawyers are political. But over the years of Barnett’s rise to influence the meaning of “political” has changed – from blood sport to “just business”. Last winter, when Hillary Clinton was slugging it out with Obama and John Edwards for the Democratic presidential nomination, Barnett had negotiated book deals for all three. In 2004, when Edwards faced Dick Cheney in the vice-presidential debate, Barnett was Edwards’ debate coach, impersonating Cheney in practice sessions. This year, Barnett was coaching Hillary Clinton. Their friendship, which dates back to before her husband’s presidency, is sufficiently close, and Barnett sufficiently tactful, that he was reportedly given the job of informing her about her husband’s “friendship” with Monica Lewinsky.

Mandy Grunwald, head of media relations for the Clinton campaign, said that in an organisation famous for infighting, Barnett “got along with everyone. He’s not a polarising figure”. Barnett’s business relationships with Edwards and Obama, she said, never caused the Clinton campaign any concern. “John and Barack had no question they could trust him. And we never had any question we could trust him.”

. . .

Born in Waukegan, Illinois, the son of a federal civil servant, Barnett graduated from the University of Wisconsin and went on to study law at the University of Chicago. There he won a place on the Law Review (as comment editor), and went on after graduation to clerk for a federal judge in New Orleans and then Byron White at the Supreme Court. A job as legislative aide to Minnesota senator Walter Mondale allowed Barnett to remain in Washington, where he joined Williams & Connolly in 1975. When Jimmy Carter picked Mondale as his running mate in 1976, Barnett took a break to work on the vice-presidential campaign for a year. “And of course we won, so that was great.”

Eight years later, when Mondale chose Geraldine Ferraro to be his running mate, he asked Barnett to help her prepare for the vice-presidential debates. If the Democrats had won in 1984, Barnett might well have been tempted to join the administration. Instead, he returned to the law. But his practice was taking a new direction. “My wife was a producer for Fred Graham, the [CBS] law correspondent, and he wanted to use a lawyer, not an agent. Then I worked for a woman named Susan Mercandetti who was the producer at Nightline with Ted Koppel [on ABC]. Then I represented a guy who was the central American correspondent at NBC. So I had somebody at each network.”

Meanwhile, Ferraro was mulling over a book. No great shakes as a legislator, as a vice-presidential candidate she hadn’t even been able to carry her own district. But as an author, the controversies which had dogged her campaign – her husband’s refusal to release his tax returns, her son’s arrest for cocaine – only added to her appeal. “Everybody wanted Gerry to write a book,” recalls Barnett. “So I hired an agent, and worked with the agent, and we got the first seven-figure Washington autobiography.”

Barnett also realised he could do this on his own. The following year, David Stockman, who had been Ronald Reagan’s budget director, “wanted to do a book. I auditioned. He picked me because he liked my charging model, and no agent was involved. And then I’d done one Republican and one Democrat.”

Ferraro’s million-dollar book deal wasn’t just the beginning of a new career. It also marked a change in the way the public saw politicians – and the way politicians made money. Says Peter Osnos: “The assumption has taken hold that any significant figure in public service should be entitled to sell their memoirs at a very high number. This has a corrupting effect. Public service is supposed to be its own reward. [Instead] public service has become an opportunity for a post-service payday.” Osnos knows he sounds quixotic, but the public seemed to agree – at least at first. Even in 1994, when Newt Gingrich, then speaker of the House of Representatives, signed a $4.5m contract with HarperCollins, the outcry was so great Gingrich had to give back the money. And yet the outrage hasn’t seemed to hurt sales. These days, it is Joe Biden, with his declaration during the vice-presidential debate that all his equity is in his house – “that’s my total investment” – who is the exception: Obama and McCain have both been fixtures on the bestsellers list.

. . .

Barnett’s impact on the publishing business may be even greater than his impact on politics. Stephen Rubin, head of Doubleday/Broadway in New York and, as US publisher of The Da Vinci Code, something of an expert on the economics of the blockbuster business, says: “It’s shocking to me more authors don’t do this. You do the math.” If the reports of Tony Blair’s advance are anywhere near the truth – neither Blair nor his spokesman Matthew Doyle would comment – a standard 15 per cent agent’s commission on £4.5m would be £675,000. Even if Barnett spent 200 hours on the book, at £500 an hour, Blair would still have saved more than £500,000.

Barnett’s business model doesn’t suit all authors. “I probably get 50 proposals a year I don’t make sense for,” he concedes happily. “I make no sense for a first-time novelist in Vermont who’s going to get a $10,000 advance. I make better sense for Bill Clinton or Tony Blair or James Patterson.” In the case of Patterson, who dependably produces eight best-selling novels a year (only actually writing a portion of them), the savings can run into tens of millions. Patterson, a former ad executive whose books earned $50m in the past year alone – only J.K. Rowling made more – left his third agent for Barnett early last year. And he probably doesn’t even need the full treatment.

But for those who do need more assistance, says Barnett, that “can involve helping with the proposal, going to the right publishers, deciding whether to negotiate or to have an auction. Most agents are not lawyers. I do the contract. I do the rollout. Sometimes I edit the book, if the client wishes.” Barnett is an acknowledged expert at each of these stages. When he auctioned Ted Kennedy’s memoirs, which sold for a reported $8m, he told the senator not to bother writing a proposal. Instead he had Kennedy host a series of elegant lunches with each interested publisher. “Publishers kind of know what the story is,” says Barnett. “You wanna have a meeting. That’s important.” And Barnett “gives great meeting”, says Stephen Rubin. “There’s no bullshit. He’s never in a rush. What you see is what you get.”

Gail Rebuck, who bought Tony Blair’s memoir for Random House, and also signed James Patterson, says that “the thing about Bob that always amazes me is that he runs this huge business. He’s still engaged in politics. He looks after this select client list. He has a tentacle-like ability to be in touch with quite complex negotiations. And he has an incredible eye for detail.”

When the actual book is published, Barnett oversees every aspect of “the rollout”. For Hillary Clinton’s memoirs “we planned 60 Minutes, we planned which NPR [National Public Radio] programme, which CNN programmes, which newspapers, which magazines. I do all that, which most agents don’t get involved in.” When Lynne Cheney’s memoir Blue Skies, No Fences came out last October, Barnett’s wife, Rita Braver, gave viewers of the CBS programme Sunday Morning a guided tour of the vice-presidential residence – and though the segment included a disclosure statement advising that Braver’s husband represented Cheney, the broadcast remains controversial.

. . .

In person, Barnett is extremely affable, but he wields that affability as a weapon against any interviewer gauche enough to suggest that working both sides of the political street – and all the angles of a deal – risks at least the appearance of conflict of interest. “When you go to a doctor you don’t ask ‘What are his politics?’ You want to know if he’s a good doctor,” he says. “If you’ve got appendicitis you go to the best doctor for appendicitis, and you don’t care what their politics are. And if you’re the doctor, you don’t ask what their politics are.”

When I press the point, asking if helping a hate figure for Democrats such as Oliver North to cash in on his political notoriety is really the same as removing a diseased appendix, Barnett says simply: “I find again and again that most people – not all people – have saving graces, and if you care to, you can find those and enjoy them.”

So is there anyone he wouldn’t work for? “I’m not going to give you examples ... but there are people – well-known people – who I consider purveyors of hate, and I have turned them down and they’re quite successful and I wish them well. But I don’t want to have anything to do with them.”

More interesting was Barnett’s response when I asked him the name of the agent he had worked with on his first book deal (the Ferraro autobiography). At first he said, “A woman. I can’t remember.” Then, when I e-mailed him a few follow-up questions, and he answered all but that one, he claimed he didn’t want the “individual – whomever it may be – badgered by colleagues” for launching him into publishing. In the acknowledgements of Ferraro: My Story, Esther Newberg is thanked for her contribution “above and beyond that of literary agent”. Newberg, whose clients include Thomas Friedman (currently number three on The New York Times non-fiction bestseller list) and Patricia Cornwell (number three on the mass-market fiction list), doesn’t agree with Barnett’s account of the Ferraro negotiations. “He didn’t work with me. He did the contracts later. I sold the book in an auction. He watched.” She adds that “three-quarters of the people he [Barnett] represents are morally repugnant to me”. Apprised of Newberg’s comments via e-mail, Barnett replied: “[She] taught me a lot, but seems to have regretted it – and been jealous about it – ever since.”

Barnett’s clients rely on him to coach them in a rough league, so a certain amount of ruthlessness probably goes with the territory. Certainly, if you ask them to describe what he does for them, toughness is taken for granted. As is intelligence. “I always felt exceptionally comfortable taking his advice,” says Alan Greenspan, who came to Barnett through his wife, the NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell, another Barnett client. Nor, despite the headlines, is it always about the money. Greenspan wanted to find a publisher (it turned out to be Penguin, a sister company to the FT) that didn’t expect a full book tour. Woodward wanted a way to remain at The Washington Post and to stay with an editor – Simon & Schuster’s Alice Mayhew – he trusted.

For Woodward, loyalty was non-negotiable. “He’s able to do great on the money. But he always says ‘Don’t auction your books.’ He knows a way to figure out what your interests are.” Woodward recalls going to Barnett with a $5m offer from the University of Texas for his and Carl Bernstein’s Watergate papers. “He said, ‘Absolutely, you don’t want to do this’. I said ‘Actually, I think I do. But I want you to write the contract.’ He was sure it wasn’t going to work – one of the conditions was that we retain physical custody of anything relating to confidential sources as long as they are alive. He said, ‘They won’t do it.’ But Texas agreed to everything.”

On another occasion, it was Barnett who said no. Without telling anyone, Woodward had written the draft of a book detailing his relationship with Mark Felt, the Watergate source known as “Deep Throat” whose identity he’d kept secret for more than 30 years. Barnett insisted Woodward obtain signed releases from Felt, his family and his doctors. “But when I met with Mark Felt to get his permission, it was clear he was not [mentally] competent,” Woodward says, adding that Barnett’s response was “fierce: ‘You don’t want to be seen taking advantage of someone who is not competent’. He and Ben Bradlee convinced me I shouldn’t do it until Felt was deceased.” It was only after Felt, 91 years old and suffering from dementia, outed himself in May 2005 that Woodward felt free to confirm his identity and to publish The Secret Man.

“This isn’t just a super lawyer, a power player,” says Woodward. “I can call 500 lawyers in Washington, and 495 will say, ‘Great! I’ll draft the contract.’ You want the person who will say ‘You absolutely shouldn’t do that.’”

How would Barnett advise Gordon Brown? Though the question is rhetorical, the answer is not. “He’s never spoken to me about a book. He and Alan Greenspan are good friends. I’ve met him two or three times but he’s never said he wants to do a book.” Of course, if he did, Barnett would be happy to help. He and his wife come to London every couple of months and are regulars at the Stafford Hotel in St James’s. But for the moment, he’s anticipating a bumper crop of new Washington clients in November – whoever wins on election day. “After every change of administration there are always people who want to do books,” he says. Robert Barnett, genie of the revolving door, is open for business.

7) Is America really going to do this?
By Mellanie Smith


The impact of the financial crisis on the American presidential election has somewhat obscured the most important reason why the prospect of an Obama presidency is giving so many people nightmares. This is the fear that, if he wins, US defences will be emasculated at a time of unprecedented international peril and the enemies of America and the free world will seize their opportunity to destroy the west.

Personally, I don’t give any credence to the ‘support’ for one candidate over the other that has been expressed by the enemies of civilisation (Iran and Hamas ‘support’ Obama, while an al Qaeda blogger ‘supports’ McCain). Their agenda is simply to sow confusion and promote American recriminations and disarray. Nor do I set much store by many of the remarks made by either candidate during the latter stages of this election campaign, since under this kind of pressure both will now say pretty much anything to win it. The New York Times has run a useful analysis of the candidates’ foreign policy campaign statements which shows how Obama has carefully tacked to the ‘hard power’ agenda while McCain has in turn nodded towards ‘soft power’.

No, the only way to assess their position is to look at each man in the round, at what his general attitude is towards war and self-defence, aggression and appeasement, the values of the west and those of its enemies and – perhaps most crucially of all – the nature of the advisers and associates to whom he is listening. As I have said before, I do not trust McCain; I think his judgment is erratic and impetuous, and sometimes wrong. But on the big picture, he gets it. He will defend America and the free world whereas Obama will undermine them and aid their enemies.

Here’s why. McCain believes in protecting and defending America as it is. Obama tells the world he is ashamed of America and wants to change it into something else. McCain stands for American exceptionalism, the belief that American values are superior to tyrannies. Obama stands for the expiation of America’s original sin in oppressing black people, the third world and the poor.

Obama thinks world conflicts are basically the west’s fault, and so it must right the injustices it has inflicted. That’s why he believes in ‘soft power’ — diplomacy, aid, rectifying ‘grievances’ (thus legitimising them, encouraging terror and promoting injustice) and resolving conflict by talking. As a result, he will take an axe to America’s defences at the very time when they need to be built up. He has said he will ‘cut investments in unproven missile defense systems’; he will ‘not weaponize space’; he will ‘slow our development of future combat systems’; and he will also ‘not develop nuclear weapons,’ pledging to seek ‘deep cuts’ in America’s arsenal, thus unilaterally disabling its nuclear deterrent as Russia and China engage in massive military buildups.

McCain understands that an Islamic war of conquest is being waged on a number of diverse fronts which all have to be seen in relation to each other. For Obama, however, the real source of evil in the world is America. The evil represented by Iran and the Islamic jihadists is apparently all America’s fault. ‘A lot of evil’s been perpetuated based on the claim that we were fighting evil,’ he said. Last May, he dismissed Iran as a tiny place which posed no threat to the US -- before reversing himself the very next day when he said Iran was a great threat which had to be defeated. He has also said that Hezbollah and Hamas have ‘legitimate grievances’. Really? And what might they be? Their grievances are a) the existence of Israel b) its support by America c) the absence of salafist Islam in the world. Does Obama think these ‘grievances’ are legitimate?

To solve world conflict, Obama places his faith in the UN club of terror and tyranny, which is currently fuelling the murderous global demonisation of Israel for having the temerity to defend itself and is even now preparing for a rerun of its own anti-Jew hate-fest of Durban 2, which preceded 9/11 by a matter of days.

McCain understands that Israel is the victim rather than the victimiser in the Middle East, that it is surrounded by genocidal enemies whose undiminished intention is to destroy it as a Jewish state, and that is both the first line of defence against the Islamist attack on the free world and its most immediate and important target.

Obama dismisses the threat from Islamism, shows zero grasp of the strategic threat to the region and the world from the encirclement of Israel by Iran, displays a similar failure to grasp the strategic importance of Iraq, thinks Israel is instead the source of Arab and Muslim aggression against the west, believes that a Palestinian state would promote world peace and considers that Israel – particularly through the ‘settlements’ – is the principal obstacle to that happy outcome. Accordingly, Obama has said he wants Israel to return to its 1967 borders – actually the strategically indefensible 1948 cease-fire line, known accordingly as the ‘Auschwitz borders’.

Obama would thus speak to Iran’s genocidal mullahs without preconditions on his side (the same mullahs have now laid down their own preconditions for America: pull all US troops out of the Middle East, and abandon support for ‘Zionist’ Israel) but has said he would have problems dealing with an Israeli government headed by a member of Israel’s Likud Party. In similar vein, it is notable that Obama opposed the congressional resolution labelling the Iranian Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization, which passed the Senate by a wide margin with support from both parties. And had he had his way, there would have been no ‘surge’ in Iraq and America would instead have run up the white flag, with the incalculable bloodbath and strengthening of the jihad that would have followed.

Obama assumes that Islamic terrorism is driven by despair, poverty, inflammatory US policy and the American presence on Muslim soil in the Persian Gulf. Thus he adopts the agenda of the Islamists themselves. This is not surprising since many of his connections suggest that that the man who may be elected President of a country upon which the Islamists have declared war is himself firmly in the Islamists’ camp. Daniel Pipes lists Obama’s extensive connections to Islamists in general and the Nation of Islam in particular, and concludes with this astounding observation:

Obama's multiple links to anti-Americans and subversives mean he would fail the standard security clearance process for Federal employees. Islamic aggression represents America’s strategic enemy; Obama’s many insalubrious connections raise grave doubts about his fitness to serve as America's commander-in-chief.

The hatred that these Islamist connections entertain towards Israel is reflected amongst Obama’s own advisers. With one notable exception in Dennis Ross, whose late arrival in Camp Obama suggests a cosmetic exercise designed to allay alarm among Israel supporters, his advisers are overwhelmingly not only hostile to Israel but perpetrate the loathesome canard that Jews have too much power over American policy.

The former Carter adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, for example, not only denounced Israel’s war against Hezbollah thus:

I think what the Israelis are doing today [2006] for example in Lebanon is in effect– maybe not in intent – the killing of hostages

but also supports Mearsheimer and Walt’s notorious smear that the Jews have subverted America’s foreign policy in the interests of Israel. Merrill McPeak, vice chairman of Obama’s campaign and his chief military adviser, has similarly blamed problems in the Middle East on the influence of people who live in New York City and Miami (guess who) whom no ‘politician wants to run against’ and who he says exercise undue influence on America’s foreign affairs. Most revolting of all is Samantha Power, a very close adviser whom Obama fired for calling Hillary a ‘monster’ but who says she still expects to be in Obama’s administration. Not only has Power has advocated the ending of all aid to Israel and redirecting it to the Palestinians, but she has spoken about the need to land a ‘mammoth force’ of US troops in Israel to protect the Palestinians from Israeli attempts at genocide (sic) -- and has complained that criticism of Barack Obama all too often came down to what was ‘good for the Jews’.

There are, alas, many in the west for whom all this is music to their ears. Whether through wickedness, ideology, stupidity or derangement, they firmly believe that the ultimate source of conflict in the world derives at root from America and Israel, whose societies, culture and values they want to see emasculated or destroyed altogether. They are drooling at the prospect that an Obama presidency will bring that about. The rest of us can’t sleep at night.