Settlements Unsettle Obama - Ulterior Motive?

Written in 1969. Still prophetic. (See 1 below.)
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Jack Cashill finally concludes Obama and FDR are clones. All Cashill had to do is read "The Forgotten Man." (See 2 below.)
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Hamas starting to play with fire as they release more rockets towards Israel. (See 3below.)
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One analyst believes Bibi comes out looking better than Obama. That does not take much doing. (See 4 below.)
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Since failure to prevent Iran going nuclear is a fait accompli and Obama is not going to attack Iran, George Friedman suggests we redefine the question and cop a deal.

Makes a lot of sense to treat your enemy as your friend. That way you can have a relationship with a friendly enemy and not have to have an unfriendly relationship with an unfriendly enemy. By re-defining problems that you failed to resolve because you lacked the will and/or ability it sure puts lipstick on that pig doesn't it?

If that causes problems later and grief now, suck it up says Friedman.
(See 5 and 5a below.)
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To prevent federal payment for abortions Obama promises and Stupak believes so health care should pass in The House.

I suspect all these side deals will add another 2000 pages to the legislation if they are written down.

But that is how legislation is passed - you turn mostly unprincipled people into prostitutes. The issue is not whether just how much it takes.
Next, screw around with projected costs and ipso facto out comes a piece of legislation which resembles an abortion. Work with putty and you can design just about anything.

My hat is off to Obama, Pelosi and Reid. They are masters at what they do. Time will tell whether it will turn out favorable. (See 6 below.)

Patrick McLlhearn unknowingly insults Arab rug dealers. (See 6a below.)
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This author believes education is lost on Obama. From "NO Child Left Behind" to "Race To The Top" - a good education will continue to elude children. (See 7 below.)

Dowd takes an axe to Stupak. (See 6b below.)
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Settlements unsettle Obama but Jacoby says they should not and explains why. Perhaps Obama had an ulterior motive to react as he did because he needs Pinatas to put wind behind his sails. (See 8 below.)
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Dick
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1)A Letter to the World from Jerusalem
By Eliezer ben Yisrael (Stanley Goldfoot)

I am not a creature from another planet, as you seem to
believe. I am a Jerusalemite-like yourselves, a man of flesh and
blood. I am a citizen of my city, an integral part of my people.
I have a few things to get off my chest. Because I am not a
diplomat, I do not have to mince words. I do not have to please you
or even persuade you. I owe you nothing. You did not build this city,
you did not live in it, you did not defend it when they came to destroy
it.

And we will be damned if we will let you take it away.
There was a Jerusalem before there was a New York. When Berlin,
Moscow, London, and Paris were miasmal forest and swamp, there was a
thriving Jewish community here. It gave something to the world which
you nations have rejected ever since you established yourselves- a
humane moral code.

Here the prophets walked, their words flashing like forked lightning.

Here a people who wanted nothing more than to be left
alone, fought off waves of heathen would-be conquerors, bled and died
on the battlements, hurled themselves into the flames of their
burning Temple rather than surrender, and when finally overwhelmed by
sheer numbers and led away into captivity, swore that before they
forgot Jerusalem, they would see their tongues cleave to their palates,
their right arms wither.

For two pain-filled millennia, while we were your unwelcome
guests, we prayed daily to return to this city. Three times a day we
petitioned the Almighty: "Gather us from the four corners of the
world, bring us upright to our land, return in mercy to Jerusalem,
Thy city, and swell in it as Thou promised." On every Yom Kippur and
Passover, we fervently voiced the hope that next year would find us in
Jerusalem.

Your inquisitions, pogroms, expulsions, the ghettos into which
you jammed us, your forced baptisms, your quota systems, your genteel
anti-Semitism, and the final unspeakable horror, the holocaust (and
worse, your terrifying disinterest in it)- all these have not broken us.
They may have sapped what little moral strength you still possessed,
but they forged us into steel. Do you think that you can break us now
after all we have been through? Do you really believe that after
Dachau and Auschwitz we are frightened by your threats of blockades and
sanctions?

We have been to Hell and back- a Hell of your making. What more could
you possibly have in your arsenal that could scare us?

I have watched this city bombarded twice by nations calling
themselves civilized. In 1948, while you looked on apathetically, I
saw women and children blown to smithereens, after we agreed to your
request to internationalize the city. It was a deadly combination
that did the job- British officers, Arab gunners, and American-made cannon. And
then the savage sacking of the Old City-the willful slaughter, the
wanton destruction of every synagogue and religious school, the
desecration of Jewish cemeteries, the sale by a ghoulish government
of tombstones for building materials, for poultry runs, army camps, even
latrines.

And you never said a word.
You never breathed the slightest protest when the Jordanians
shut off the holiest of our places, the Western Wall, in violation of
the pledges they had made after the war- a war they waged,
incidentally, against the decision of the UN. Not a murmur came from
you whenever the legionnaires in their spiked helmets casually opened
fire upon our citizens from behind the walls.

Your hearts bled when Berlin came under siege. You rushed your
airlift "to save the gallant Berliners". But you did not send one
ounce of food when Jews starved in besieged Jerusalem. You thundered
against the wall which the East Germans ran through the middle of the
German capital- but not one peep out of you about that other wall, the one
that tore through the heart of Jerusalem.

And when that same thing happened 20 years later, and the Arabs
unleashed a savage, unprovoked bombardment of the Holy City again,
did any of you do anything?

The only time you came to life was when the city was at last
reunited. Then you wrung your hands and spoke loftily of "justice"
and need for the "Christian" quality of turning the other cheek.
The truth- and you know it deep inside your gut - you would
prefer the city to be destroyed rather than have it governed by Jews.
No matter how diplomatically you phrase it, the age old prejudices
seep out of every word.

If our return to the city has tied your theology in knots,
perhaps you had better reexamine your catechisms. After what we have
been through, we are not passively going to accommodate ourselves to
the twisted idea that we are to suffer eternal homelessness until we
accept your savior.

For the first time since the year 70, there is now complete
religious freedom for all in Jerusalem. For the first time since the
Romans put a torch to the Temple, everyone has equal rights (You
prefer to have some more equal than others.) We loathe the sword- but
it was you who forced us to take it up. We crave peace, but we are
not going back to the peace of 1948 as you would like us to.

We are home. It has a lovely sound for a nation you have willed
to wander over the face of the globe. We are not leaving. We are
redeeming the pledge made by our forefathers: Jerusalem is being
rebuilt. "Next year" and the year after, and after, and after, until
the end of time- "in Jerusalem"!

Stanley Goldfoot
Founder Editor
The Times of Israel
August 1969
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2)Is BHO the New FDR?
By Jack Cashill

On the cover of its November 24, 2008 edition, Time Magazine photo-shopped Barack Obama into a classic image of a jaunty Franklin Delano Roosevelt, right down to the politically incorrect cigarette holder.


The article is headlined, "The New New Deal." There is no question mark. Back in those heady days of hope and change, Obama promised to remake Washington in his own image, much as FDR had before him.


"His top priority will be stabilizing the financial system," Time ingenuously reported, "followed by investing in renewable energy, universal health care, middle-class tax cuts and education reform."


A year and a half later, Obama has indeed honored Time's bold prediction. The parallels between FDR and BHO are hard to miss: the eagerness to improvise, the impulse to control, the urge to scapegoat, the willingness to let business wonder what fresh hell tomorrow might bring. To understand the long-term effects of this style in the real world, it pays to revisit the past.


If there is any one image that evokes the whimsy of the original New Deal, it is this one: FDR sitting in his bedroom with Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., picking the daily price of gold.


As I recount in my book Popes and Bankers, Morgenthau would later report that on one more whimsical than average day, FDR decided to set the gold price at 21 cents. "Why 21 cents?" asked Morgenthau. "It's a lucky number," the president remarked, "because it's three times seven." Say what you will, but the man knew his times tables!


Just five years earlier, America had sat astride the economic world, the repository of most of its gold and even more of its hope. The president at that time, Republican Calvin Coolidge, could not have differed more from FDR.


Businesses, Coolidge believed, welcomed an administration whose approach to its business clientele mirrored the Holiday Inn's -- "no surprises." Businesses, Coolidge felt, could plan more confidently if they could trust their government not to jack with the law of the land.


As vice-president under Harding, Coolidge had seen how the White House's hands-off approach to the sharp downturn of 1920 had allowed businesses to cut their losses, trim their payrolls, and get back to work quickly. The years since had, by all accounts, been years of sustained and substantial growth.


As to the precipitating event that led to the crash of 1929, fingers point in a thousand directions -- towards a bumbling Fed, among others -- but a market crash does not necessarily lead to depression, or even recession. Case in point: October 1987. That the depression of the 1930s merited a capital "D" and the curious descriptor "Great" is due in no small part to the two activist presidents who mismanaged it.


Sworn in as president eight months before the crash, Herbert Hoover contributed his own fair share to the unraveling, but not by being passive. "Words are not of any great importance in times of economic disturbance," he announced. "It is action that counts."


Unfortunately, just about every action Hoover took proved to be the wrong one. He raised taxes, browbeat businesses into sustaining wages and employment, bullied the stock market, and signed into law the flamingly disastrous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which triggered a fury of retaliatory measures around the world and sharply cut American exports as well as imports.


The improvisational Roosevelt made Hoover look like Coolidge. In his March 1933 inaugural address, Roosevelt may have eased the fears of the ordinary Joe, but he intensified the fears of those who made the economy work.


"The rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods," he insisted, "have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence." From that day forward, no businessperson could anticipate FDR's market logic du jour any better than he could his gold price.


After describing a variety of actions to get people back to work, Roosevelt turned his inaugural sights on "the evils of the old order." That this order had made America so dang prosperous that its dispossessed could drive their own cars to California was lost on Roosevelt and his allies.


"There must be a strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments," FDR railed, fully ignoring the role of government in creating the mess at hand. "There must be an end to speculation with other people's money, and there must be provision for an adequate but sound currency."


Roosevelt proved to have unusual ideas as to what exactly constituted a "sound currency," especially when it came to gold. Two days after the inauguration, he used the legal cover of the wartime Trading With the Enemy Act to declare war on those who were "hoarding" gold.


Three days later, he signed into law the Emergency Banking Act. This bill gave FDR the authority to demand the surrender of all gold by American citizens in exchange for paper money. Those who failed to surrender their gold -- yikes! -- could face as much as ten years in prison.


The civic stripmining of America's gold was executed without benefit of a single congressional hearing. Needless to say, this process did not inspire a lot of confidence within the business community.


Roosevelt was just as adventurous on the banking front. Upon taking office, he ordered all banks that were closed to remain closed, even though he had no authority under the Constitution to do this. The Emergency Banking Act, which he had Congress pass immediately thereafter, gave him the power not only to close banks, but also to print money wartime-style as he saw fit.


From day one, Roosevelt did his best to dethrone the "privileged princes of these new economic dynasties" -- FDR-code for those bankers who had not failed their customers.


"These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America," he argued at his second inaugural. "What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power." Sound familiar?


Ironically, however, it was the major investment bankers like the House of Morgan that were diversified enough to weather the Depression. Royalism did not cause the great majority of bank failures. Regulation did.


Some 90 percent of failures occurred in states whose "unit" banking laws forbade banks from branching out beyond their base. Canada, which had no such laws, had no such problems.


In June 1933, Roosevelt signed into law the Glass-Steagall Act. Banks now had to choose between investment and deposit banking. They could not do both.


A classic in political scapegoating, the act rewarded those banks that had done the worst and punished the banks that had done the best. It provided deposit insurance for the struggling banks and forced the successful ones to divest their investment banking operations.


In 1935, forced to choose between deposit banking and investment banking, the House of Morgan shocked Wall Street by abandoning the side of the business that had made it rich and famous. With the investor class paralyzed by uncertainty, commercial banking remained its bread and butter.


For all the sound and fury of FDR's reign, and for all the soothing charm of his style, the New Deal did not deliver. And no one knew that better than a bummed Morgenthau.


"We are spending more money than we have ever spent before, and it does not work," he told a congressional hearing in 1939.


"I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get jobs. We have never made good on our promises. I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started and an enormous debt to boot."


In 1939, seventeen -- as in a seventeen-percent unemployment rate -- was no one's idea of a lucky number. In 2010, alas, we're working our way up.
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3)Qassam hits south of Ashkelon
By Shmulik Hadad

No injuries or damage reported as rocket fire emanating from Gaza continues. 'Terror groups taking advantage of PM's trip to US,' local council head says


A Qassam rocket fired by Palestinian terrorists in north Gaza Sunday night landed south of Ashkelon. There were no reports of injury or damage.


The rocket landed in an open area within the Ashkelon Beach Regional Council's limits.


"When they say that the rocket exploded in an open area, from our standpoint it is a field in which farmers work. Therefore, such attacks should be dealt with just as any direct hit on a house," council head Yair Farjun said.


"I assume the groups that are firing the rockets are taking advantage of the fact our hands our somewhat tied because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in the US for meetings. It is not my place to give the security establishment advice – it has proven that it knows what to do against the Palestinian organizations," he said.



Ashkelon's Deputy Mayor Shlomo Cohen, formerly a senior official with the Shin Bet security service, said, "We are witnessing a deterioration whereby the rockets are getting closer and closer to Ashkelon. This merely validates our fears and demands for the fortification of educational institutions."

On Saturday four rockets emanating from the Hamas-ruled coastal enclave landed in open areas in Israel's Negev region. Another Qassam landed in Palestinian territory near the Kissufim Crossing.


Saturday saw a rocket land near a kibbutz located within Sha'ar Hanegev Regional Council limits. There were no injuries or damage, but the IDF retaliated with strikes on a Hamas facility near the defunct airport in south Gaza. The Palestinians said 14 people were injured, among them two seriously.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon crossed into Gaza Sunday morning as part of a regional tour aimed at reviving the Middle East peace process.


Ban was met on the other side of the border by a small group of people waving Palestinian flags. "I'll go to Gaza to express my solidarity with the plight of the Palestinian people there and to underscore the need to end the blockade," Ban told reporters on Saturday. He added that the siege was causing "unacceptable human suffering".


During his meeting with President Shimon Peres Saturday evening, Ban called on Hamas to release Gilad Shalit, and Peres thanked him for scheduling a meeting with the kidnapped soldier's Shalit's parents. The UN chief also called on the Palestinians to end rocket attacks from Gaza, while urging Israel to lift the Gaza blockade.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------4) Give Bibi some credit: Obama got carried away, while Netanyahu managed crisis responsibly
By Hanoch Daum

At one point last week, it appeared that the only person around here to maintain some sort of balanced perspective is a 14-year-old child, who happens to be the prime minister’s son.


After winning the national Bible Quiz, PM Netanyahu’s son was not confused or overly passionate, modestly and shyly declaring that in his view, the real winner is the Book of Books, which will remain here long after people remember who won the quiz and when.

There was something comforting in the fact that a young person of all people managed to put things in a reasonable perspective and provide an inspiring insight, on a week when everyone here competed with each other over whose vision is more focused on the short-term.


There was something almost amusing in the differences we saw this past week between the Prime Minister’s Office’s conduct and the exaggerated zeal of its many critics.

While many of Netanyahu’s critics stood up and yelled, and screamed, and bemoaned our terrible situation, almost going as far as urging us to pack up and move way, officials around the prime minister maintained their silence. The PM’s Office, which has been criticized by everyone quite a bit, did not rage and did not blame anyone; it also refrained from issuing a plethora of media statements.

Aesthetic sin; substantive punishment

Meanwhile, the forum of top seven government ministers also convened, without leaking anything from its discussions. We got the sense that someone is managing this crisis responsibly and by maintaining the right perspective, while other people are covering it based on a sense of complete vertigo.


Many people, including Americans, agree that President Obama got carried away. Even those who believe, like I do, that the metaphorical hands of the official who signed the construction permits during Biden’s visit need to be cut off, must admit that there is a limit to the panic that can be produced over wrong timing.

Israel’s sin was an aesthetic one. Yet the punishment the US sought to impose on us was a substantive one. There is something disconnected from reality, exaggerated, and disproportional in the Obama Administration’s attempt to pounce at the Israeli mishap and attempt to use it in order to prompt a statutory change in Jerusalem’s status.
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5)Thinking About the Unthinkable: A U.S.-Iranian Deal
By George Friedman

The United States apparently has reached the point where it must either accept that Iran will develop nuclear weapons at some point if it wishes, or take military action to prevent this. There is a third strategy, however: Washington can seek to redefine the Iranian question.

As we have no idea what leaders on either side are thinking, exploring this represents an exercise in geopolitical theory. Let’s begin with the two apparent stark choices.

Diplomacy vs. the Military Option
The diplomatic approach consists of creating a broad coalition prepared to impose what have been called crippling sanctions on Iran. Effective sanctions must be so painful that they compel the target to change its behavior. In Tehran’s case, this could only consist of blocking Iran’s imports of gasoline. Iran imports 35 percent of the gasoline it consumes. It is not clear that a gasoline embargo would be crippling, but it is the only embargo that might work. All other forms of sanctions against Iran would be mere gestures designed to give the impression that something is being done.

The Chinese will not participate in any gasoline embargo. Beijing gets 11 percent of its oil from Iran, and it has made it clear it will continue to deliver gasoline to Iran. Moscow’s position is that Russia might consider sanctions down the road, but it hasn’t specified when, and it hasn’t specified what. The Russians are more than content seeing the U.S. bogged down in the Middle East and so are not inclined to solve American problems in the region. With the Chinese and Russians unlikely to embargo gasoline, these sanctions won’t create significant pain for Iran. Since all other sanctions are gestures, the diplomatic approach is therefore unlikely to work.

The military option has its own risks. First, its success depends on the quality of intelligence on Iran’s nuclear facilities and on the degree of hardening of those targets. Second, it requires successful air attacks. Third, it requires battle damage assessments that tell the attacker whether the strike succeeded. Fourth, it requires follow-on raids to destroy facilities that remain functional. And fifth, attacks must do more than simply set back Iran’s program a few months or even years: If the risk of a nuclear Iran is great enough to justify the risks of war, the outcome must be decisive.

Each point in this process is a potential failure point. Given the multiplicity of these points — which includes others not mentioned — failure may not be an option, but it is certainly possible.

But even if the attacks succeed, the question of what would happen the day after the attacks remains. Iran has its own counters. It has a superbly effective terrorist organization, Hezbollah, at its disposal. It has sufficient influence in Iraq to destabilize that country and force the United States to keep forces in Iraq badly needed elsewhere. And it has the ability to use mines and missiles to attempt to close the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf shipping lanes for some period — driving global oil prices through the roof while the global economy is struggling to stabilize itself. Iran’s position on its nuclear program is rooted in the awareness that while it might not have assured options in the event of a military strike, it has counters that create complex and unacceptable risks. Iran therefore does not believe the United States will strike or permit Israel to strike, as the consequences would be unacceptable.

To recap, the United States either can accept a nuclear Iran or risk an attack that might fail outright, impose only a minor delay on Iran’s nuclear program or trigger extremely painful responses even if it succeeds. When neither choice is acceptable, it is necessary to find a third choice.

Redefining the Iranian Problem
As long as the problem of Iran is defined in terms of its nuclear program, the United States is in an impossible place. Therefore, the Iranian problem must be redefined. One attempt at redefinition involves hope for an uprising against the current regime. We will not repeat our views on this in depth, but in short, we do not regard these demonstrations to be a serious threat to the regime. Tehran has handily crushed them, and even if they did succeed, we do not believe they would produce a regime any more accommodating toward the United States. The idea of waiting for a revolution is more useful as a justification for inaction — and accepting a nuclear Iran — than it is as a strategic alternative.

At this moment, Iran is the most powerful regional military force in the Persian Gulf. Unless the United States permanently stations substantial military forces in the region, there is no military force able to block Iran. Turkey is more powerful than Iran, but it is far from the Persian Gulf and focused on other matters at the moment, and it doesn’t want to take on Iran militarily — at least not for a very long time. At the very least, this means the United States cannot withdraw from Iraq. Baghdad is too weak to block Iran from the Arabian Peninsula, and the Iraqi government has elements friendly toward Iran.

Historically, regional stability depended on the Iraqi-Iranian balance of power. When it tottered in 1990, the result was the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The United States did not push into Iraq in 1991 because it did not want to upset the regional balance of power by creating a vacuum in Iraq. Rather, U.S. strategy was to re-establish the Iranian-Iraqi balance of power to the greatest extent possible, as the alternative was basing large numbers of U.S. troops in the region.

The decision to invade Iraq in 2003 assumed that once the Baathist regime was destroyed the United States would rapidly create a strong Iraqi government that would balance Iran. The core mistake in this thinking lay in failing to recognize that the new Iraqi government would be filled with Shiites, many of whom regarded Iran as a friendly power. Rather than balancing Iran, Iraq could well become an Iranian satellite. The Iranians strongly encouraged the American invasion precisely because they wanted to create a situation where Iraq moved toward Iran’s orbit. When this in fact began happening, the Americans had no choice but an extended occupation of Iraq, a trap both the Bush and Obama administrations have sought to escape.

It is difficult to define Iran’s influence in Iraq at this point. But at a minimum, while Iran may not be able to impose a pro-Iranian state on Iraq, it has sufficient influence to block the creation of any strong Iraqi government either through direct influence in the government or by creating destabilizing violence in Iraq. In other words, Iran can prevent Iraq from emerging as a counterweight to Iran, and Iran has every reason to do this. Indeed, it is doing just this.

The Fundamental U.S.-Iranian Issue
Iraq, not nuclear weapons, is the fundamental issue between Iran and the United States. Iran wants to see a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq so Iran can assume its place as the dominant military power in the Persian Gulf. The United States wants to withdraw from Iraq because it faces challenges in Afghanistan — where it will also need Iranian cooperation — and elsewhere. Committing forces to Iraq for an extended period of time while fighting in Afghanistan leaves the United States exposed globally. Events involving China or Russia — such as the 2008 war in Georgia — would see the United States without a counter. The alternative would be a withdrawal from Afghanistan or a massive increase in U.S. armed forces. The former is not going to happen any time soon, and the latter is an economic impossibility.

Therefore, the United States must find a way to counterbalance Iran without an open-ended deployment in Iraq and without expecting the re-emergence of Iraqi power, because Iran is not going to allow the latter to happen. The nuclear issue is simply an element of this broader geopolitical problem, as it adds another element to the Iranian tool kit. It is not a stand-alone issue.

The United States has an interesting strategy in redefining problems that involves creating extraordinarily alliances with mortal ideological and geopolitical enemies to achieve strategic U.S. goals. First consider Franklin Roosevelt’s alliance with Stalinist Russia to block Nazi Germany. He pursued this alliance despite massive political outrage not only from isolationists but also from institutions like the Roman Catholic Church that regarded the Soviets as the epitome of evil.

Now consider Richard Nixon’s decision to align with China at a time when the Chinese were supplying weapons to North Vietnam that were killing American troops. Moreover, Mao — who had said he did not fear nuclear war as China could absorb a few hundred million deaths — was considered, with reason, quite mad. Nevertheless, Nixon, as anti-Communist and anti-Chinese a figure as existed in American politics, understood that an alliance (and despite the lack of a formal treaty, alliance it was) with China was essential to counterbalance the Soviet Union at a time when American power was still being sapped in Vietnam.

Roosevelt and Nixon both faced impossible strategic situations unless they were prepared to redefine the strategic equation dramatically and accept the need for alliance with countries that had previously been regarded as strategic and moral threats. American history is filled with opportunistic alliances designed to solve impossible strategic dilemmas. The Stalin and Mao cases represent stunning alliances with prior enemies designed to block a third power seen as more dangerous.

It is said that Ahmadinejad is crazy. It was also said that Mao and Stalin were crazy, in both cases with much justification. Ahmadinejad has said many strange things and issued numerous threats. But when Roosevelt ignored what Stalin said and Nixon ignored what Mao said, they each discovered that Stalin’s and Mao’s actions were far more rational and predictable than their rhetoric. Similarly, what the Iranians say and what they do are quite different.

U.S. vs. Iranian Interests
Consider the American interest. First, it must maintain the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. The United States cannot tolerate interruptions, and that limits the risks it can take. Second, it must try to keep any one power from controlling all of the oil in the Persian Gulf, as that would give such a country too much long-term power within the global system. Third, while the United States is involved in a war with elements of the Sunni Muslim world, it must reduce the forces devoted to that war. Fourth, it must deal with the Iranian problem directly. Europe will go as far as sanctions but no further, while the Russians and Chinese won’t even go that far yet. Fifth, it must prevent an Israeli strike on Iran for the same reasons it must avoid a strike itself, as the day after any Israeli strike will be left to the United States to manage.

Now consider the Iranian interest. First, it must guarantee regime survival. It sees the United States as dangerous and unpredictable. In less than 10 years, it has found itself with American troops on both its eastern and western borders. Second, it must guarantee that Iraq will never again be a threat to Iran. Third, it must increase its authority within the Muslim world against Sunni Muslims, whom it regards as rivals and sometimes as threats.

Now consider the overlaps. The United States is in a war against some (not all) Sunnis. These are Iran’s enemies, too. Iran does not want U.S. troops along its eastern and western borders. In point of fact, the United States does not want this either. The United States does not want any interruption of oil flow through Hormuz. Iran much prefers profiting from those flows to interrupting them. Finally, the Iranians understand that it is the United States alone that is Iran’s existential threat. If Iran can solve the American problem its regime survival is assured. The United States understands, or should, that resurrecting the Iraqi counterweight to Iran is not an option: It is either U.S. forces in Iraq or accepting Iran’s unconstrained role.

Therefore, as an exercise in geopolitical theory, consider the following. Washington’s current options are unacceptable. By redefining the issue in terms of dealing with the consequences of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there are three areas of mutual interest. First, both powers have serious quarrels with Sunni Islam. Second, both powers want to see a reduction in U.S. forces in the region. Third, both countries have an interest in assuring the flow of oil, one to use the oil, the other to profit from it to increase its regional power.

The strategic problem is, of course, Iranian power in the Persian Gulf. The Chinese model is worth considering here. China issued bellicose rhetoric before and after Nixon’s and Kissinger’s visits. But whatever it did internally, it was not a major risk-taker in its foreign policy. China’s relationship with the United States was of critical importance to China. Beijing fully understood the value of this relationship, and while it might continue to rail about imperialism, it was exceedingly careful not to undermine this core interest.

The major risk of the third strategy is that Iran will overstep its bounds and seek to occupy the oil-producing countries of the Persian Gulf. Certainly, this would be tempting, but it would bring a rapid American intervention. The United States would not block indirect Iranian influence, however, from financial participation in regional projects to more significant roles for the Shia in Arabian states. Washington’s limits for Iranian power are readily defined and enforced when exceeded.

The great losers in the third strategy, of course, would be the Sunnis in the Arabian Peninsula. But Iraq aside, they are incapable of defending themselves, and the United States has no long-term interest in their economic and political relations. So long as the oil flows, and no single power directly controls the entire region, the United States does not have a stake in this issue.

Israel would also be enraged. It sees ongoing American-Iranian hostility as a given. And it wants the United States to eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat. But eliminating this threat is not an option given the risks, so the choice is a nuclear Iran outside some structured relationship with the United States or within it. The choice that Israel might want, a U.S.-Iranian conflict, is unlikely. Israel can no more drive American strategy than can Saudi Arabia.

From the American standpoint, an understanding with Iran would have the advantage of solving an increasingly knotty problem. In the long run, it would also have the advantage of being a self-containing relationship. Turkey is much more powerful than Iran and is emerging from its century-long shell. Its relations with the United States are delicate. The United States would infuriate the Turks by doing this deal, forcing them to become more active faster. They would thus emerge in Iraq as a counterbalance to Iran. But Turkey’s anger at the United States would serve U.S. interests. The Iranian position in Iraq would be temporary, and the United States would not have to break its word as Turkey eventually would eliminate Iranian influence in Iraq.

Ultimately, the greatest shock of such a maneuver on both sides would be political. The U.S.-Soviet agreement shocked Americans deeply, the Soviets less so because Stalin’s pact with Hitler had already stunned them. The Nixon-Mao entente shocked all sides. It was utterly unthinkable at the time, but once people on both sides thought about it, it was manageable.

Such a maneuver would be particularly difficult for U.S. President Barack Obama, as it would be widely interpreted as another example of weakness rather than as a ruthless and cunning move. A military strike would enhance his political standing, while an apparently cynical deal would undermine it. Ahmadinejad could sell such a deal domestically much more easily. In any event, the choices now are a nuclear Iran, extended airstrikes with all their attendant consequences, or something else. This is what something else might look like and how it would fit in with American strategic tradition.

5a)What if Iran gets the bomb? Many now argue that containment, not a military strike, is the best way to deal with Tehran's nuclear ambitions.
By Doyle McManus

'It is not this calendar year" that the world will face a nuclear-capable Iran, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus told a Senate committee last week. He was being conservative: Most experts now estimate that Iran needs about 18 months to complete a nuclear device and a missile to carry it.

Iran's march toward nuclear weapons has been slowed by several factors: technical bottlenecks, the exposure of secret facilities and equipment breakdowns (sometimes thanks to flaws baked into equipment by Western intelligence agencies).

But progress toward the bomb hasn't been stopped -- not by sanctions, negotiations or domestic unrest.

The Obama administration's goal is still to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. But like many of the president's worthy aspirations, this one may be unattainable. The administration is working diligently on stepped-up economic sanctions against Iran, but even the proponents of that approach don't promise immediate results. And the option of a military strike against Iran faces strong opposition from an important constituency: the U.S. military, which doesn't relish adding a third war to the two it's already fighting. As Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates never tires of pointing out, a military strike wouldn't prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons; it would merely postpone it.

That's why national security thinkers from both parties are talking more openly about what happens next: what to do when the Iranians get a nuclear weapon.

An Iran with one or two nuclear bombs is a very bad thing, their reasoning goes, but it's not the end of the world. As Israel's defense minister, Ehud Barak, put it last month: "I don't think that the Iranians, even if they got the bomb, are going to drop it immediately on some neighbor. They fully understand what might follow. They are radicals but not total meshugenehs" (Yiddish for "nut cases"). He went on to say that a nuclear Iran would be "unacceptable" because it would strengthen the Tehran regime as a regional power and increase the danger of nuclear proliferation -- but the Israelis are also thinking about what to do if the "unacceptable" happens.

Hawks, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, argue that military action is the only remaining option. But a growing chorus that includes former Secretary of State James A. Baker III and former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, are warning against a military strike on Iran by either the United States or Israel. A military strike, they say, would create chaos and strengthen its hard-line regime. And it wouldn't stop Tehran from eventually acquiring a nuclear weapon.

As Bruce Riedel, a 29-year veteran of the CIA who directed the Obama administration's initial review of U.S. policy in Afghanistan, put it to me last week: "Bombing Iran is a truly bad option."

Even a surgical airstrike against Iran's nuclear installations, he warned, would touch off a much wider conflagration around the Persian Gulf and beyond. "It's not a war the United States needs right now," he said. "It would be disastrous to the wars we're already in [in Afghanistan and Iraq], and it would lead to a fourth war, one between Iran and Israel."

So what should we do instead? At the same time the U.S. tries to prevent Iran from getting the bomb, it should also turn to an option it has long experience with: containment. That doesn't mean passively accepting a nuclear Iran. Instead, it means working on several fronts to deprive Iran of any advantage it hopes to gain from possessing nuclear weapons.

It means escalating sanctions on Iran to increase the cost of owning nuclear weapons. It means providing a more explicit American defense umbrella to Israel, Saudi Arabia and other countries that Iran might threaten. It means a more active U.S. role in the region -- presumably the opposite of Iran's desires. And it means a continued demand on Iran to freeze and eventually reverse its nuclear program, even if it produces actual weapons.

In fact, even though the Obama administration isn't ready to accept that Iran will become a nuclear power, it is already doing all those things -- and laying a foundation for containment.

Riedel makes one more provocative point: He argues that President Obama should actually take the military option off the table and forswear any intention of attacking Iran -- because, in his view, it gets in the way of an effective containment policy. "It makes it harder for a lot of other countries to come on board," he said.

But Obama and his aides, after vowing repeatedly to keep the military option on the table, are unlikely to agree.

The most important thing is this: Obama shouldn't allow himself to be boxed in by past formulas. If Gates is right that a military attack on Iran is a bad idea, the time to begin talking about alternatives is now.

In 2003, the United States went to war in Iraq without a thorough debate of the alternative -- which was containment. Then, as now, hawks argued that military action was the only remaining option. This time, before another rush to war, that claim should be put to a more exacting test.



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6)Stupak, White House reach pact on health care reform
By TODD SPANGLER

Assured by President Barack Obama that no federal dollars will be spent on abortions, U.S. Rep. Bart Stupak and other anti-abortion Democrats signed on to health care reform legislation, likely providing the critical votes needed to pass the landmark legislation later today.



Stupak, from Menominee on the Upper Peninsula, said he and the others “stood on principle,” even if it meant bringing down the health care reform bill that most, if not all, of them otherwise supported.


Just before taking the podium at a 4 p.m. news conference, the White House released the text of an executive order to be signed by the after the health care reform legislation is passed. It makes clear the president’s intention “to establish an adequate enforcement mechanism to ensure that federal funds are not used for abortion services” and continues the current prohibition on taxpayer money being used for abortions known as the Hyde amendment.


The executive order requires the Department of Health and Human Services to draw up in six months’ time a set of guidelines for states to follow to ensure that federal funds don’t pay for abortion coverage. Any such coverage under state insurance exchanges to be created would have to be paid for by the person insured.


“Make no doubt about it, there will be no public funds for abortion,” Stupak said at the conference, where he was joined by six other members of Congress who were prepared to vote against the legislation but now, with the president’s pending order, support it.


Stupak said he and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops would rather have a statutory provision approved by Congress that blocks federal subsidies going to any insurer that provides abortion coverage, even if funds for the abortion coverage itself came from the insured person’s own pocket. But Stupak said such a provision lacks the needed votes in the Senate.


The executive order has the force of law — as long as the president keeps it in place and no future administration overturns it.


Stupak said he has received assurances that the president “will not rip this up tomorrow.” Meanwhile, he said he would fight on for statutory provisions in future legislation.


In recent days, the health care debate has swirled around Stupak, a former state trooper and a Catholic. He said he and his like-minded colleagues could not support the abortion provision that came out of the Senate, believing it did not provide adequate protection in ensuring no public funds would support abortion coverage.


Negotiations to craft an executive order satisfying the group’s concerns began in earnest on Saturday, after it looked like health care supporters did not have the 216 votes needed to pass the legislation without Stupak’s group.


“There was a principle that meant more to us than anything and that was the sanctity of life,” Stupak said.

6a)Health care designed in a rug bazaar
ByPatrick McIlheran


Today, perhaps by the time you read this, Congress may have voted in a way that both saddles us with Obamacare and lets House members deny they did so.

Congress planned to resort to this trick, in which this vast reordering of America is presumed to have passed when it hadn't, because Democrats felt they couldn't muster a majority for a vote on the actual bill.

Threats and bribes were ongoing, so whether Congress really would blow off the Constitution wasn't clear as of this writing. The president earlier said this insider process wasn't central; the content of the bill is. He was right. The reek of what Obamacare does overwhelms the rottenness of how it's enacted.

But the dishonest process suits a bill sold by deceit.

Take the matter of whether America clamors for Obamacare. It does, the president insisted. Then Congress last August met school gymnasiums full of dissent. As details sank in, polls steadily turned. Now, with a majority of the country against the bill and 40% in favor, its backers are reduced to saying that people want some thing done. Yes, though decidedly not Obama's thing. Yet that's what we're getting.

This isn't a plan about covering the uninsured or poor. We already pay to do that, via Medicaid and programs like BadgerCare. If it were about the uninsured, we'd just expand those or, better, give people the tax break now going to employers.

This plan instead puts 16 million more people onto Medicaid - then adds about $500 billion in new taxes on everyone and presumes to let Washington redesign the coverage that four-fifths of us like.

It doesn't pay for itself, as Democrats claimed last week. You pay, via that half-trillion in new taxes. Then the plan bets on another half-trillion in Medicare cuts that Congress perennially threatens but never makes.

It isn't about making health care affordable - that is, moderating prices. The bill does nothing about the cost of care, which Medicare's actuary says will rise even faster than now. Congressional accountants say the cost of health care subsidies will rise 8% a year.

Rather, the bill will mask this fundamental problem by taking money from some Americans - for instance, by more heavily taxing investments, and isn't that how to grow an economy? - and giving it to others. Families making $80,000 a year would get subsidies. By its design, the plan enshrines the idea that you consume health care someone else buys, the very mechanism leading to spiraling costs.

This plan is not single-payer, but it's not the improved market that backers claim. It is a parody of a market. You cannot choose to buy coverage but must buy it. Washington will design the plans - low-cost, high-deductible coverage, for instance, will be practically impossible. The prices will be controlled. The doctors will be told how to practice.

Your government will command, prohibit or direct every move in the belief that you're an incorrigible slob and your doctor is a fool. This plan does not build a single-payer hell, but pervasive bureaucratic control amounts to grading the site for it.

None of this is even new. By backers' own admission, they're doing what Teddy Roosevelt wanted to do 100 years ago. This is the imposition of a century-old urge to regiment reality. Previous half-steps toward that got us the mess we're in now, so how will this bring anything but disaster?

The bill is, instead, recklessness. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was never clearer than when she said this month that "we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it."

It's arrogant for her to think politicians could redesign everything about how medicine is done. It is incalculable folly to impose an opaque redesign now shaped mainly by payoffs to senators, complaints by unions, spite at insurance companies and whatever desperate promise the president thinks might close the deal.

We're left with health care designed by hysterical, minute-before-deadline infomercial-level rug-bazaar promises. Heaven help this republic.


6b)Eraser Duty for Bart?
By Maureen Dowd

Angry nuns have been calling Congressman Bart Stupak’s office to complain about his dismissive comments on their bravura decision to make a literal Hail Mary pass, break with Catholic bishops and endorse the health care bill.

As a Catholic schoolboy, the Michigan Democrat had his share of nuns who rapped his knuckles when he misbehaved, like the time he crashed a kickball through the school window.

So, of course, he’s having some acid flashbacks, but he told me, “They’re not printable even in The New York Times.”

Like that other troublemaking Bart (Simpson), Stupak, who wants to kill the health care bill because he thinks the language on abortion funding is not restrictive enough, should have to write on the blackboard a hundred times: “I will listen closely when the nuns tell me I am wrong. I will not be an obstinate lawmaker.”

Stupak got in hot holy water when he told Fox News, “When I’m drafting right-to-life language, I don’t call up nuns.” He followed that with more scorn for sisters, telling Chris Matthews that the nuns were not influential because they rarely try to influence — which makes no sense — and because “they’re not the recognized spokesperson for the Catholic Church.” He listens to the bishops, he said, and antiabortion groups.

We might have to bang Bart’s head into a blackboard a few times before he realizes that in a moral tug-of-war between the sisters and the bishops, you have to go with the gals.

The nuns are giving the Democrats cover. As Bob Casey, an abortion opponent who helped negotiate the abortion language in the Senate bill, observed, quoting Scripture: “They care for ‘the least, the last and the lost.’ And they know health care.”

On Friday, Tim Ryan, an antiabortion Democrat from Ohio, took to the House floor to say he had been influenced by the nuns to vote for the bill.

“You say this is pro-abortion,” he said to Republicans, and yet “you have 59,000 Catholic nuns from across the country endorsing this bill, 600 Catholic hospitals, 1,400 Catholic nursing homes endorsing this bill.”

For decades, the nuns did the bidding of the priests, cleaned up their messes, and watched as their male superiors let a perverted stain spread over the entire church, a stain that has now even reached the Holy See. It seemed that the nuns were strangely silent, either because they suspected but had no proof — the “Doubt” syndrome — or because they had no one to tell but male bosses protecting one another in that repugnant and hypocritical old-boys’ network.

Their goodness was rewarded with a stunning slap from the über-conservative Pope Benedict XVI. The Vatican is conducting two inquisitions into the “quality of life” of American nuns, trying to knock any independence or modernity out of them.

The witch hunt has sparked the nuns to have a voice at last. Vulnerable children were not protected by the male hierarchy of the church, which treated sexual abuse as a failure of character rather than a crime. The men were so arrogant it never occurred to them that they should be accountable to the secular world. In their warped thinking, it was better to let children suffer than to call the authorities, embarrass the church and risk diminished power.

Now the bishops think that it’s better to deprive poor people of good health care than to let the church look like it’s going soft on abortion.

Under the semantic dodge of ideological purity, the bishops also are doing the bidding of the Republicans, trying to kill the bill and weaken the president. But the nuns are right when they say that “the Senate bill will not provide taxpayer funding for elective abortions” and that its protection of pregnant women is the “real pro-life stance.”

The nuns stepped up to support true Catholic dogma, making sure poor people get proper health care. (Which would lead to fewer abortions anyway.)

The men running the church seem oblivious to the fact that, with the ranks of priests and sisters dwindling, they can’t afford to alienate the nuns who make their schools and hospitals run smoothly.

And now, just as he’s finally issuing a pastoral letter about the Irish clerical child abuse, the pope himself has been ensnared in the international scandal, with a psychiatrist in Germany saying that an archdiocese that Benedict led at the time ignored warnings in the 1980s that a priest accused of sexually abusing boys had to be “kept away from working with children.”

Because Pope Benedict has addressed the sex scandal belatedly and sparsely, stonewalling on the skeleton in his German closet, he has lost authority to speak about the issue consuming his church.

The only internal investigation he has undertaken with alacrity, for heaven’s sake, is the one bullying American nuns.
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7)Education Lessons Are Lost on Obama
By Steve Chapman

I can't pinpoint the moment when the Obama administration went wrong on the subject of education. But I can pinpoint the moment when it demonstrated that it can't be taken seriously.

It happened on Monday, March 15, when Education Secretary Arne Duncan was expounding to reporters about revising the No Child Left Behind law. The new policy, he asserted, "is going to revolutionize education in our country."


No, it's not. We have been at the task of education for a long time, and one thing we have learned is that you cannot revolutionize it. The American system of schooling is vast, complicated, self-protective, slow to change and even slower to improve.

On these points, No Child Left Behind leaves no doubt. It was inaugurated with grand promises eight years ago. "As of this hour, America's schools will be on a new path of reform, and a new path of results," exulted President George W. Bush upon signing it.

For the first time, the federal government demanded that states create and enforce standards, hold educators accountable and make prescribed changes. It seemed to hold great potential.

But the potential has gone unfulfilled. In the first five years, there were small gains in reading proficiency among 4th-graders, but the gains were larger in the five years before that. Likewise with math.

Among 8th-graders, there was no change in reading performance. Math scores rose a little, but less rapidly than they had been rising. Nor have minority students improved more than before.

High school students also have nothing to brag about. A 2008 report from the National Center for Education Statistics found that among 17-year-olds, performance in math and reading is worse now than it was in the 1990s and no better than in 1973.

If you didn't know NCLB had become law in 2002, you would not guess it from looking at the trends in student performance. We were mediocre then, and we're mediocre now.

Hoover Institution scholar John Chubb, in his book "Learning from No Child Left Behind," laments that "only a third of American young people are demonstrating mastery of the knowledge and skills that education experts believe appropriate for their respective grade levels." In some countries, two-thirds of kids meet that standard.

The common complaint among liberal critics is that Washington imposed new rules without supplying the needed funds. But between 2001 and 2008, federal education spending jumped by 72 percent.

In short, we launched an unprecedented and expensive effort to improve schools and help students -- and it didn't work.

One problem is that the states that were serious about raising performance didn't need the law, and those that were not serious were able to evade or frustrate it. Michael Petrilli, vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, has explained, "While it's hard to force recalcitrant states and districts to do things they don't want to do, it's impossible to force them to do those things well."

Nor is it clear it would help if they did. Diane Ravitch, a New York University professor who was an education official under the first President Bush and a former NCLB enthusiast, finds no evidence that the remedies that failing schools must adopt actually work in practice.

As she notes in her new book, "The Death and Life of the Great American School System," few parents have taken advantage of the opportunity provided under NCLB to escape bad schools. Few students have leapt at the chance to get free after-school tutoring. Few failing schools have been able to turn around.

Obama's "Race to the Top" plan is a new approach, offering competitive grants to states that adopt high standards, improve lousy schools and reward good teachers. It's a fresh, promising idea in a field where fresh, promising ideas go to die.

Like NCLB, the new policy rests on the assumption that the federal government not only knows how to raise student performance but has the tools to induce states and local school districts to make the changes required to help the students in need. But experience indicates all those premises are wrong.

Our leaders have a lot of evidence that a bigger federal role will not produce the desired results, and yet they persist in believing that it will. Not every education failure occurs in a classroom.
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8)Settlements shouldn’t unsettle peace talks
By Jeff Jacoby


LAST NOVEMBER the government of Israel agreed to a 10-month moratorium on new Jewish housing in the West Bank. The moratorium did not apply to schools, synagogues, and residential units already in the pipeline; nor did it apply to eastern Jerusalem, which is home to around 180,000 Israelis — more than a third of Jerusalem’s Jewish population. Even with those caveats it was an unprecedented concession, intended, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, to “encourage resumption of peace talks with our Palestinian neighbors.’’

At the time, the Obama administration applauded Israel’s announcement. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hailed it as a “move forward.’’ George Mitchell, the president’s special envoy to the Middle East, praised it as “a positive development’’ and acknowledged that “it is more than any Israeli government has done before.’’

So when Israel’s Interior Ministry recently announced its interim approval for the construction of 1,600 new apartments in Jerusalem’s Ramat Shlomo neighborhood, it was not reneging on any commitment. If anyone was guilty of bad faith in the diplomatic crisis that ensued, it was the Obama administration, which had explicitly accepted the terms of Netanyahu’s building freeze in November, yet was now going back on its word.

The Israeli government was guilty at most of poor timing, since the announcement came as Vice President Joe Biden was in the country and indirect talks with the Palestinians — who have refused for more than a year to meet face to face with the Israelis — were scheduled to begin. The gaffe should have been waved aside as soon as Netanyahu apologized for his government’s awkward announcement, which he had not known about in advance. Instead the Obama administration went nuclear. Clinton publicly blasted Israel for what she called “an insult to the United States,’’ and upbraided Netanyahu in a blistering 45-minute phone call, with talking points scripted by the president.

For good measure, the State Department spokesman then demanded that Israel demonstrate “through specific actions’’ its commitment to peace. Forgotten, apparently, was Netanyahu’s unprecedented moratorium of November, to say nothing of the innumerable Israeli goodwill gestures, concessions, prisoner releases, and peace offers to the Palestinians that preceded it — all of them unrequited.

When President Obama was asked Wednesday evening whether US-Israeli relations are now in a crisis, he flatly answered “no.’’ But an atmosphere of harsh antagonism seems exactly what the administration’s tantrum was meant to engender.

If the president’s goal was to bring Israel and the Palestinians to the negotiating table and thereby revive the so-called “peace process,’’ he couldn’t have chosen a more counterproductive tactic. The Palestinian Authority promptly seized the opportunity to back out of the indirect talks it had agreed to — why negotiate for Israeli concessions if Washington can force Israel to deliver them on a silver platter? “We want to hear from Mitchell,’’ said Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, “that Israel has cancelled the decision to build housing units before we start the negotiations.’’

This has been the Palestinian Authority’s strategy ever since Obama took office. Last spring, the PA’s Mahmoud Abbas told The Washington Post that he had no intention of negotiating with Israel — he was content to sit back and let Washington twist Netanyahu’s arms. “The Americans are the leaders of the world,’’ Abbas told Diehl. “They can use their weight with anyone around the world. . . . I will wait.’’

Israel will generally bend over backward to accommodate Washington, but there are some things no Israeli government can relinquish. One of them is the right of Jews to live in Jerusalem — in all of Jerusalem, including the parts of the city conquered by Jordan in 1948 and kept judenrein until 1967. Israelis quarrel over many things, but the vast majority of them agree that Jerusalem must never again be divided. Americans agree as well. Indeed, as a matter of federal law — the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 — it is US policy that “Jerusalem should remain an undivided city in which the rights of every ethnic and religious group are protected.’’

As a candidate for president in 2008, Barack Obama said that was his position too. Millions of pro-Israel American voters believed him, just as they believed his pledge of “unwavering friendship with Israel.’’ The recent unpleasantness suggests it may be time for second thoughts.
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