Seattle Relents! David Horovitz Spoofs!

Most everyone in the liberal media and press are applauding the victory achieved by the 111th Congress. How does a defeat for the nation equal a victory for Congress and Obama?

Changing tires on a racing car in record time is not a victory if the tires come off as the driver rounds the track, smashes into the wall and goes down in flames.(See 1 and 1a below.)

However, one newspaper seems to get it. (See 1b below.)
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This was sent to me by a former South African. Maybe Seattle's bus company can replace the anti-Israel ads with an anti-Mugabe ones.

This naive writer suggests various flotillas going to Gaza are meant solely for humanitarian purposes. I question that, however. (See 2 below.)
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Final interview with Porter Stansberry.

Whenever things get bad there is always a doomsday scenario that someone presents to make a living off of fear that abounds. I personally do not believe things will get as dire as Stansberry suggests but I also do not logically see how we get out from under our debt burden without taking drastic measures which I am not sure Americans will tolerate or something more drastic happening forcing our hand.

I am in total agreement with Stansberry re his demand for a balanced budget and his rational behind it is morally correct. It is unconscionable for Congress to indebt future generations who have no vote.(See 3 below.)
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The Jerusalem Post's Editor, David Horovitz, conjures up a State Department Cable as a spoof and lo and behold it had already been written by a perceptive American Diplomat - read and find out what it said.

Obama either cannot understand Israel because it is a democracy or because his sympathies lie with his Muslim brothers. Either way he continues to bark up the wrong tree and thus,his diplomatic initiatives are doomed to fail. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)Political Connections
By Ronald Brownstein

This Congress will enter the history books for the magnitude of both its political losses and its legislative victories.

This month’s final flurry of legislative successes for President Obama and the Democratic Congress underscores the difficulty of rendering a single verdict on their tumultuous two years in power.

In November, Democrats forfeited control of the House after suffering the largest midterm losses for either party since 1938. They absorbed stinging defeats in the Senate as well. But before that, and to an utterly unexpected extent after that as well, Obama and congressional Democrats passed into law an enormous agenda. This Congress will enter the history books for the magnitude of both its political losses and its legislative victories.

The program that Democrats implemented during Obama’s first two years doesn’t approach the Himalayan peaks of the first congressional sessions for Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. But probably not since Johnson has either party implemented as much of its agenda in a single legislative session as Democrats did in this one. “You probably have to go back to Johnson to see something as substantial as this,” says presidential historian Robert Dallek, a Johnson biographer. Historian Alan Brinkley of Columbia University agrees: “Legislatively, this Congress has probably done more than any Congress since the 1960s.”

Democrats had their legislative disappointments. Mostly because of Senate filibusters, they could not pass limits on carbon emissions, reform the labor laws or the immigration system, or establish a public competitor to private health insurers. Obama felt compelled to accept the extension of George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy. Nor could he persuade Congress to back his pledge to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.

But the achievements in the ledger’s other column are imposing. Health care and financial-services reform top that list. The 2009 economic-stimulus package contained, by some measures, more net new public investment in education, infrastructure, and clean energy than Bill Clinton achieved during his entire two terms. Other significant wins included bills that restructured and increased college financial aid, toughened pay-equity laws for women, expanded national service, and provided new credit card protections to consumers. This week’s Senate vote approving the New START pact provided Obama a bipartisan foreign policy-victory that steamrolled the opposition of the GOP Senate leadership.

Many of these bills fulfilled long-standing Democratic goals. Presidents of both parties since FDR had pursued comprehensive health care reform; Obama alone signed it into law. The repeal of the Pentagon’s "don’t ask, don’t tell" policy that Obama signed this week concluded an effort to allow gays to serve openly that dated back to Clinton’s 1992 campaign. Earlier, Obama signed legislation protecting sexual orientation under the hate-crimes law and more closely equalizing the penalties for possession of powder and crack cocaine--in each case implementing changes key Democratic constituencies have likewise sought since the 1990s.

Almost without notice, Obama ended a similar odyssey of even greater consequence. In 1996, Clinton’s Food and Drug Administration asserted the authority to regulate the marketing and sale of tobacco products; in 2000, the Supreme Court said it overreached. Since then, public health advocates had repeatedly failed to pass legislation providing FDA that authority (partly because of Bush’s opposition). Last year, Congress finally approved the bill and Obama signed it. FDA has already banned candy-flavored cigarettes and proposed to strengthen health warning labels. “That was the most significant legislative action that the Congress has [ever] taken with regard to tobacco,” said Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids.

Why didn’t this record provide Democrats more defense against the wave that capsized their House majority? One (smaller) reason is that the interminable struggle over health care overshadowed much of it. More important, conservatives, and even many independents, recoiled from the cumulative scale and cost of these initiatives at a time of economic unease. Most important, as the downturn lingered, the Democrats’ agenda appeared incapable of, and even tangential to, creating jobs, the public’s main concern. Many of the Democrats’ priorities “didn’t seem relevant to what the public was struggling with,” says lobbyist Vic Fazio, the former chairman of the House Democratic Caucus.

One other factor contributed. Democrats passed such a comprehensive agenda largely because they achieved near-parliamentary levels of party unity in Congress. That focus on uniting Democrats was probably unavoidable given lockstep Republican opposition, but it produced a kind of myopia. On the biggest issues--health care and stimulus--Democrats spoke mostly to each other and never attracted enough public support beyond their core coalition.

All of these factors converged to ignite a fierce backlash against Democrats in the midterm election. If that recoil carries a Republican past Obama in 2012 as well, many of the Democratic legislative achievements could be uprooted. But if Obama wins a second term, he could instead institutionalize his key reforms. The huge federal deficit, and growing Republican strength in Congress, virtually ensures that the Democrats’ latest tide of Washington activism has already crested. Yet, if Obama can steer a course to a second term, the powerful imprint of that surge might endure.

1a)Lame Ducks Triumphant
By GAIL COLLINS

Wow, we’re getting a new nuclear arms control treaty for Christmas. I know some of you were hoping for iPads. But still, big news.


Good work, White House! Thank heavens we got rid of our former president, Barack Obama, who couldn’t even get the trade agreement he went all the way to South Korea to sign. Our current president, Barack Obama, would never let that happen, and, in fact, came up with a really excellent trade agreement with the South Koreans just the other day.

“Administration officials have bent over backwards to try to solve every problem that’s come up,” said Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, one of the Republicans who reached across the aisle to get the New Start treaty with Russia ratified.

The treaty, which needed a two-thirds vote, was actually approved 71 to 26. The Democrats did not have to go scrambling madly around looking for one last vote. And even the opponents were winners since they got to spend more than a week beating up on the Russians, revisiting the golden days when life was simple and wars were cold.

“They cheat. They are serial cheaters,” said Senator James Risch of Idaho, the author of my favorite unsuccessful amendment to the treaty. It would have made the entire groundbreaking nuclear-reduction program contingent on the return of four American Humvees that the Russians picked up during their conflict with Georgia. Risch hauled out blowups of one of the enslaved military vehicles, shouting: “You can watch your property right here being towed away by the Russians! Back to Moscow!” If the former Red Menace wants to “hold hands and sing ‘Kumbaya,’ ” he added, “Well, that is fine. But give us back our stolen military equipment.”

When was it that the singing of “Kumbaya” became a shorthand for weenieness? “Kumbaya” is an excellent campfire song, especially for groups that border on tone-deafness and don’t know the words to anything. I remember singing it in Girl Scout camp with friends who emerged unscathed and became conservative Republicans. Some may be writing letters protesting the New Start treaty at this very moment. Please, give “Kumbaya” a break.

But I digress. Nothing, not even Humvees in chains, was going to stop the progress of what has recently become known as the “hard-charging lame-duck Congress.” It is a perfect image, with its suggestion of a flock racing along in the clumsiest manner possible but still stumbling over the finish line.

“When it’s all going to be said and done, Harry Reid has eaten our lunch,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who called the hard-charging lame duck “a capitulation in two weeks of dramatic proportions.” This is the rapidly evolving new hyperpartisan Lindsey Graham, who was so ticked off at the fact that the Senate was devoting a mere eight days to the treaty that he told the antitreaty obstructionist Jon Kyl of Arizona: “I want to apologize to you for the way you’ve been treated by your colleagues.”

His Start-supporting fellow Republicans appeared quietly unrepentant. Perhaps they were afraid that if they said anything in response, Graham would continue his evolution into awfulness right there on the Senate floor and start gnawing on the ankles of elderly legislators.

Good work, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry. We appreciate the way you’ve evolved from one of the world’s worst presidential candidates into an extremely useful senator. Unlike some unsuccessful presidential candidates we could name.

Good work, Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, the lone Republican who stuck with the treaty through thick and thin and never mutated into a scary new entity.

Good work, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Unlike your hapless predecessor, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, you’ve had legislation shooting off to the White House like angry birds in that video game. Unemployment compensation! Gay rights! Food safety! Judicial appointments! Arms control! Health care for 9/11 responders!

But let’s admit it. Nothing would have gotten done if Obama hadn’t swallowed that loathsome compromise on tax cuts for the wealthy.

If he’d taken the high road, Congress would be in a holiday war. The long-term unemployed would be staggering into the new year without benefits. The rest of the world would look upon the United States as a country so dysfunctional that it can’t even ratify a treaty to help keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists. The people who worked at ground zero would still be uncertain about their future, and our gay and lesbian soldiers would still be living in fear.

It’s depressing to think that there was no way to win that would not have involved giving away billions of dollars to people who don’t need it. But it’s kind of cheery to think we have a president who actually does know what he’s doing.


1b)Voters elected Republicans to end Obamaism, not expand it
By: Examiner Editorial

It has probably escaped the attention of all but the few who make it their business to pay attention to such things, so we note here that a subtle but dangerous piece of revisionism about the meaning of the November election crept into the national political conversation this week.

Nowhere was that revisionism more evident than in President Obama's comments late Wednesday in lauding the just-ended 111th Congress, and in particular its lame-duck conclusion: "A lot of folks in this town predicted that after the midterm elections, Washington would be headed for more partisanship and more gridlock. And instead, this has been a season of progress for the American people. That progress ... is a reflection of the message that voters sent in November, a message that said it's time to find common ground on challenges facing our country." A few paragraphs later, it became clear that Obama wants us to believe that voters meant for congressional Democrats and Republicans to find that common ground so they can do more of what made the 111th Congress "the most productive two years that we've had in generations."

No, Mr. President, voters in 2010 did not demand bipartisan cooperation in 2011 to advance Obamacare, increase out-of-control federal spending that drove the national debt to $13.4 trillion and the annual deficit to $1.4 trillion, add thousands of bureaucrats to the government payroll even as private-sector unemployment remains near 10 percent, create hundreds more wasteful, duplicative federal programs that mainly benefit Democratic-favorite special interests like Big Labor, impose thousands more growth-killing environmental regulations, or erect multitudes of additional obstacles to achieving energy independence here at home.

To be sure, voters have lost patience with the endless partisan harangues, elitist arrogance, political corruption, and hypocritical pandering to special interests that long ago came to define Washington and its professional politicians in both parties. That was why Republicans were tossed out of congressional power in 2006. The same factors further coalesced in 2010 with disgust with Obamacare, the failed $814 billion economic stimulus program, the "Always Apologize for America" foreign policy, and exploding spending and debt. The result was that voters tossed Democrats out of control of the House and handed Republicans their deepest midterm election victory since 1938. Only in a liberal fantasy world does such an electoral result represent an electorate demanding bipartisan cooperation for more of the same.

Historians may someday describe the just-ended lame-duck session as the high-water mark of Big Government. Come Jan. 5, the reality of what voters did on Nov. 2 will become incontestably clear as a Republican House majority takes office. Then, as Sen. Tom Coburn said Wednesday, henceforth, "there will be no more big spending bills." The new year cannot come too soon.
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2)The following letter from a Zimbabwean refugee in Johannesburg is a stark reminder of the world's indifference to human tragedy wrought by Mugabe, while the anti-Israel crusaders divert the world's attention.
Regards
Maurice


An appeal from Zimbabwe
To all those good people who organize flotillas to aid Hamas in Gaza

PLEASE RECOGNIZE US TOO

We admire and envy the good works and immense resources and influence around the
world that enable you to charter ships and organize costly flotillas and we
ask in all humility, are we Zimbabweans less human and less deserving than
the Gazans? At least they have UNRWWA with its $400 million annual budget and
substantial additional funds from the EU, the U.N. the U.S., Saudi Arabia
and other Arab League countries.

We don't for one moment suggest that you ignore the Gazans but we appeal to
you to remember our suffering too, with 80% percent of our population barely
existing below the poverty line, where Mugabe has destroyed basic health
services, where the police use batons and worse to suppress political
opponents, where malaria, Aids and tuberculosis continue to spiral upward,
where hyperinflation is rampant and the privileged few who have jobs earn $8
to $16 per month, barely enough to buy bread when available, for the family.

The average life-span has fallen to about 30 years per person and more than
one-third of Zimbabwean children are orphans.

ABC news reported in June this year that the largest number of new refugees
in the world are from Zimbabwe, almost all in South Africa. ZimOnline has
reported that while the people starve, Mugabe and his loyalists in ZANU-PF
own nearly 5 million hectares of agricultural land, seized from white
commercial farmers since 2000, making a mockery of the land reform plan.

In a John Simpson BBC documentary "Tracking down a massacre", the terrible
wounds which Mugabe's Fifth Brigade inflicted on Matabeleland in the early
1980s were recently exposed. It began when Mugabe decided to deal with about
500 dissident followers of his rival, Joshua Nkomo. Mugabe ordered the
Brigade to root them out

The Fifth Brigade, like Mr Mugabe's government was mostly Shona-speaking,
whereas Matabeleland is populated mostly by Ndebele descendants of Zulus who
came to the area in the 1830s. Joseph Buchena Nkatazo who co-ordinated an
investigation some years ago by the Catholic Commission for Justice and
Peace told Simpson that in the areas where they had been able to
investigate, they found evidence of more than 20,000 deaths. He was sure
there must have been many more elsewhere.

Flotilla organizers, Physicians for Human Rights, Rabbis for Human Rights,
and other humanitarian organizations, please spare some of your compassion,
energy and resources for this human disaster in Zimbabwe that has been
callously ignored by people who should be concerned. Can we look forward to
an aid flotilla via South Africa with food for distribution to the needy and
medical supplies for the ailing?

Joseph Khumalo
Fomerly of Josiah Tongogara Street
Harare
Zimbabwe
Now in Johannesburg
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3) Goldsmith comment: In the final installment of our "End of America" interview with Porter, he tells you how he'll escape the U.S. if things get really bad. He also predicts the one major freedom U.S. citizens will lose in the next two years.


Sean Goldsmith: I know previously you've discussed an escape plan.

Porter Stansberry: Hold on. Let me go back to that facetious question [where I'm holding my offshore assets]. One of the things I used to really like to do in investment conferences when I used to speak in front of a bunch of people every year... I do little of that anymore because I have a family now and I don't like to travel that much without them. But I would get up and say, "Hi, everybody. How's everybody doing today? How are things going?" And we talk about their investments, and then I would ask the audience, "Now, how many of you people here have an offshore bank account?" And there would actually be people who raised their hands.

SG: Another good one is when Doug Casey was giving a speech, and he'd get up and say, "Well, I got a call and I know that there are two federal agents in the audience, so if you guys would please stand up? We all know you're here, so please just stand up and show yourselves out." And of course no one had called him. He was just making a joke. And sure enough, two federal agents stood up and walked out of the conference.

PS: That's great.

SG: So back to my question... You've previously discussed an escape plan. I would like to know what is your plan – if you're willing to discuss that – if things get bad enough in the U.S. Do you recommend the average American citizen have an escape plan?

PS: Well, this goes to what I think everyone considers to be the fringe element of these discussions.

SG: Certainly.

PS: And so let me preface my remarks by saying I consider the idea that I would have to flee my country because of political or fiscal pressures to be remote. The possibility is certainly remote that I would ever feel persecuted enough individually to flee the country.

SG: And that's coming from a guy who was sued by our country.

PS: Yes. The government has targeted me individually. It cost me $3 million and eight years of my life to fight the lawsuit that resulted from it, so I speak from some experience. But I do consider it unlikely I will need this contingency plan.

On the other hand, I firmly believe that it is my responsibility to always provide for the safety, the security, and the well being of my family. I can't do anything to save my neighbors. I might not be able to do enough to save our subscribers, but I can damn sure save myself and my family from any and all outcomes of this coming hyperinflation.

So I have provisioned the ability for me to leave the country secretly, anonymously, and I have taken the steps to make sure that I have assets overseas that can sustain me in the event of an emergency. This may not be for you, and it may be completely unnecessary. It probably is. But I know a lot about what's going to happen here. It's going to get really, really ugly. And nobody can know exactly what the outcome will be. So I think that taking certain precautions in a limited way is simply prudent. Whether you feel the same, of course, is up to you.

SG: All right. So a couple of questions for entertainment value... I want to know – let me preface this by saying I know that never in a million years will you ever enter the political arena – but what would you do to fix the U.S.?

PS: That's a very good question, and I have no interest at all in serving my fellow citizens, at least not at the wages that the government will pay. So…

SG: Well, everyone knows that you don't make money as a politician with your wages. It's in the kickbacks.

PS: Right, exactly, and I'd rather just make money honestly. So my answer is sort of silly because there's no political way to do these things... but if I was king for the day and my edicts would remain in effect, I would start by doing one simple thing.

One thing you have to do is have a balanced-budget amendment. It's completely immoral to spend more than you tax if you're the government because all you're doing is taxing future generations of Americans who are not even entitled to have a vote on decisions that you're making.

It's totally immoral to leave vast debts to our children and grandchildren. Every American ought to understand this. So I would put in a balanced-budget amendment that says unless our continental United States is invaded by a foreign enemy we have to run a balanced budget. If the Mexicans decide to invade us, then OK… we can run a deficit for a couple years just until we can repel the invasion. Perhaps the Canadians will come after us. We don't know.

But there's no point at all in believing these foreign adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan are worth the debts we're going to leave to our children. And don't even get me started on Medicare and Social Security running deficits like that. It's just completely immoral, and it shows just how decrepit and disgusting the American political process has become. So a balanced-budget amendment is No. 1.

No. 2, you have to have sound money. When you don't have sound money, none of the economy can function correctly. Prices are the most important form of information in the economy. Prices are what inform entrepreneurs about what needs to be created and what doesn't need to be created. When you don't have sound money, you have a completely distorted price system, and it all falls apart.

Then of course, people say, "Oh, look, capitalism has failed." No, we haven't had capitalism in this country since before World War II. What we've had ever since then is this sort of phony corporate state capitalism, really sort of socialism-light. So you have to have sound money... Otherwise, the economy can't function appropriately or efficiently.

So a balanced budget, sound money... When I say sound money, I mean either gold and silver as money or a sound backing for such a currency. So you can say 25% backed by gold, 10% backed by gold, 100% backed by gold. I don't really care about that. I just want the money to be sound, and I don't want inflation to be possible, legally.

And then the third thing, I think, is you'll never be able to keep those reforms. You'll never be able to keep a balanced-budget amendment in place. You'll never be able to keep sound money in place until you change the fundamental nature of our democracy. And this of course is the most radical idea that I'll share with you. I have a simple idea to fix America. Everyone should be entitled to as many votes as they have spent dollars in taxes. Real simple. If you spend a ton of money in taxes, you get to have a powerful vote. If you don't pay any taxes, you don't get a vote at all because you haven't invested at all in the equity of our country. So I think that would really eliminate a lot of the problems that we have with people voting themselves the largesse of our treasury.

Right now in America, half the people in our country don't pay any federal income taxes – none. So they are net beneficiaries of the welfare state, and they're going to continue to vote for more and more welfare until they bankrupt our entire country. The incentives of that are so clearly perverse everyone should understand why that's not a safe process, and I think that just giving people the vote based on their taxes is really simple.

And I tell you what would even be better: You could make taxes optional. If you don't want to vote, you don't have to pay any taxes. Boy, that would really change the math, wouldn't it? Of course, I don't expect that to happen either. But those are the three principles: a balanced budget, real money, and change the voting system so only people who have a vested interest in the success or failure of our country are able to have a voice in the decision-making process.

And by the way, all three things were in place when our country was founded. So to say that these things are radical is really not true. These things are actually conservative. They're what our country was founded on. They're just common sense. And if you put those things back in place, our country would be on the right foot almost immediately.

SG: All right, and in closing, I was wondering if you would be willing to share a prediction, an End of America prediction that you haven't yet made with Digest readers.

PS: Oh, jeez.

SG: And I know you've already predicted a lot.

PS: An End of America prediction. OK, sure. I don't know if I've exactly predicted this yet or not, but I believe it'll be against the law for you to send assets overseas without restriction by January 2013.

SG: All right.

PS: Some kind of significant capital controls will be in place in two years. So you've got two years to really prepare yourself for what's coming, otherwise all your assets are going to be trapped in the States, where they'll be confiscated or taxed or inflated away.

SG: All right. Well, thank you very much, Porter.
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4)Editor's Notes: Stranger than fiction
By DAVID HOROVITZ



I dreamed up an Israeli-empathetic cable last week. Turned out the former US ambassador had written the genuine article.

In this column last week, I manufactured a spoof WikiLeaks cable, purportedly written by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, setting out an ostensible “recalibration” of the Obama administration’s policy as regards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I didn’t see much danger of anyone mistaking it for a genuine diplomatic document. Certainly, I made it sound somewhat authentic by following some of the formatting and linguistic conventions of such cables. But there were three pretty big clues that this was a fake.

First: The WikiLeaks US State Department deluge includes nothing from the past few months, and I dated my secretary of state’s directive December 10, 2010 – just a few days ago. It is highly unlikely that even the best-connected newspaper editor would gain access to so fresh a genuine cable. And if an editor did, it would be front-page, leadto- the-paper, global-headlinemaking news, not material for an opinion piece.

Second clue: I used the word “WikaLikes” in the headline. “WikaLikes.” As in, “LookaLikes.” As in, not the genuine article!

And third, there was the not insignificant matter of the content. This was “Secretary Clinton” writing what I would like to think Secretary Clinton ought to want to be writing, rather than staking out the kinds of positions that she and the Obama administration actually have been taking – positions that have included a heavy public focus on settlements; positions that, to my mind, have indicated an unfortunately exaggerated confidence in the willingness and capacity of Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority to agree to the necessary compromises for a peace accord; positions that, I further believe, have reflected a failure to internalize, on the one hand, the widespread Israeli willingness to trade land for real peace, and, on the other, the deep Israeli skepticism about Palestinian readiness to meet us halfway.

Could any reader seriously imagine Hillary Clinton truly writing to her State Department team, as I had her writing in my “cable,” phrases such as “Recognized that previous 10-month freeze was wasted by Palestinian Authority, which failed to enter direct talks in good faith”? Or “USG conscious of PA President Abbas’s failure to capitalize on former PM Olmert’s terms”? Or “Israeli mainstream commitment, interest in accommodation hitherto underestimated by this Administration”? Or “Palestinian commitment, interest in accommodation hitherto overestimated by this Administration”?

Of course not, I figured. And more’s the pity.

Well, I was wrong.

Despite the implausibility of me getting my hands on such a document and burying it in a column rather than leading the paper with it; despite that “WikaLikes” headline; and despite the cable’s strikingly Israel-considerate (though not, in my opinion, Israel-apologist) tone, many readers did seize upon it as an authentic Clinton directive – to their dismay or their delight, depending on their own positions.

And a number of people who have been involved in the American- Israeli diplomatic process wrote directly to me, wondering about the cable’s origin and asking for more details. One such correspondent, smelling a rat, noted that there seemed to be rather too many pro-Israeli assumptions.

Indeed so, I responded to him sadly.

Which is where things get more interesting.

ON MONDAY of this week, WikiLeaks released a new batch of Israel-related diplomatic cables. Genuine, leaked US State Department documents. These featured all kinds of interesting tidbits and revelations, notably including Israeli security figures’ downbeat assessments of Abbas and the PA, and their upbeat assessments of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s peacemaking capacity.

Also in the new batch was the classified section of a “scenesetter” cable prepared by the former US ambassador here, Richard Jones – a kind of overview of the Israeli psyche drawn up for relevant senior American officials just as Israel marked its 60th anniversary in May 2008 and shortly before a three-day visit to Israel by then-president George W. Bush.

Let me digress for a moment to make something clear: I do not endorse the slogan utilized by WikiLeaks on its website: “Keep us strong. Help WikiLeaks keep governments open.”

The democratic pact involves empowering elected leaderships to safeguard our interests as they see fit, subject to their ouster if and when the electorate determines that others can do the job better. It does not require that those leaderships be so transparent to friend and enemy alike – so “open,” to use the WikiLeaks term – as to doom their capacity to act effectively on their citizens’ behalf. When democratic governments led by Washington are battling rapacious and tyrannical regimes across the globe, publicizing the US diplomatic hierarchy’s classified conversations, analyses and directives does far more to undermine that struggle than to advance it.

Nonetheless, among the outweighed advantages of the WikiLeaks breach has been to make plain to the public, in almost real time, how impressive the American diplomatic corps truly is, how conscientious and astute are so many of its envoys, and how important their assessments. Richard Jones’s May 2008 “scenesetter” is a peerless case in point.

Many of the documents leaked so far pertaining to this region contain far more dramatic content than the Jones paper. But none better demonstrates a real understanding of Israel and a grounded empathy with the Israeli public – its challenges, its concerns, its moods, its guiding mindset. And there is no single cable that I would rather commend as vital reading for those who, whether because of predetermined hostility or ignorance, misrepresent us.

The same selection of documents leaked on Monday included a June 2009 cable from Paris in which US officials reported home on the stark, three pronged message that President Nicolas Sarkozy was about to deliver to Binyamin Netanyahu at a meeting in the French capital that month.

“You think you’ve got time, but you don’t,” Sarkozy was set to admonish the prime minister. “You think you have an alternative solution, but you don’t. You think you’re stronger than the Palestinians, but you’re not.”

I wish Sarkozy had been able to read Jones’s cable. He would have gleaned – not from a selfinterested Israeli official or analyst, but from a professional American diplomat – the sense that mainstream Israel does not feel that time is on its side where peacemaking with the Palestinians and the wider region is concerned. That mainstream Israel does not believe it has an alternative to a viable two-state solution with the Palestinians. And that mainstream Israel is not too cocky about its “strength,” however that might be defined.



THE JONES cable “gets” Israel to a quite remarkable degree.

Indeed, it presents precisely the kind of realist’s insights into Israel that I, last week, put into my fake Secretary Clinton cable. The kind of insights that I knew, or thought I knew, would be perceived as too Israel-empathetic to feature in a genuine cable.

Boy was I wrong. Here were insights along similar lines, set out in an articulate cable written ahead of a presidential visit by none other than the very top American diplomat here.

The ambassador began by poignantly describing a country that was “preparing to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of its declaration of independence on May 8 with a characteristically Israeli mix of pride in their achievements and worry about the future.”

In a section headed “Israeli Pride Justified,” Jones wrote admiringly of the realization of the “desperate dream” of a “strong, democratic Jewish state that would be a haven for Jews everywhere.”

Today, he reported, “Israel is very much a reality, with a vibrantly original Hebrew-speaking cultural life, a Tel Aviv skyline dominated by gleaming skyscrapers, a booming high tech-based economy, and the strongest army in the Middle East.”

Israel, he went on, “is firmly Western in its values but also more diverse ethnically and culturally, less Europe-oriented, and decidedly more capitalist than the Israel founded largely by East European-born socialists. For all of its problems with finding the right electoral formula to bring about stable governments, Israel’s democracy is also a thriving reality. Israel is the only Middle Eastern country in which its citizens take for granted the peaceful transfer of political power via the ballot box.”

Critically and commendably, the ambassador then penned a section titled “And Anxieties are Real” where he noted that “the looming threat of a nuclear armed Iran, whose leaders constantly declare their determination to wipe Israel off the map, weighs heavily on the minds of Israelis, who regard their country not only through the prism of the Holocaust but also as the only UN member-state to be routinely threatened with annihilation. Iran’s success in projecting power directly into the core of the Arab- Israeli conflict through its ties to Syria, Hizballah and Hamas compounds the sense of threat.”

Most pertinently, when he came to the Palestinians, Jones correctly stated that “a solid majority of Israelis has come to accept the need for a Palestinian state and for Israel to relinquish control of most of the West Bank... Gone are the days when many Israelis questioned the existence of a Palestinian national identity, and today only a small minority – though still an outspoken and determined one – continues to articulate a demand to retain control of all of the West Bank for religious/historical reasons.”

And then, in what I consider the most important observation of all, Jones drew the contours of the crucial Israeli mainstream dilemma – the dilemma that I feel has been so underestimated by, among others, key figures in the Obama presidency.

“One problem, however,” the ambassador wrote, “is the lack of a broad-based Israeli confidence in the Palestinians’ capacity to hold up their end of the land-forpeace bargain.”

When I first read that sentence, I offered a silent thank you. A thank you to Jones for stating what so many Israelis see as so blindingly obvious but what, to our frustration, seems to have eluded so many of our critics and even some of our friends. Yes, we want to make peace with the Palestinians. No, unfortunately, we are not convinced that they want to make peace with us.

It is worth noting that the ambassador, who ended his three-year term here later in 2008 to become deputy head of the Paris-based International Energy Agency, chose not to express his own judgment as to whether Israelis are right or wrong to doubt the Palestinians’ land-for-peace bona fides. It is also worth stressing that there is nothing here or elsewhere in the cable that contradicts the conviction – shared by successive American administrations, much of the international community and many Israelis – that Israel’s selfinterest requires it to do absolutely everything in its power to encourage a genuine Palestinian commitment to peace.

I DON’T doubt that senior members of the Bush administration scrutinized this cable, and it may have helped shape their ongoing Middle East thinking and policymaking. I wonder how widely it has been read, and if read, internalized, within the Obama administration.

At present, senior US administration officials are working assiduously to revive the diplomatic process – and are said to be pessimistic about their prospects. On the final-status issues of Jerusalem and border demarcation, differences are persistent and wide. Less progress has been made on security issues than widely reported. There has been some shift in the Palestinian position on the refugee issue, but no breakthrough.

Overall, the struggle for substantive progress, always difficult, has been exacerbated by the missteps of the past two years. Instead of broadcasting, along with empathy for Palestinian sovereign aspirations, Jones-style understanding of Israeli concerns, the new administration, publicly at least, seemed to be applying far more pressure in Jerusalem than Ramallah, based on the apparent conception that it was the Israelis, more than the Palestinians, who were set against concessions.

The doubly counterproductive effect was to signal to the Palestinians that they could hold to maximalist positions, while reducing the Israeli government’s incentive to engage more substantively on the key issues.

I WROTE a fake cable last week, which incidentally included no little criticism of Netanyahu – “negotiating stance and actions inconclusive, even unhelpful...”; “distressingly unforthcoming in aborted direct talks” – setting out what I thought could constitute reasonable American positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I wrote it because it has seemed to me that the administration had fallen prey to certain misconceptions and misjudgments, and that this was a factor in the failure to make the progress in which mainstream Israelis, moderate Palestinians, regional moderates and the US all share a paramount interest. I wrote it because, among others, I wanted people in the administration to read it.

The minor consequent irony is that some people mistook it for the genuine article – a belated, Clinton-ordered, dramatic recalibration of policy. The greater, depressing irony is that it turns out that a document citing various similar perspectives – an authentic, secret, diplomatic cable, overflowing with sensible assessments of the most critical issues – had been written two and a half years ago, by Washington’s ambassador here.

Maybe as of this week, now that all of us can read and appreciate its wisdom, this genuine, fair-minded and perceptive document will garner its deserved resonance, most notably in the highest echelons of the US diplomatic hierarchy for which it was originally prepared.
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