It Is A Snake - Don't Be Fooled!

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Newt asks why government gumshoes want to string up them Gibson people? It should be self-evident. Obama needs more unemployed so he can grow the deficit, seek more money for bigger government. (See 1 below.)
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We all have our views and certainly this lady has her strong ones. (See 2 below.)
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If it hisses like a snake, coils like a snake and attacks like a snake it might be a snake. The fact that it uses a teleprompter, smiles and sounds pious don't be fooled.

As for being civil, granted politics is rough business, but being sanctimonious is a dead give away it is a snake. You decide. (See 3, 3a and 3b below.)
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That marvelous bastion of morality. (See 4 below.)
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A fascinating interview with Edward Luttwak - long but very worthwhile read. Sent by a very dear friend and fellow memo reader who e mailed: "I’m sending this to you, despite the risk that you’ll 'post' it."

I responded: "With a challenge like that how could I possibly resist."

Now let's see if Luttwak is correct about Erdogan. Appears that our on again off again ally is going to challenge Israel's Navy? (See 5 and 5a below.)

Meanwhile, I have begun reading Dick Cheney's recent book. Too long for full review but may make a few comments after I finish. We had the pleasure of meeting him, I on several occasions, supported him when he was thinking of running for the Republican nomination and I served with Lynne on the Board of Visitors of St John's College.

Despite his vilification by the elite Leftist news and media folk our nation would be far better off today had he become President.

He was organized, a superb Chief of Staff serving President Ford, an excellent Sec. of Defense, a fiscal conservative down to his boots and a very decent and honorable man. Cheney also was a very effective Vice President and a very trustworthy advisor.

He never let D.C. go to his head and is a true man of the people.

I have the deepest admiration for him.
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I neither watched the debates last night (having dinner with friends and their TV did not pick up MSNBC) nor watched Obama because I was reading Cheney's excellent book.

This is what David Victor Hanson thought about the speech. (See 6 Below.)
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Michael Boskin does a number on Number One. (See 7 below.)
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Dick
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1) Out of Tune and Out of Touch
By Newt Gingrich

When I first read last week about dozens of federal agents descending on an admired American business with automatic weapons drawn, I thought the story was bizarre.

When I learned that what prompted this attack was the Justice Department’s interpretation of an Indian law, in a way that even India doesn’t interpret it, I could hardly believe it was true.

The government’s actions are so outside normal behavior, so lacking in common sense and such an outrage against the freedom of every American that it sounds like a scene from a dystopian novel.

The Obama Administration is engaged in a vendetta against the Gibson Guitar Company of Nashville and Memphis, Tenn.

Gibson Guitar makes very high quality guitars and attracts customers and tourists from all over the world.

Amazingly, this was the second assault on this small business. In 2009, federal agents seized six guitars, which they have not returned despite filing no charges in the investigation.

It is so bizarre it bears repeating. In 2009, armed federal agents seized six guitars.

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According to the Memphis Commercial Appeal, during the most recent government assault on Gibson Guitar there were three dozen Australian tourists watching big government attack a small company.

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service apparently believes Gibson made inappropriate use of foreign wood under a 1900 law designed to ban materials illegally exported from other countries.

Gibson Guitar maintains it has papers from Madagascar in 2009 and India in 2011 proving the wood from both countries is legal, but hasn’t been given the opportunity to defend itself in court since the government has filed no charges.

There were apparently 26 armed federal agents assaulting Gibson Guitar in pursuit of endangered wood.

The Obama administration could use 26 armed agents to 1) help control the border; 2) fight drug cartels; or 3) hunt down terrorists.

But given the hard left bias of President Obama and his appointees, endangered wood from India was a higher priority.

With 14 million Americans unemployed and another 11 million underemployed or dropped out of the work force, the Obama Administration is trying to pressure Gibson Guitar into moving its wood-finishing jobs offshore.

Gibson Guitar’s CEO Henry Juszkiewicz has said that federal agents actually told Gibson its problems would go away if the company just moved its operations to Madagascar.

This is beyond ideology.

It is insanity.

Congress should investigate these bizarre events and the Obama appointees responsible for the abuse should lose their jobs.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------2)We The Stupid
By Ann Barnhardt

(Ann Barnhardt is a livestock and grain commodity broker and marketing consultant, American patriot, traditional Catholic, and unwitting counter-revolutionary blogger. She can be reached through her business and/or blog at www.barnhardt.biz.)
I stand here in abject stupefaction. The so-called "right" or "Tea Party" in this republic is being so thoroughly rolled and defeated that I am struggling to come up with an adequate violent submission metaphor that does not involve prison rape . . . and they honesty think that they're "winning." Really? You call this winning?
· - Obama gets over $2 Trillion to spend before the 2012 election

· - There are no real spending cuts

· - There is a massive tax increase effective January 1, 2013
Obama is going to be handed something in excess of $2 Trillion -- and he has made it perfectly clear that he will spend every penny of it before the November 2012 election. That's why he kept saying, " . . . so we don't have to do this again", meaning raise the debt ceiling again. The debt ceiling would only need to be raised if all of the money had been spent. Therefore, he has stated very clearly that he will spend every penny of any debt ceiling increase. He is going to burn through $2 Trillion-plus in the next sixteen months. This was the Obama regime's plan from day one. Geithner appeared before Congress in early May and told them this in no uncertain terms. This outcome has been a known quantity all along.

There are no spending cuts in this plan.. It is all accounting fraud. Saying that you are not going to spend money in Afghanistan ten years from now is not spending cuts. Even if you accept the $1 Trillion in cuts over ten years propaganda, that is only $100 Billion per year, which is essentially meaningless relative to the size of the problem. Furthermore, even a miniscule uptick in interest rates, which given the massive debasement of our currency is now a mathematical certainty, will completely consume that $100 Billion per year. It's all a joke.

Back to the $2 Trillion that Obama is being handed. I honestly think that most people in this country have no understanding of simple counting numbers. Do you not understand how much a trillion is? Where do you think this money is going to come from -- who has two trillion dollars to loan us? China? Nope. Not even close. China's entire GDP is only $6 Trillion. Do you honestly think that China is going to loan us one third of their total annual economic production? China was a huge creditor to us back when $100 Billion was considered a staggeringly large amount of money - which was four years ago. Now $100 Billion is literally a rounding error. Do you realize that there are only a handful of nations of this planet that even have a GDP in excess of $2 Trillion? If these countries loaned us every penny of their GDP, it wouldn't even be $2 Trillion:
Canada ($1.57 T)
India ($1.54 T)
Russia ($1.46 T)


Are you starting to understand the scope of what we are talking about now? Obama is going to embezzle considerably more than the entire economic output of Canada, India or Russia to his cronies before the 2012 election -- and that is just counting this round of spending. This doesn't include the other $5 Trillion he has already burned through since 2009.
China is not going to lend us this money because they simply don't have anything close to that much money to lend.. This $2 Trillion is going to come from the Federal Reserve. Where is the Federal Reserve going to get $2 Trillion? They are going to print it out of thin air. We are in the midst of the largest currency debasement ever seen in human history. There is only one result that can come of currency debasement: hyperinflation and total economic and societal collapse.
Have you also forgotten the so-called "Bush tax cuts"? Yeah. Those rates are going to expire on January 1, 2013. Obama will presumably still be occupying the Oval Office at that time assuming that he is not forcibly removed or that the Republic is still intact at that time.

Taxes will increase significantly at that point, and the Congressional Budget Office has scored everything put before them given the fact of the massive tax increases on 1/1/2013. Do you understand that? When these Republicans and even these so-called "Tea Party Freshmen" tell you that there are no tax hikes in their "plan," they are consciously, willfully, knowingly lying to you through their teeth.

Finally, I do not understand how it can possibly be that conservative writers are still addressing Obama as if he is actually trying to help the economy, but his well-intentioned policies are failing.

Obama is the enemy. Obama is a Marxist-Communist usurper and puppet front for a cabal of Marxist-Communists who are actively trying to destroy the United States of America. Everything they have done, are doing, and will do has the single goal of collapsing and destroying the U.S. economy, military, constitutional government and culture. What part of "Marxist Revolution" do you not understand?

The Obama regime is not a failure. The Obama regime is not incompetent. The Obama regime has achieved more in two and a half years than anyone could have possibly foreseen. It has debased the currency by 50% of the GDP and guaranteed that our economy will collapse. It has looted the Treasury for more than the size of a top-ten economy and embezzled that wealth into the hands of their fellow Marxists in preparation for the final collapse of the United States. It has ground the economy of the United States to a screeching halt. It has destabilized the entire Muslim world and ensured that there will be a nuclear war centered around Israel within the decade.

The Obama regime has no interest whatsoever in "stimulus" or "getting folks back to work." How can you not understand this? How can we possibly win this war if we refuse to come to terms with the fact that we are in fact fighting a war.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------3)The Cult of Obama
By Robin of Berkeley
We're playing those mind games together

Pushing the barriers,

Planting seeds

Playing the mind guerrilla

Chanting the mantra, peace on earth

- John Lennon

It's a chilling moment when the light goes out in someone's eyes. A once-radiant child hardens from abuse. A woman's heart shrinks after her husband's abandonment.

The person looks the same, maybe acts the same. But something is gone, and what's lost is irretrievable. It's like when a person dies: in a heartbeat, the soul vanishes.

I see this phenomenon every day: a light dimming. The friendly shopkeeper snaps at me. My cheerful neighbor seems flattened.

And you hear it in the news: people acting strangely, going off the deep end. The most bizarre behavior becoming the new normal.

A thug bites off a finger. Sarah Palin's church is torched. Black Panthers intimidate voters.

An esteemed Columbia University black architecture professor punches a white female coworker in the eye for not doing more about white privilege. He has no history of violence. Why now?

Meanwhile, liberal leaders, such as Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Bill Clinton, and Joe Biden, incite attacks on political opponents by using incendiary language, such as "barbarians," "Nazis," "tea-baggers." Perhaps not coincidentally, flash mobs of blacks attack innocent whites all over the country; black youths injure or even kill non-whites in "knock 'em down" assaults.

In the past week or so, a senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus tells the Tea Party to go to hell, and the head of one of America's biggest unions incites union members to violence: "Let's take these son of a bitches out." When Barack Obama takes the stage to follow this incitement, he says he is "proud," and the following day his press spokesman refuses comment.

Why now? This may be the most important question of our time. Why are some people reaching the boiling point? Why do many others look vacant, like in an Invasion of the Body Snatchers? The shootings at military bases, from Little Rock to Fort Hood -- why now?

It's Obama, of course.

Liberals will excoriate me for writing this. They'll insist that bad behavior is not Obama's fault. He's a man of peace.

But study the phenomenon of cults, and the dynamics are always the same. The leader can incite violence without ever getting his hands dirty. Obama is controlling the marionette of the masses.

If Obamamania is a cult, then Obama is the cult leader. Cult leaders routinely pull the strings of their followers. The most extreme example is Charles Manson. He rots in prison for murders he never committed. He didn't have to do the dirty work. His brainwashed charges did his bidding.

I'm not saying Obama is a Charles Manson. There are varying degrees of manipulation, from using sexy blondes to entice men to buy cars all the way to hypnotizing them to drink poisoned Kool Aid. But there's a common denominator in all mind-control: manipulating people through mind games.

As soon as Obama came on the scene, the programming began. His face was plastered everywhere, like Mao's. In his speeches, Obama lulled audiences with a melodious voice and feel-good phrases repeated over and over. And he began inciting people with his charming smile.

First, the vultures starting swooping down on Hillary. Obama chose not to call off the dogs.

Then thugs invaded caucuses. Again, silence.

Which led to vicious misogyny against Sarah Palin and threats on her life. From Obama: not a peep.

We even saw armed thugs at polling places. Ignored and not prosecuted by Obama's attorney general.

The moment Obama became president, he upped the signals. At the Grant Park rally celebrating his victory, the entire family eerily chose to wear black and red, colors associated with communism and black nationalism. Obama's first radio address was broadcast in the Arab world.

Obama returned Britain's gift of a Winston Churchill bust while embracing dictators. He gave a white police officer a dressing down for doing his job, in effect calling the officer a racist.

Obama's greatest magic trick? Brainwashing the masses to believe that racism is a greater danger than radical Islam, and that Obama himself is in constant peril.

Opposing health care means you oppose Obama. Oppose Obama and you are the enemy.

Thus, more and more people are finding themselves on the receiving end of a fist, figuratively or literally. After the White House released a directive for his followers to strike back hard, a frail, diabetic black man at a Town Hall was beaten up.

Even women can get slugged in the face. Obama signaled during the primary that women were fair game.

Obama and the left are making sure that there is an increasing number of persuadable people. By displacing workers, panicking business owners with draconian laws, and whipping up rage and paranoia, they amass more lackeys. And people go along with the programming because they know that, as with all cults, they'll be ostracized if they balk.

The American hard left knows how to create a cult because it is a cult, one with a violent history. The Black Panthers, Symbionese Liberation Army, Weathermen, Black Muslims -- all nefarious cults.

And lesson number one of cults: group members must have their spirits broken. The young Weathermen, for instance, were required to participate in forced wickedness, such as animal abuse. Patty Hearst morphed into bank robber Tania after weeks of isolation, rape, and beatings by the SLA. Huey P. Newton sent his Black Panthers to the hospital or to the grave if they didn't practice total obedience.

Isn't the left doing the same thing to the masses today, albeit in a more clandestine manner? Aren't people's spirits being broken by the helplessness and horror of Obama's acting as our king, with little regard for the Constitution -- of beholding our economy in free-fall and the world exploding in flames?

So what's the endgame here?


The first goal is power. The left has an insatiable need to control every aspect of our lives.

But there's a deeper reason, one much more insidious.

The left wants to tear Americans down. Just as the Weatherman did to those naïve lost kids, they want to break our spirits. This goal of degradation is more crucial than their one-world government.

The progressives want to turn us into them, to make us feel as deprived and depraved and deadened. It's the only way that they can silence the roar of shame and self-loathing.

What they don't understand is this: it's not going to happen. There are too many of us who won't be hypnotized, who have a light in us that will not be extinguished.

We see right through them. We know who they are: the most piteous of human beings, and the most dangerous. Men without a country, orphans far from home. The forsaken and disowned.

They're "hungry ghosts," to use a Tibetan phrase: tormented beings who are starving to death from an inner void that they cannot fill, no matter how much they try.

Mother Teresa was once asked how she coped with serving the poorest of the poor in Calcutta. She responded that what she saw in the cities of the United States was much more disturbing, because it was a "poverty of the spirit."

Poverty of the spirit. No truer words can be spoken of the progressive left. And they want nothing more than impoverishing your spirit as well..




3a)Obama's 2012 Campaign Strategy: War?
By Jay Clarke


A new war that threatens to unravel American society may be brewing. The war has already been openly and publicly declared. Not by a foreign enemy or even a terrorist organization, but by members of the United States Congress. By union leaders. And by the vice president of the United States.

Even while successfully implementing the most radical leftist agenda this country has ever known, Barack Obama, the Messiah of the radical, socialist left, has taken some big body blows. Frustrated, disillusioned, and angry, the liberal wing of the Democratic party is becoming unhinged day by day as they witness the meltdown. They believe Obama caved to Republicans on the debt deal. He caved on taxing the rich. He caved on new smog regulations, and, embarrassingly, he caved to House Speaker John Boehner when attempting to schedule a speech to a joint session of Congress on the same evening as a Republican presidential debate. In the midst of plummeting poll numbers, Obama has been behaving like a beaten man. He still talks the talk, but the left is petrified that their man is not capable of walking the walk, and that he's all but ready to cave once again and virtually concede the 2012 presidential election to those evil Republicans.

It's clear that Obama is floundering. And liberals are fighting mad. But help is on the way. Obama has a secret weapon and it's being unleashed on the American public with increasing frequency, ferocity, and vulgarity.

Carefully implied calls for lawlessness and threats of violence are raining in from Obama's radical leftist buddies. Whether it's the Congressional Black Caucus, Big Labor, or the increasingly incoherent Rev. Jesse Jackson, the anger is palpable and the rage is rising. Liberals who plaintively pressed for "civil discourse" when Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D) was shot by a left-wing lunatic have been largely silent. While California Democrat Rep. Maxine Waters screams that the "TEA Party can go straight to hell," mainstream media outlets say little. Waters theorized that banks might behave differently if they were surrounded by angry citizens demanding their money -- in effect, advocating a run on banks. She later threatened to tax banks out of business if they did not provide loan modifications to keep people in their homes. Mainstream media reports? Just listen for the crickets.

The Congressional Black Caucus is chest-high in the battle, openly declaring war on the TEA Party and, along with Rep. Waters, advocating civil unrest as they attempt to frame the current political debate in wildly racial terms. Big Labor joined the fracas with Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa firing up a Labor Day crowd in Detroit just before President Obama was to speak. Hoffa spoke of war and singled out the TEA Party as the enemy: "President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march. Let's take these son-of-a-bitches out[.]" One might expect President Barack Obama to seize the opportunity of the event, adopt a tone of civility, and try to calm the inflamed rhetoric and high emotion that is bubbling over in liberal circles. Hardly. After taking the podium, Obama remarked that he was "proud" of Hoffa. Later, the White House declined to comment on Hoffa's tirade.

At an AFL-CIO rally in Cincinnati, Vice President Joe Biden barked to the union crowd that "you are the only folks keeping the barbarians from the gates." Biden wowed attendees with his passion as he pounded the podium, claiming that "the other side has declared war on Labor's house and it's about time we stand up!" Last week, Democratic Representative from Indiana Andre Carson stood by his statement at a Congressional Black Caucus town hall meeting that "[s]ome of them in Congress right now with this Tea Party movement would love to see you and me ... hanging on a tree." Wow.

Obama cannot be reelected on his presidential record. Economic and employment numbers are terrible. Seventy-six percent of Americans believe we're headed in the wrong direction, and 65% do not trust him on the economy. Politically speaking, there is blood in the water. All that Obama can do is to blame the other guy.

So, Obama's surrogates and allies gleefully whip up virulent anti-TEA Party, anti-Conservative, anti-Republican sentiment in an effort to shift the blame for the country's problems and create a veritable "boogeyman" for him to run against. By attacking the TEA Party and using such racially charged and combative language, Obama's liberal disciples are trying to gain support for something that's never been attempted before by an American president: to wage political war against the American people.

The liberal left appears to be in the early stages of this effort. They are recruiting their forces and mobilizing for a fight that could well stretch the fabric of our society to the breaking point. If violence comes to America's neighborhoods and streets, the liberal left will shoulder the blame. And it could happen.

It's happened before in America. In 1992. In Los Angeles.

In March 1991, an intoxicated Rodney King was severely beaten by four Los Angeles police officers after a 100-mph car chase. The beating was videotaped (a rare event at the time) and incessantly replayed on local and national news stations. The police officers involved were suspended and eventually prosecuted. All four were found not guilty during the initial trial. The events that followed illustrate what can happen when public officials are irresponsible in their speech. LA Mayor Tom Bradley quickly commented on the acquittals and added a shot of fuel to the tinder box that was Los Angeles. Rather than appealing for calm and for respect of the judicial process, Bradley felt compelled to share his personal feelings: "we will not tolerate the savage beating of our citizens by a few renegade cops." That was all Los Angeles needed. The 1992 Los Angeles riots erupted. Rep. Maxine Waters was there too -- making excuses for the rioters she called it a "rebellion" and an "insurrection" and eventually joined in with the throng as she chanted "no justice, no peace!" while 53 people died, 2,000 were injured, and 1,100 buildings were destroyed.

It's clear that Tom Bradley's and Maxine Waters' behavior in 1992 Los Angeles was, at best, not helpful. At worst, they helped incite or intensify the LA riots, leaving Bradley and Waters with innocent blood on their hands. Bradley has since passed on. Waters lives on, inciting more hatred and advocating more violence. This time for all of America.

History is clear. Liberals have done this kind of thing before. And for the sake of four more years of Barack Obama, they seem willing to do it again.

Jay Clarke is a businessman and lifelong conservative from Southern California.



3b)Civility for Me, But Not for Thee
By Rich Lowry

President Obama delivered his loviest speech as president in Tucson, Ariz., after the shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords. It was moving, pitch perfect and -- in its key passages calling for civility in our political discourse -- brazenly insincere.

Obama said we should be sure that “we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.” He framed his call as a way to honor the victims of the Tucson tragedy: “Only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation, in a way that would make them proud.”

Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa must have been too busy watching old episodes of “The Sopranos” that night. In a warm-up act for the president’s rally the other day in Detroit, Hoffa unloosed a witless, stereotypically crude tirade standing at a podium about to be affixed with a presidential seal and graced by the presence of the Master of Civility himself.

Hoffa told the rally that the tea party had declared “war on workers,” but told his listeners that organized labor likes “a good fight.” He thundered: “They got a war with us, and there’s only going to be one winner.” He assured President Obama that “this is your army,” and urged the crowd to vote: “Let’s take these sons of bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong.”

This passage is so hot in tone and freighted with martial imagery that had Sarah Palin uttered it, MSNBC would pre-empt its usual prison documentaries to do 24-hour coverage of the supposed incitement to violence. But President Obama took the stage shortly afterward with nary a word about Hoffa’s rant, and the White House has refused to condemn it. Perhaps the president gave the unions a secret waiver from his injunctions to civility?

Of course, the summons to civility was never intended as a bipartisan initiative. Born of a smear of the right as somehow responsible for the crimes of the lunatic who shot Giffords, it was a handy way to try to delegitimize conservatives and mute their voices. Soon after Tucson, liberal protesters in Madison, Wis., were lambasting Republican officeholders in rancorous terms and even threatening them, without anyone standing up for civility. When Giffords returned to Washington at the end of the debt debate to cast her first vote since the shooting, it was in an atmosphere thick with liberal accusations that Republicans were “terrorists” and “hostage-takers.”

When he extolled civility nine months ago, President Obama didn’t count on his political base becoming more enraged than ever, or on his own desperation as president of a country with 9.1 percent unemployment. The most elemental act of civility is assuming the sincerity and patriotism of your opposition. President Obama’s latest theme is that Republicans are putting party before country in opposing his program, an argument that implicitly rules out the possibility that they genuinely think his policies are foolhardy and worthy of opposition. It’s a kidney punch masked as high-mindedness.

Unless the economy rebounds suddenly, Obama will be left with only one option next year -- winning ugly. He will have to make his opponent even more unacceptable than he is, and if the past is any guide, he’ll do it without scruple.

All Obama’s promises about process are highly conditional. He jettisoned his support for the public funding of campaigns in 2008 as soon as it became clear he could raise $750 million. He sloughed off “post-partisanship” when he had the congressional majorities necessary to ram through major legislation on a partisan basis. And now he’s saying goodbye to civility, too.

So be it. If civility is a good in its own right, the functioning of our big, unruly democracy has never depended on it. It will survive Hoffa’s ham-handed metaphors and Obama’s hypocrisy. But next time, Mr. President, please spare us the pose and the lectures.

Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------4)The depraved United Nations
By Isi Leibler


On September 20, the vast majority of the 192 member countries of the United Nations will probably "recognize" a Palestinian state.

The "recognition" will not be accompanied with caveats about dismantling PA terrorist organizations such as Al- Aksa Martyrs Brigades or ending the incitement to hatred and murder of Jews and Israelis that pervades all levels of Palestinian society. There will be no requirements for demilitarization. Nor will negotiations by the PA to unite with the genocidal Hamas be curtailed. The Palestinians will not be obliged to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and will continue demanding the Arab right of return to it.

Renewal of negotiations with Israel are unlikely because the Palestinians realize that their goals can be more effectively achieved by leveraging international pressure on us to make further unilateral concessions - and dismantle us in stages.

This event will be followed by Durban III, a UN endorsed hate fest designed to delegitimize and demonize the Jewish state. The principal participant will be Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who recently predicted that the UN recognition of Palestinian statehood would represent the first step toward the inevitable elimination of the Jewish state. Like the preceding meetings in 2001 and 2009, this purportedly "anti-racist conference" will overwhelmingly concentrate on spewing venom against Israel.

The founders of the United Nations, who after the defeat of Nazism endorsed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, could never have visualized that the organization they created would become controlled by dictatorships and tyrannies and transformed into a platform for promoting genocide.

This was exemplified by the Libyan representative serving as president of the UN General Assembly in 2009, succeeded in July this year by Qatar with Iran as a vice president; genocidal Iranian president Ahmadinejad repeatedly addressing the General Assembly as an honored guest; North Korea, renowned proliferator of nuclear arms, elected to chair the Conference on Disarmament; and Iran, notorious for stoning women for adultery, appointed to the UN Commission on the Status of Women.

But nothing beats the bizarre UN Human Rights Council, 80 percent of whose members, according to the Freedom House index for 2010, are either "not free" or "partly free" countries. Not surprisingly, scoundrels are appointed to positions of authority. Thus we have Richard Falk, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Palestinian territories, who claimed that the US backed and executed the 9/11 attacks, and recently also posted an anti-Semitic cartoon on his website. The Advisory Committee is chaired by Morocco's Halima Warzawi, who previously blocked an effort to condemn Saddam Hussein for gassing 30,000 Kurds. It also includes Jean Ziegler from Switzerland, who praises Fidel Castro and Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe and co-founded the "Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights" - the recipients of which included Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy, Louis Farrakhan and Hugo Chavez.

The chatter about human rights initiated by tyrannical states that inflict monstrous injustices on their own people represents the ultimate hypocrisy. Examples abound: Libya moved a motion to "end all forms of racial discrimination"; Iran called on the US to ensure implementation of international humanitarian law; China demanded an end to "excessive force by law enforcement bodies"; and North Korea called for a ban on torture.

In this degenerate UN Human Rights Council, a pogrom environment dominates, with 70% of all resolutions directed against Israel.

This also applies to the General Assembly, where demonizing, delegitimizing and attributing all the woes of the world to the Jewish state is reminiscent of the Middle Ages, when Jews were blamed as the principal source of all the evils confronting mankind.

Daniel Pipes estimates the total number of deaths in world conflicts since 1950 to be in excess of 85 million.

The 50,000 deaths in the Arab-Israeli conflict would thus account for less than 0.05% of this total. To this day, while hundreds of thousands of people throughout the world are slaughtered or denied elementary human rights, the hypocritical UN has not commissioned any Goldstone type reports to investigate such massacres, but shamelessly directs the bulk of its energies toward condemning Israeli settlements or construction in Jewish Jerusalem.

Alas, primarily due to realpolitik, the "enlightened" European countries - whose soil has been drenched with Jewish blood for 2,000 years, culminating in the Holocaust - are, at best, inclined to abstain, but more recently have been endorsing primitive anti-Israeli resolutions.

SO HOW should we respond to the impending vote on Palestinian statehood? We must reconcile ourselves to the fact that we will never achieve justice at the United Nations. The combination of Islamic countries, rogue states and dictatorships guarantees that the most extreme resolutions against Israel will always be overwhelmingly carried.

Blaming Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for this state of affairs because he failed to provide a "plan" is simply primitive political demagoguery. What "plan" beyond making suicidal unilateral concessions could conceivably satisfy the Palestinians? But we should not panic. Despite President Barack Obama's ongoing policy of engaging and appeasing extremists and Islamic states, the US will almost certainly prevent the UN Security Council from imposing sanctions and boycotts against Israel.

Contrary to Defense Minister Ehud Barak's recent hysterical remarks, this is not a "diplomatic tsunami," and we must take advantage of the UN platform to convey the case for Israel to our friends and allies.

We must bear in mind that the UN General Assembly can make proclamations, but it cannot "create" a state or change the status on the ground. Besides, in the absence of the IDF protecting the weak and corrupt PA, a genocidal Hamastan would displace it - a situation that even most European states would not wish to foist upon the region.

Today most Israelis would endorse a Palestinian state - provided Palestinians faced up to the issues mentioned in the opening paragraph of this column. Until Abbas is willing to recognize the Jewish state and forgo the "right of return," even Obama will be obliged to exercise the US veto at the Security Council. And if the Palestinians resort to violence - Abbas has called for "Arab Spring-like popular resistance" - we must be prepared to overcome our adversaries as we did in the past.

On the positive side, there are rumblings in the United States Congress reflecting grassroots frustration with the annual $7.7 billion of American taxpayer funds being provided to the UN, despite the fact that the global body's original noble objectives have been reversed and it has been transformed into a depraved organization.

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chairwoman of the powerful Congressional House Foreign Affairs Committee, maintains that the UN no longer has any credibility as a force for peace in the Middle East. She objects to the US "paying one-fifth of the bills for the UN's anti-Israeli activities including the UN Human Rights Council, a rogue's gallery dominated by human rights violators who use it to ignore real abuses and instead attack democratic Israel relentlessly."

She remarks that "at the UN, money talks and smart withholding works," noting that in 1989 Yasser Arafat pushed for membership at the UN for a "Palestinian state," but his initiative was stopped in its tracks when the George H. W. Bush administration threatened to cut off US funding from any UN entity that upgraded the Palestinian mission.

She has concluded that with the Obama administration refusing to leverage US funding to defend US interests, Congress must fill the void. Thus on August 30, with 57 co-sponsors, she introduced the United Nations Transparency, Accountability and Reform Act, which would terminate US contributions to any UN entity upgrading the Palestinian mission.

The bill would also require the US to disaffiliate and cease funding the Human Rights Council until it repealed its permanent anti-Israeli resolution. It would freeze contributions to UN activities related to the defamatory Goldstone Report and the Durban hate fest and suspend support for UNWRA until it ceased employing terrorists.

Ros-Lehtinen said she was promoting this resolution "for the sake of our ally Israel and all free democracies, for the sake of peace and security. And for the sake of achieving a UN that upholds its founding principles."

The Senate will probably narrowly block this resolution, and the Obama administration has already bitterly condemned the bill, which it would undoubtedly veto.

But the fact that such a resolution could be submitted by the chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee signals a growing frustration with the UN, which may sooner rather than later lead to a showdown with this obnoxious organization.

Congress is the bright light in the current difficult situation confronting us. In the long term, as the American public becomes increasingly disillusioned with the groveling behavior of the Obama administration toward the decadent and biased UN, there is hope that congressional intervention will ultimately succeed in employing US clout to bring an end to such outrageous behavior.

In the meantime, we should remain resolute and stand our ground.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------5)Q&A: Edward Luttwak

The military strategist talks about Israeli security, Henry Kissinger, the Arab Spring, and the death of Osama Bin Laden
By David Samuels

Edward Luttwak is a rare bird whose peripatetic life and work are the envy of academics and spies alike. A well-built man who looks like he is in his mid-50s (he turns 70 next year), Luttwak—who was born in 1942 to a wealthy Jewish family in Arad, Romania, and educated in Italy and England—speaks with a resonant European accent that conveys equal measures of authority, curiosity, egomania, bluster, impatience, and good humor. He is a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown University, and he published his first book, Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook, at the age of 26. Over the past 40 years, he has made provocative and often deeply original contributions to multiple academic fields, including military strategy, Roman history, Byzantine history, and economics. He owns a large eco-friendly ranch in Bolivia and can recite poetry and talk politics in eight languages, a skill that he displayed during a recent four-hour conversation at his house, located on a quiet street in Chevy Chase, Md., by taking phone calls in Italian, Spanish, Korean, and Chinese, during which I wandered off to the porch, where I sat and talked with his lovely Israeli-born wife, Dalya Luttwak, a sculptor.

The walls of Luttwak’s donnish study—which is by far the nicest room in the Luttwaks’ house, with the best view, and might otherwise have served as the dining room, if Edward and Dalya were more like their neighbors—are lined with bookshelves containing the Roman classics, biographies of Winston Churchill, works on military history and strategy, intelligence gathering, Byzantine art, old atlases, and decorations and plaques from foreign governments. Luttwak’s work as a high-level strategic and intelligence consultant for the U.S. Defense Department, the National Security Council, the State Department, the Japanese government, and the defense departments and intelligence services of other countries in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East (he appears to be spending a lot of time in South Korea and China) is also augmented by a parallel life as an “operator,” about which he is both secretive and obviously proud.

While the details of Luttwak’s life as a private intelligence operative are sketchy, he has been actively involved in military and paramilitary operations sponsored by the U.S. government, foreign governments, and various private entities. By his own admission, he has been directly involved in attacks on physical targets, interdiction efforts, and the capture and interrogation of wanted persons—although “admission” is clearly the wrong word here, since he is almost boyishly eager for visitors to understand his familiarity with the nuts and bolts of special ops and cites his own field experience to support his estimations of people like Gen. David Petraeus, whose reputation as a counter-insurgency genius he dismisses as a fraud. He is also careful to state that his activities have never violated U.S. law. The Walter Mitty-ish component of Luttwak’s enthusiasm for his other life—academic by day, special operator by night—seems less significant in his psyche than a driving appetite for physical risk that has helped him understand military strategy and related policy questions in a way that the current generation of Western policymakers often does not.

Loved and loathed, and capable of living multiple lives, any one of which would quickly tire out a less intellectually and physically robust man, Luttwak glories in the undeniable fact that he is not the usual Washington think-tank product. His instinctive tendency to reject common wisdom as idiotic, combined with his need to prove that he is the smartest person in every room, has deprived him of the chance to shape events in the way that every policy intellectual not-so-secretly craves. Yet his first allegiance is clearly to the habits of mind that have made him one of the most brilliant strategic thinkers in America, capable of understanding the psychological and practical necessities that drive human action in a highly original, insightful and counterintuitive way.

We met last month, at the height of a rainstorm. What follows are selectively edited portions of the transcript of our interview, during which I made a point of not asking him about his childhood experience as a Jewish refugee in Europe, which seemed like a subject for a different conversation.

I think that if America had been able to tolerate a second Henry Kissinger, that person would have been you.

Kissinger at 88 is writing brochures for Kissinger Associates. His last book on China is one such work written by the staff at Kissinger Associates. It is designed to curry favor with the Chinese authorities and nothing else.

I know him personally very well, but he is such a deceptive person; he’s a habitual liar and dissembler. Although I’ve spent a lot of time talking to him, I have no insight on him at all. His book ends with a paean to U.S.-Chinese friendship and how every other country has to fit in. I have to review it for the TLS, but I’ve been delaying it by weeks because I don’t know whether it is a case of senility or utter corruption.

There are two differing interpretations of the events of the Arab Spring. The dominant one is: “Here is this marvelous wave of popular revolutions where everyone uses Facebook and Twitter to spread democratic ideas.” The other is that “Rickety state structures held together by repressive police and state apparatus are now collapsing into tribal bloodshed.”

Well, any dictatorship creates an unnatural environment, analogous to that of taking peasants from the field and putting them in an army, where they get uniforms and are drilled and disciplined. Dictatorships attempt to turn entire populations into well-drilled regiments. The North Korean regime takes it to the logical extreme of actually having the entire population drilled in regiments. The Ben Ali and Mubarak dictatorships were attempting to regiment their populations by having state structures imposed on them. Both of them, for example, were able to create loyal police forces.

Once the regiment dissolves, then the people are released and they revert to their natural order. They stop wearing uniforms, they put on the clothes they want, and they manifest the proclivities that they have. A few Egyptians are Westernized, hence they have exited Islam whatever their personal beliefs may be. But otherwise, there is no room for civilization in Egypt other than Islam, and the number of extremists that you need to make life impossible for the average Westernized or slightly Westernized Egyptian who wants to have a beer, for example, is very small. The number you need to close all the bars in Egypt is maybe 15 percent of the population.

Do you think stepping away from Mubarak was a mistake or it made no difference?

I think it made no difference. The regime was senile. Literally.

How much of a role do you think the so-called “democracy promotion” efforts of the United States under President George W. Bush, including the invasion of Iraq, played in the increasing instability of the Arab regimes, and how much of their collapse was the result of their own senility?

I will pretend that this is an easy question; it’s not. The easy answer is that Bush and the Bush Administration for a brief period of less than two years were on a democracy-promotion binge. They used a pickax and attacked a wall, seemingly making an impression, and perhaps they caused some structural damage. The Iraq War, with the defeat, humbling, and execution of a dictator, was a big blow with a pickax. On the other hand, when the regime becomes sufficiently involuted as to become hereditary, which is what happened in Syria and appeared to be happening in Egypt, then you are dealing with senility of the regime embodied: “The dictator is old.” So, both answers are true.

There have been many different explanations given over the past 10 years for the strength of the American-Israeli relationship, ranging from the idea that Israel has the best and most immediately deployable army in the Middle East, to the idea that a small cabal of wealthy and influential Jews has hijacked American foreign policy.

You mean the Z.O.G.? The Zionist Occupied Government?

Yes.

Personally, from an emotional point of view, myself, as me, I prefer the Z.O.G. explanation above all others. I love the idea that the Zionists have sufficient power to actually occupy America, and through America to basically run the world. I love the idea of being a member of a secretive and powerful cabal. If you put my name Luttwak together with Perle and Wolfowitz and you search the Internet, you will get this little list of people who run the American government and the world, and I’m on it. I love that.

Anytime you need an added jolt of ego gratification, you open your laptop and confirm the fact that you rule the world.

In Pakistan, there are millions of people who go to schools where they are taught that I am the ruler of the universe. So, emotionally speaking, I would explain everything that happens by referring to the Z.O.G., the Zionist Occupied Government, which is run by a small cabal of people, and that I am one of them.

Now, if I’m forced to actually think about this question, I would say that the cleanest analytical way of understanding the American-Israeli relationship is to say that the post-1945 career of the United States as a world-meddling, imperialist power has forced Americans to be very foreign-oriented. Many American families have had their sons killed overseas, and many other Americans have become foreign-oriented for many reasons. Among them there is a group of Christians who read the Bible, who believe in the Bible to some degree as a document that registers God’s will. For them, Israel is the proof of the truth of the Bible. Hence, the notion that the United States should be supporting rather than opposing Israel has now become expected, which was absolutely not true in 1948 when the United States did every possible thing to prevent the existence of Israel by systematically intercepting arms flows to the Jews.

Therefore, if we in the Z.O.G. didn’t really run everything, and there was no Zionist influence, then this solid mass of foreign-aware Americans, who also happen to be Bible-believers—we’re talking 50 million people—to them, the only foreign policy that counts is America’s support for Israel. Period.

Many American Jews are viscerally uncomfortable with this kind of support. They say, “Oh, look at these Bible-thumping Christians who want to make us kiss Jesus. The only reason they like Israel is so they can turn it into a landing strip for their God.”

You are now invoking a second constant—

Why are so many Jews so stupid about politics?

They have not had a state for 2,000 years, they have had no power or responsibility and it will take centuries before they catch up with the instinctive political understanding that any ordinary Englishman has. They don’t understand politics, and of course they confuse their friends and their enemies, and that is the ultimate political proof of imbecility.


When you look at the current conduct of American policy in the Middle East, do you see any coherent policy or strategy?

Obama is no different than most previous administrations that come into office with ready-made solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Jimmy Carter was the first one, and his plan was redacted by Zbigniew Brzezinski. It led to Sadat’s journey to Jerusalem because his brilliant idea was to subject Egyptians and Israelis to a Soviet-American condominium, which was a terrible idea, and so Sadat created his own reality. It was really one of the funnier moments in history. The national security adviser officials, and I believe Brzezinski himself, came out with a lot of negative statements when Sadat first made his announcement because he was ruining their policy scheme, which was, of course, impossible.

Obama is in that tradition. He came in with an impossible policy scheme, which is first you get Israelis to stop agreeing to settlements, and then you proceed. Of course, that doesn’t make any sense. When you draw a border that is what matters. The Israelis removed all the settlements from Sinai without any American involvement in two minutes after the agreement was made with Egypt.

[The phone rings. Luttwak breaks into impossibly perfect Italian. I wander out onto the porch to talk to Dalya and return 20 minutes later, as he is finishing up the call.]

There’s nobody involved who is anti-Israeli like there were in the past, when there was a strong Arabist position in the State Department. The people in the Obama Administration read the New York Times and they don’t know Arabic, and therefore they are operating systematically with false categories. The fundamental error with regard to settlements is a very simple one: When borders are established, borders are established, and settlements are neither here nor there. This notion that when some faction of Israelis puts a camper on a hilltop that this changes anything is a fantasy.

A fantasy both on the part of the people who put the campers on the ground and also American policymakers.

They’re both equally deluded.

Do you anticipate violence this fall between the Israelis and the Palestinians?

I don’t anticipate violence this fall. War leads to peace. Peace leads to war. So, now logically we should have war. And the Iranians, of course, would love to pay for one. But the moment there is an intifada, the Palestinian regiment collapses and gangsters take over. So, the moment the violence escalates they stop fighting and they start talking peace. The moment the talking appears to be approaching an actual peace, they start an intifada.

Do you think the cost of the violence and other social ills that come out of the stalemate you are describing is something Israeli society can easily afford, or do you think there is any alternative to it?

I’m not sure it’s a cost.

Because the strategic depth that it affords and the control over those borders is more important?

Listen, my wife is a very good cook. And we have a housekeeper, who is an even better cook. It’s a weird situation, but I think my housekeeper is a better cook than any restaurant in Washington. She is a simple woman with no education, from Chile, and she just happens to have a superhuman talent. She being such a good cook, she achieves wonderful effects with very strange ingredients, and strange combinations of ingredients. Israel’s success as a state has been made possible by Arab threats of different kinds. Arab violence or threats of violence are part of the Israeli soup. There are certain levels of violence that are so high that they’re damaging, and there are also levels that are so low they are damaging. There is an optimum level of the Arab threat. I would say for about nine days of the 1973 war, the level of violence was much too high. Even when Israelis were successful, the level of violence was destroying the tissue of the state. Most of the time, the violence is positive.

When you say that the effects of Arab violence are positive, you mean that they generate social cohesion inside Israel?

Lenin taught, “Power is mass multiplied by cohesion.” Arab violence generates Jewish cohesion. Cohesion turns mass into power. Israel has had very small mass, very high cohesion. If only the Palestinians understood that, they would have attacked the Jews with flowers.

Shimon Peres says, “Iran is a decaying corpse of a country and the idea that they are any long-term threat to anybody, based on demographics and based on the rickety state of their economy, is a joke. So yes, it would be terrible if they ended up with an atomic bomb, but otherwise, Iran is not a long-term strategic threat to anybody.”

I think to get a good view on Iran you have to put yourself in the shoes of Hezbollah. Hezbollah is wholly dependent on Iran. Without Iran, Hezbollah is just a band of hotheads with a few thousand highly trained men. So, view Iran from Hezbollah’s point of view. What do you see? It’s a regime that has been around since 1979 in one way or the other. Is it consolidated? Is it functioning better and better and getting more and more support? It’s not. Is it getting more dependent on police repression or less? The answer is more. So, from the Hezbollah point of view, you realize that your days are counted because the regime is in a downward spiral.

There is a good measure of social control in Iran, and that is the price of genuine imported Scotch whiskey in Tehran, because it’s a) forbidden, and b) has to be smuggled in for practical purposes from Dubai, and the only way it can come from Dubai is with the cooperation of the Revolutionary Guard. The price of whiskey has been declining for years, and you go to a party in north Tehran now and you get lots of whiskey. And it’s only slightly more expensive than in Northwest Washington.

But on the other hand, the regime is doing something for which they will have my undying gratitude—that is, they have been manufacturing the one and only post-Islamic society. They created a situation in which Iranians in general, worldwide, not only in Iran, are disaffiliated. They are converting Muslim Iranians into post-Muslim Iranians.

What do you make of the Obama Administration’s increasingly close diplomatic alliance with Turkey? There seems to be this effort to build up the Turks as an alternative hegemon to Iran in the region, even as Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, is trying his best to create an Islamic one-party state.

Hillary Clinton and her staff are not fools. Therefore, they must know that the Turkish foreign minister is a fool. I know him personally. The man is an idiot. Hillary Clinton and her advisers are not idiots. No advantage would be served for the United States to recognize where Erdogan is really going. It’s much better to pretend that he’s a member of NATO and North Atlantic Alliance and all the rest of it.

One way to look at the place of Israel in this landscape is “Wow, you have a functioning neo-liberal state with a tech economy second to Silicon Valley amidst the rubble of all these failed Arab states. Imagine the Syrian army trying to attack anybody. Egypt’s army is incapable of doing anything despite $10 billion worth of American weapons, Iran is falling to pieces, Lebanon is still a mess, Jordan is a joke of a country with a Palestinian majority.” On the other hand, you could look at it and say, “Israel is a tiny country in a chaotic neighborhood where it will always get sucked into conflicts with its neighbors and will never have a moment of peace.”

Yes, everything you say is correct, but there is a third element you are omitting. The very innermost circle of Israeli security is actually within the 1967 borders. And there you have almost 1.5 million Arabs, some Christian, some Muslim. The current situation is helping consolidate their loyalty to the Israeli state. If you ask them, “Are you loyal to the Israeli state?” They will say, “Oh no, we hate them all.” Are they involved in terror plots? The answer is that out of the 1.5 million, the ones involved in terror plots or even plain criminality of any sort, they could all sleep in my house. Or if not, they could sleep in a motel.

But there is even a more fundamental issue within Israel, which is the functioning of the Israeli economy and its impact on Israeli society. What’s happened, as you know from these latest demonstrations, is that the Israeli economy has become so successful that it has generated big numbers of millionaires, which means that four-room apartments in Tel Aviv cost as much as they do in New York. Israel is becoming Aspen, Colo., where normal people have to travel 20 miles to go to sleep because they can’t live anywhere within Aspen proper.

Are strategic minds nurtured through upbringing and education, or is the ability to think strategically an inborn gift, like mathematics?

It’s a gift like mathematics. The paradoxical logic of strategy contradicts the logic of everyday life, it goes against all normal definitions of intelligence we have. It only makes sense if you understand the dialectic. If you want peace, prepare for war. If you actively want war, disarm yourself, and then you’ll get war. Virile and martial elites understand that kind of thinking instinctively.

Here’s an easily falsifiable statement, but there’s something in it that interests me and I want you to pick it apart. I would start with the moment when George W. Bush met Vladimir Putin and said, “I looked into his eyes and saw this was a man I could really trust.” So, my thesis is this: If you’re Vladimir Putin, and you rise to the top of this chaotic and brutal society after going through the KGB, you must be some kind of strategic genius with amazing survival skills, because the penalty for failure may be torture or death. This kind of Darwinian set-up exists in many countries around the world. What does it mean to be head of the security services in Egypt? It means that you had to betray your friends but only at the right time, and you had to survive many vicious predators who would have loved to kill you or torture you, or otherwise derail your career. By the time you become Vladimir Putin or Omar Suleiman, your ability to think ahead and analyze threats has been adequately tested.

By contrast, what does it take to become a U.S. Senator? You have to eat rubber chicken dinners, you have to impress some rich people who are generally pretty stupid about politics, and smile in TV commercials. The penalties for failure are hardly so dire. And so, American leadership generally sucks, and America is perennially in the position of being the sucker in the global poker game. That’s the thesis. So, tell me why it’s wrong.

Even if your analysis is totally correct, your conclusion is wrong. Think about what it means to work for a Putin, whose natural approach to any problem is deception. For example, he had an affair with this athlete, a gymnast, and he went through two phases. Phase one: He concealed it from his wife. Phase two: He launched a public campaign showing himself to be a macho man. He had photographs of him shooting a rifle, and as a Judo champion, and therefore had the news leaked that he was having an affair. Not only an affair with a young woman, but a gymnast, an athlete. Obviously such a person is much more wily and cunning and able to handle conflict than his American counterpart. But when such a person is the head of a department, the whole department is actually paralyzed and they are all reduced to serfs and valets. Therefore, what gets applied to a problem is only the wisdom of the aforementioned wily head of the department. All the other talent is wasted, all the other knowledge is wasted.

Now you have a choice: You can have a non-wily head of a department and the collective knowledge and wisdom of the whole department, or else you can have a wily head and zero functioning. And that is how the Russian government is currently working. Putin and Medvedev have very little control of the Russian bureaucracy. When you want to deal with them, and I dealt with them this morning, they act in very uncooperative, cagey, and deceptive ways because they are first of all trying to protect their security and stability and benefits from their boss. They have to deceive you because they are deceiving their boss before he even shows up to work. And they are all running little games. So, that’s the alternative. You can have a wily Putin and a stupid government. Or an intelligent government and an innocent head. There’s always is a trade-off. A Putin cannot be an inspiring leader.

One final question. When I heard the Bin Laden news and you look at the circumstances surrounding his place of residence, and the length of his stay there, it seems clear that he was sold to the U.S. by somebody inside the Pakistani security apparatus, no?

I don’t believe that at all.

You think that the CIA independently developed this information?

First of all, it was not the CIA because the CIA doesn’t run interrogations in Guantanamo.

You believe the story about the courier?

I believe it and I believe it categorically. Look, the Pakistanis had been sheltering Bin Laden. But in these matters, the only way to proceed is to develop thoughts that are based only on uncontroversial facts. Any analysis of the Bin Laden story tells you that there was active Pakistani complicity simply because people cannot go to Abbottabad and live in a compound without somebody asking questions. For one thing, Pakistan has this system where foreign citizens have to obtain the residence permits and renew them, and there are foreigners including Arabs living there, and they would be asked to show their papers. Pakistani complicity is certain. That’s point one. Point two: The guy uses couriers. Therefore, if you’re going to find him, you had to find the courier. The courier story is not the cover story.

The proof of this is that if they got the information from some Pakistani guy, if one of the protectors of Osama decided to sell out, they would have known what was in the compound, and if they had known what was in the compound, they would not have attacked it the way they did. The attack against the compound reflected the central fact they did not know what they would find inside. The only thing that they hoped to find was Osama Bin Laden, among other objects, furniture, walls, people. Had a Pakistani provided the information, they would have provided two pieces of information, not just one. One is that Osama Bin Laden is there and two, a platoon is not there.

You understand the thing that keeps bothering me.

Now you are entering an area that is highly technical, and I’m not at liberty to speak because I’m in this line of business myself so there are limits to what I can tell you. But tell me what bothers you?

What bothers me is that you have a secret that was obviously known by more than one person. Let’s say that only three people in the ISI knew that Bin Laden was there.

The people who knew that he was in Abbottabad were a minimum number of some 12 people, and the reason is that you had to keep telling the police not to enter, you had to communicate with the other parts of the Pakistani state. But I repeat, but if American information had come from inside Pakistan, and there was knowledge of what was in the compound, they would have not attacked the compound in this way.

If 12 people know a secret, then there are also many people surrounding those 12 people who might also have access to some part of that information.

So, in other words, there are fragments of that secret.

With that many people knowing a big secret over that long a period of time, something must have leaked.

I know the courier information would tell you that Osama Bin Laden is in that space and nothing else. And the military operation that was mounted reflects that fact. Whoever designed that military operation had the kind of information that is consistent with the courier and is not consistent with any other story.

If I am in the receipt of information about Bin Laden’s whereabouts from a source in the ISI who wanted to submarine his boss, or gain the support of America, or pay off his mistress, I might design an operation that would match my cover story about the courier, who definitely existed, but might not have led anyone back to Bin Laden’s house.

No, no, no. It’s a very technical thing. It has to do with how you attack a target when you know that there are maximum of two people who will shoot at you or three people who will shoot at you, neither of the three being trained gunmen, versus how you design an attack on a target when you think there might be 25 people shooting at you. That’s all. The official word is that there was a courier, and I’m inclined to believe it. Because when somebody tells you how something happened, operationally speaking, do not disbelieve it until you have evidence that tells you that it’s wrong. Then you can pursue some other theory. All the information I have is consistent with the courier story because the courier story would tell you that there’s the bad guy in the space but nothing else.

Why kill him?

They were under orders to kill him.

Wouldn’t Osama Bin Laden be a source of useful intelligence? Alternately, one good reason to kill him is that you have a deal with the Pakistanis—“we’re gonna get rid of this problem”—then you need to kill him, because otherwise he might start talking about who protected him for the past 10 years.

There was no deal with the Pakistanis. There’s no institutional integrity. Therefore you cannot make deals with the Pakistani system. They would betray each other. There was no deal.

They killed Bin Laden simply because of the inconvenience of a trial?

They killed him because of the fact that if we captured Bin Laden, every Jihadist in the world would have been duty-bound to kidnap any American citizen anywhere and exchange him for Bin Laden.

David Samuels, Tablet Magazine's literary editor, is a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker.



5a)Erdogan drives toward armed clash with Israel. Oil and gas at stake

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan this week coolly moved his country step by provocative step towards an armed clash with Israel – not just over the Palestinian issue, but because he covets the gas and oil resources of the eastern Mediterranean opposite Israel's shores.

Thursday night, Sept. 8, he announced that Turkish warships will escort any Turkish aid vessels for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. In his remarks to Al Jazeera television, the Turkish prime minister also said he had taken steps "to stop Israel from unilaterally exploiting natural resources from the eastern Mediterranean."

He did not say what steps he had taken. However, for some time now, he has moved mountains to isolate Israel by drawing a double diplomatic noose around it.
If Turkish ships breach the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza, which a UN report last week pronounced legitimate under international law, Erdogan will become the first Muslim leader to embark on military action in the Palestinian cause. The Arab nations which fought Israel time after time in the past will be made to look ineffectual and the Turkish leader the regional big shot. Even Iran would be put in the shade for never daring to provoke Israel the way Turkey has.

The Turkish prime minister clings to the belief that the foremost Arab powers, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which have been watching his maneuvers with deep suspicion, will have no choice but to play ball with him now that he has confronted Israel. The first crack in the Arab ice came about Thursday, Sept. 8, in the form of Egyptian consent to join the Turkish Navy in sea maneuvers in the eastern Mediterranean.
Erdogan plans to send his warships into this water for two missions:

1. To split the Israel's small Navy into two heads – one for sustaining the blockade against Gaza and one for safeguarding the gas and oil rigs opposite its shores.

2. To scare Israel into the full or partial stoppage of its offshore oil and gas operations, thereby robbing it of energy power status and substantial economic gains. Erdogan is determined never to let Israel overshadow Turkey in the regional stakes and will put a stop to the Jewish state's progress – even if military aggression is called for.

Military sources report that the Turkish prime minister is resolved to corner Israel into an inescapable military confrontation. It might not happen at once or even within a week, but it will happen a lot sooner than many Israeli politicians and military chiefs imagine because he is using Israel as his ticket to regional prestige.

Erdogan is driven to assert Turkey's importance additionally by the way he was shouldered aside in Libya. Ankara invested heavily in its support for the Libyan rebels. But when British, French, Jordanian and Qatari special forces stormed Tripoli on Aug. 21 and overthrew the Qaddafi regime, Turkey was left behind and forgotten in the heat of the action.

From Ankara, the Turkish leader watches the sharing out of Libyan oil as the spoils of war among the Western powers and Qatar as an outsider.

Since he can't pluck up courage to intervene in Syria, he has plumped for seizing eastern Mediterranean natural resources to elevate Turkey's standing. Not only will he snatch the treasure out of Israel's hands but no less important, he will challenge his country's traditional rival Greece whose military ties with Israel are growing stronger.

As for Washington, Erdogan is counting on President Barack Obama's backing in a military clash with Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak are less confident of US support. This gives Turkey an edge in a conflict – the cost of the passive military policy pursued consistently by Israeli leaders in the face of security threats.

The Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas will also suffer if Turkey and Israel come to blows by being overshadowed.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------6)A Stale Speech
By Victor Davis Hanson

Obama must be in a time warp — he thinks the content of his speech is new, or can be made new by more soaring cadences. It’s almost as if he is oblivious to the fact that, before calling for nearly half a trillion dollars in government borrowing to jumpstart temporary job creation tonight, he already oversaw a failed $800 million stimulus, “shovel-ready” jobs that were later admitted to be not so shovel-ready, “millions of green jobs” talk leading to sweetheart loans to now-bankrupt crony companies, nearly $5 trillion in new borrowing, and massive new financial and environmental regulations. Been there, done that.

And is the president unable to give a speech without trotting out the tired canard of “millionaires and billionaires” and the omnipresent Warren Buffett and his proverbial secretary for the nth time — especially given that Buffett’s companies have had tax troubles with the IRS and his fortune will pass without inheritance taxes? Can he refrain from equating legitimate worry over new hyper-regulation with a desire to expose kids to mercury or be shortchanged by the health-care industry? Does he really believe that the majority of Americans who oppose his statism really wish to “just dismantle government, refund everybody’s money, and let everyone write their own rules, and tell everyone they’re on their own”?

Why all that straw-man caricaturing ad nauseam, when after three years it is well beyond old and stale and, what’s more, Obama has a desperate need now for bipartisan support? Is Obama just politically dense, or he is so inured to the Chicago us/them confrontational mentality that he knows no politics other than polarization, even when appealing for help?
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7)The American presidency By The Numbers
The president constantly reminds us that he was dealt a difficult hand. But the evidence is overwhelming that he played it poorly.
By MICHAEL J. BOSKIN

When it comes to the economy, presidents, like quarterbacks, often get more credit or blame than they deserve. They inherit problems and policies that affect the economy well into their presidencies and beyond. Reagan inherited Carter's stagflation, George H.W. Bush twin financial crises (savings & loan and Third World debt), and their fixes certainly benefitted the Clinton economy.

President Obama inherited a deep recession and financial crisis resulting from problems that had been building for years. Those responsible include borrowers and lenders on Wall Street and Main Street, the Federal Reserve, regulatory agencies, ratings agencies, presidents and Congress.

Mr. Obama's successor will inherit his deficits and debt (i.e., pressure for higher taxes), inflation and dollar decline. But fairly or not, historians document what occurred on your watch and how you dealt with your in-box. Nearly three years since his election and more than two years since the economic recovery began, Mr. Obama has enacted myriad policies at great expense to American taxpayers and amid political rancor. An interim evaluation is in order.

And there's plenty to evaluate: an $825 billion stimulus package; the Public-Private Investment Partnership to buy toxic assets from the banks; "cash for clunkers"; the home-buyers credit; record spending and budget deficits and exploding debt; the auto bailouts; five versions of foreclosure relief; numerous lifelines to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; financial regulation and health-care reform; energy subsidies, mandates and moratoria; and constant demands for higher tax rates on "the rich" and businesses.

Consider the direct results of the Obama programs. A few have performed better than expected—e.g., the auto bailouts, although a rapid private bankruptcy was preferable and GM and Chrysler are not yet denationalized successes. But the failed stimulus bill cost an astounding $280,000 per job—over five times median pay—by the administration's inflated estimates of jobs "created or saved," and much more using more realistic estimates.

Cash for clunkers cost $3 billion, just to shift car sales forward a few months. The Public-Private Investment Partnership, despite cheap federal loans, generated 3% of the $1 trillion claimed, and toxic assets still hobble some financial institutions. The Dodd-Frank financial reform law institutionalized "too big to fail" amid greater concentration of banking assets and mortgages in Fannie and Freddie. The foreclosure relief program permanently modified only a small percentage of the four million mortgages the president promised. And even Mr. Obama now admits that the shovels weren't ready in all those "shovel-ready" stimulus projects.

Perpetually overpromising and underdelivering is not remotely good enough, not even for government work. No corporate CEO could survive such a clear history of failure. The economic records set on Mr. Obama's watch really are historic (see nearby table). These include the first downgrade of sovereign U.S. debt in American history, and, relative to GDP, the highest federal spending in U.S. history save the peak years of World War II, plus the highest federal debt since just after World War II.

The employment picture doesn't look any better. The fraction of the population working is the lowest since 1983. Long-term unemployment is by far the highest since the Great Depression. Job growth during the first two years of recovery after a severe recession is the slowest in postwar history.

Moreover, the home-ownership rate is the lowest since 1965 and foreclosures are at a post-Depression high. And perhaps most ominously, the share of Americans paying income taxes is the lowest in the modern era, while dependency on government is the highest in U.S. history.

That's quite a record, although not what Mr. Obama and his supporters had in mind when they pronounced this presidency historic.

President Obama constantly reminds us, with some justification, that he was dealt a difficult hand. But the evidence is overwhelming that he played it poorly. His big government spending, debt and regulation fix has clearly failed. Relative to previous recoveries from deep recessions, the results are disastrous. A considerable fraction of current joblessness, lower living standards, dependency on government and destroyed savings is the result. Worse, his debt explosion will be a drag on economic growth for years to come.

Mr. Obama was never going to enthusiastically embrace pro-market, pro-growth policies. But many of his business and Wall Street supporters (some now former supporters) believed he would govern more like President Clinton, post-1994. After a stunning midterm defeat, Mr. Clinton embarked on an "era of big government is over" collaboration with a Republican Congress to reform welfare, ratify the North American Free Trade Agreement and balance the budget. But Mr. Obama starts far further left than Mr. Clinton and hence has a much longer journey to the center.

The president still has time to rebound from his economic policy missteps by promoting permanent, predictable policies to strengthen forecasted anemic growth. But do Mr. Obama and his advisers realize their analysis of the economic crisis was flawed and their attempted solutions mostly misconceived? That vast spending, temporary tax rebates and social engineering did little of lasting value at immense cost? That the prospect of ever more regulation and taxation created widespread uncertainty and severely damaged incentives and confidence? That the repeated attempts to prevent markets (e.g., the housing market) from naturally bottoming and rebounding have created confusion and inhibited recovery?


Can Mr. Obama change course, given the evidence that the economy responded poorly to top-down direction from Washington rather than the bottom-up individual initiative that is the key to strong growth? Is he willing to rein in the entitlement state erected under radically different economic and demographic conditions? And will he reform the corporate and personal income taxes with much lower rates on a broader base? Or is he going to propose the same failed policies—more spending, social engineering, temporary tax cuts and permanent tax hikes?

On the answer to these questions, much of Mr. Obama's, and the nation's, future rests.

Mr. Boskin, a professor of economics at Stanford and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under President George H.W. Bush.
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