Will be out of town Dec 22 - 29, so want to take this opportunity to wish everyone a Happy Chanukah and The Merriest of Christmases and nothing but the best in the New Year and let it be one of good health and peace for all.
---
Obama apparently never had any intention of adhering to limitations on the president. Radicals have utter disregard for Constitutional government. (See 1 below.)
---
Dithering by Obama and Western leaders carries a very high price. (See 2 below.)
---
Are we losing the undercover war with Iran? (See 3 below.)
---
Cliff May addresses the issues of Obama's Islamism denial and its dangers.
Obama's subtle but systematic excising of all terminology that associates terrorism with Islam or Islamic concepts such as jihad threatens our security.
Anyone who does not believe Obama is purposefully dismantling the way we must think about terrorism has their head in the sand.(See 4 below.)
---
Will Jordan be next to enjoy The Arab Spring Movement? (See 5 and 5a below.)
---
Establishment Republicans are uncomfortable with the prospect of a Gingrich nomination because they are generally uncomfortable playing hard ball politics. It offends their sensibilities. Sometimes it seems they would rather go into oblivion with the Dole's and McCains'.
Because the stakes are so high and Gingrich is flawed in many ways it is understandable why Establishment Republicans are nervous.Therefore, they better toughen Romney up. (See 6 below.)
This from a dear friend and fellow memo reader regarding Romney: "FYI, just heard Julian Robertson speak, he is a key Romney advisor. He said that, in his lifetime, he has never met anyone who is more qualified to be president.. he said he is more qualified because he is intellectually, morally and fiscally the most capable man that has ever run for president in his lifetime. Don't know if you know who Julian Robertson is, he runs Tiger Management and was one of the most successful hedge fund managers of all time. he also is now taking over Forstman, Little after the passing of Terry Forstman who was the first guy to take on the education monopoly.
Hopefully Romney can resonate with the Republicans, because in my view he is the candidate with the best chance to beat Obama."
My Response:
Know of Robertson and Romney still my best choice warts and all but if Newt then ready to support him as well." (See 6a below.)
---
Dick
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1)Obama's Job Description
By Cindy Simpson
What exactly is the proper role of the president of the United States? As we prepare for another election and strive to thoroughly vet GOP hopefuls, an equally comprehensive examination of the job to which they aspire is in order.
A starting point for such an evaluation was recently provided in the 60 Minutes interview with President Obama. Although CBS News described its segment as a discussion of "both [Obama's] accomplishments and the challenges he faces as he begins his quest for reelection," many would argue that Obama's role of campaigning has never ended.
Obama revealed his own view of his job early in the interview, when correspondent Steve Kroft asked: "Isn't it your job as president to find solutions to these problems, to get results, to figure out a way to get it done?" Obama answered:
It is my job to put forward a vision of the country that benefits the vast majority of Americans. It is my job to make sure that my party is behind those initiatives, even if sometimes it's breaking some china and going against some of the dogmas of our party in the past ... And it's my job to rally the American people around that vision.
Prior to hearing those remarks, many of us had been operating under the naïve assumption that the primary responsibility of the president was as sworn in the oath of office: to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. We assumed that a president's "vision" would harmonize with our founding documents, that the president would provide leadership to more than his own party, and that his "initiatives" would not "benefit the vast majority" to the detriment of the freedom and liberty of all.
The American Thinker article "President Obama, It's Business, Not Personal," analyzed the job of Obama as if he were an executive in corporate America:
As the man at the top, he sets the tone for the rest of us, and the best interests of all shareholders should be his top priority, all while operating inside the parameters of power granted him. He must be the number-one champion of his company's product -- the assurance and protection of our God-given rights of freedom and liberty. And he must faithfully represent his company, not some fundamentally transformed entity audaciously designed in his own mind.
Imagine a corporate executive saying something like Obama told Kroft:
[W]hen I came into office in 2008, it was my firm belief that at such an important moment in our history, there was no reason why Democrats and Republicans couldn't put some of the old ideological baggage aside ... And I think the Republicans made a different calculation, which was, "You know what? We really screwed up the economy. Obama seems popular. Our best bet is to stand on the sidelines, because we think the economy's gonna get worse, and at some point, just blame him."
Most CEOs would never dare to make such whiny sentiments public, and we wonder what exactly Obama meant by the phrase "at such an important moment in our history." Surely he referred to our economic troubles, and not to his own election victory.
But then when Obama described to Kroft his view of Wall Street from "40,000 feet" above, it was difficult not to recall Newsweek's Evan Thomas' vision of Obama "standing above the world" as a "sort of God," or the time that Obama, upon accepting his party's nomination in 2008, declared: "...this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." He has since informed us, however, that his presidential powers do not include "control [of] the weather."
In a speech describing the presidency, Rep. Mike Pence wisely noted:
[W]e as a people are not to be ruled and not to be commanded ... the president should never forget this; that he has not risen above us, but is merely one of us, chosen by ballot, dismissed after his term, tasked not to transform and work his will upon us, but to bear the weight of decision and to carry out faithfully the design laid down in the Constitution[.]
It goes without saying that the commander-in-chief should be loyal to our founding ideals. Bows and apologies to the rest of the world and assertions that the American experiment of "a you're-on-your-own economy ... hasn't worked ... [and] it's not gonna work in the future" display either a radically different view of our nation's history or the desire to dramatically remake its character going forward.
Another president's remarks have lately been making their way around the blogosphere:
Now, more than ever before, the people are responsible for the character of their Congress. If that body be ignorant, reckless, and corrupt, it is because the people tolerate ignorance, recklessness, and corruption. If it be intelligent, brave, and pure, it is because the people demand those high qualities[.]"[i]
While those words of wisdom by James Garfield were written over 100 years ago, his additional comments in the same essay are even more noteworthy:
The legislation of Congress comes much nearer to the daily life of the people than ever before. Twenty years ago, the presence of the national government was not felt by one citizen in a hundred. ... Now he meets it in a thousand ways. Formerly the legislation of Congress referred chiefly to our foreign relations, to indirect taxes, to the government of the army, the navy, and the Territories. Now, a vote in Congress may, any day, seriously derange the business affairs of every citizen. [ii]
Garfield would be shocked to see the level of derangement produced by our government today. And he likely would never have dreamed that the burden of taxes are borne by only around half of the country, with a large proportion going to programs that redistribute to the other half or to pork-barrel spending. And if Garfield was concerned about the engagement of the constituency in his day, imagine his horror at the realization that today's electorate would likely never vote against the hand that feeds it, a hand that under the guise of governmental authority takes wealth out of the pockets of others.
Rather than considering "cutting taxes" or "gutting regulations" to boost our lagging economy, Obama instead has dug in his heels and demanded that wealthy Americans "do their fair share" plus "a little bit more." And if he lacks support, he asserted: "We're just gonna keep on looking for specific things that we can do without congressional cooperation."
Another president from the past viewed his role quite differently: Grover Cleveland, who "believed in keeping government expenditure at the minimum required to carry out essential constitutional functions." Cleveland famously vetoed the Texas Seed Bill, legislation that proposed to spend $10,000 on assistance to drought-suffering Texas farmers. Cleveland stated:
I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution; and I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit. A prevalent tendency to disregard the limited mission of this power and duty should, I think, be steadily resisted, to the end that the lesson should be constantly enforced that, though the people support the Government, the Government should not support the people.
Cleveland could not find the power for a $10,000 grant in the Constitution. Well, "folks," guess what else besides the billions of dollars of today's spending is not in the Constitution: the job description Obama has written for himself.
In the next few weeks, the GOP will begin the formal process of selecting its candidate. In choosing the most qualified contender, we also affirm our idea of the proper role of the president.
Our founding fathers aptly designated the chief executive as the "President of the United States of America and Protector of their Liberties" [iii]. The best candidate is the one who aspires to that presidential job description.
[i] The Works of James Abram Garfield, Volume II, Edited by Burke A. Hinsdale (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1883), page 486.
[ii] Ibid., page 485-6.
[iii] Ibid., page 475.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2)Iran reports all its nuclear installations now underground
Iran announced on Wednesday, Dec. 14, that it had completed the transfer of its nuclear facilities underground, including its uranium enrichment centrifuges, and that the Iranian nuclear program was now safe from US and Israeli attack. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Passive Defense Division, Gholamreza Jalali, said: "Our vulnerability in the nuclear area has reached the minimum level." And if circumstances demand it, he said, uranium enrichment facilities would be placed in more secure locations.
Israeli Defense Minister Barak has repeatedly warned that once it was buried in underground bunkers, Iran's nuclear infrastructure could no longer be attacked; nor would it be possible to find out what was happening there. His meaning was that that no one would know when Iran started building nuclear bombs in deep underground chambers.
Then, Monday, Dec. 12, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Strategic Affairs Moshe Ya'alon said, "Iran will acquire military nuclear capability within months."
Intelligence sources report that in the second part of his comment, the Iranian Guards official was referring to the first-generation P1 and P2 centrifuges which remain at the regular Natanz. It is the newer and faster IR2 and IR4 machines which are being moved to the new underground nuclear city at Fordo near Qom. When these advanced models have all been transferred to Fordo, Iran can start enriching the 20-percent grade uranium it has accumulated to 60 percent, a step before weapons grade.
This accumulated stock is sufficient for four or five nuclear bombs. Nothing but a decision by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei stands between this and the final enrichment leap to the military level and the assembly of the first bomb.
Western and Israeli intelligence experts have assumed until now that Iran was held back by serious problems with the new centrifuges which arose from a shortage of the specialized aluminum alloys, tungsten-copper plates, tungsten metal powder and maraging steel for their blades, the key to smooth enrichment up to weapons-grade.
In recent weeks, US and Israeli officials have argued that Iran's inability to manufacture these rare metals themselves or obtain them on international markets was delaying Tehran's progress. This argument supported their claim that there was still time to stop the nuclear program before it produced a weapon.
But intelligence sources now report exclusively that Iran has solved this problem. Since early November, North Korea has been sending the Islamic Republic consignments of the missing metals following a deal brokered by Chinese middlemen who also helped arrange their shipment. Tehran is already in receipt of the hundreds of tons of rare metals needed to keep its high-tech centrifuges spinning uninterrupted.
Western intelligence officials conclude that Iran deliberately exaggerated the explosion Sunday, Dec. 11 at a steel plant in the central Iranian town of Yazd intending to imply that the Americans or Israelis had conducted another covert attack on the production of special metals for Iran's nuclear industry.
Iran hoped to mislead the West into believing that Iran was still stalled by lack of a regular supply of those metals, when in fact the shortage has been overcome and advanced uranium enrichment was racing ahead deep underground.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3)Intensifying undercover war between the West and Iran
By Nicholas Blanford
Latest spy-versus-spy with Iran shows again that CIA has grown weak on tradecraft and in cultivating human intelligence resources
The publication by Hezbollah of the names of the CIA station chief in Beirut and several other alleged CIA staffers is a serious blow to the US agency's ability to gather intelligence amid what appears to be an intensifying undercover war between the West and Iran, according to a former CIA officer.
"There's obviously an espionage war going on in Iran. And to lose an asset in the middle of a war like this, I think it's catastrophic," says Robert Baer, a former CIA officer who operated in Lebanon in the 1980s.
Iran has been rocked in recent weeks by a series of mysterious explosions at facilities believed to be connected to the Islamic Republic's nuclear and missile production programs, raising speculation that the US and Israel are in the throes of a secret intelligence war against Iran.
A special report on Hezbollah's Al-Manar television station on Friday listed the names of the alleged CIA station chief in Beirut, along with his predecessor and three CIA officers as well as the nicknames of five other operators.
"The CIA station in Lebanon, through a team of operating officers, executes tasks of recruitment that target all colors of the Lebanese spectrum — government employees, security and official individuals, Lebanese politicians, media people, religious people, social people, bankers, medics, and academics," Al-Manar said in a report that used cartoons and graphics.
CIA SHUTDOWN
The television report added weight to recent revelations that the CIA was forced to abandon its Lebanon operations after Hezbollah discovered the identity of several spies. In June, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's leader, revealed that at least two members of his organization had been discovered working for the CIA and were arrested.
Nawar Sahili, a Hezbollah MP, said Tuesday that the intelligence war with Israel and the US was ongoing. "We have our tools and we are watching their movements," he said, adding that Hezbollah would have further revelations to make on the issue.
Baer, who has written three books based on his experiences with the CIA as well as a novel, said that the agency would have to undergo a thorough damage assessment exercise before it could consider resuming intelligence-gathering operations in Lebanon.
"With a damage assessment, traditionally you just have to close down and figure out why [it happened] and what else is compromised," he says. "They also have to consider that the embassy or wherever they were operating from is compromised. It's a laborious, time-consuming thing that can take years. You've got to pull everybody out and put new people under cover and get them to learn Arabic."
Archive footage of Baer being interviewed by a Lebanese television station about his former clandestine activities in Beirut was included as background in Al-Manar's expose of the CIA's current Lebanon operations.
Hezbollah has a strong and aggressive counter-intelligence department that apparently has access to sophisticated monitoring and surveillance equipment to track down enemy agents. In the past three years, more than 100 people in Lebanon have been arrested on suspicion of spying for Israel. They have ranged from garage mechanics to a retired general in the Lebanese army.
US EQUIPMENT USED?
While there have been no serious overt acts of violence along the traditionally volatile border between Lebanon and Israel since the month-long conflict of 2006, the two enemies are engaged in a secret intelligence war using highly sophisticated equipment. Last week, Hezbollah technicians discovered an elaborate Israeli tapping device hooked into the group's private fiber-optic communications network in south Lebanon. The device was destroyed in a remote-control explosion by the Israelis shortly after its discovery.
Hezbollah is believed to have uncovered the CIA network through the process of telephone co-location which analyzes millions of phone calls made in Lebanon every day to discern patterns. Ironically, the equipment used by Hezbollah to roll up the CIA network is thought to have been originally provided by the US to help the Lebanese government trace the assassins of Rafik Hariri, a former Lebanese prime minister who was assassinated in a truck bomb explosion in 2005, according to Baer and Lebanese press reports. In June, an international tribunal indicted four members of Hezbollah for their alleged role in Mr. Hariri's assassination.
Baer said that the CIA had grown weak on tradecraft and in cultivating human intelligence resources over the past decade, which had resulted in costly mistakes being made in Lebanon.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4)What's Islam Got to Do with It?
By Clifford D. May
To prohibit the question is to invite disaster
Is there anything Islamic about Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps? On what basis does Ayman al-Zawahiri, now al-Qaeda's leader, formerly the head of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, claim to be a jihadi — an Islamic warrior? Do groups that justify terrorism on the basis of Islam have a doctrinal leg to stand on?
Let's not start by answering these questions. Let's start by agreeing that such questions need to be asked — not suppressed. Yet right now suppression seems to be the goal of senior officials in the Obama administration. A report by the Westminster Institute's Katherine C. Gorka notes: "Key national security documents have already excised all terminology that associates terrorism with Islam or Islamic concepts such as jihad."
She cites evidence that those who persist in using such terminology are being blacklisted — disqualified from working with federal agencies. Gorka asks: "If counter-terrorism professionals are not allowed to acknowledge that a person motivated by jihadist ideology, or by such Islamist ideologues as Sayyid Qutb or Abu'l-A'la Mawdudi, may be inclined towards acts of violence against Americans, how will they be able to identify and deter potential attackers?"
Qutb, of course, was the "intellectual godfather" of modern Islamism. He proclaimed that "a Muslim has no nationality except his belief," and that Islam is "not a 'religion' in the sense this term is commonly understood." Instead, Islam is meant to encompass "all fields of living" emphatically including politics and economics. He opposed democratic systems of governance because they replace G0d's laws with man's laws, thereby blasphemously diminishing the former and elevating the latter. A member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Qutb was executed in Egypt in 1966.
Mawdudi was a Pakistani who argued that "the aim of Islam is to bring about a universal revolution." He advocated that Muslims begin by transforming the states in which they live into "Islamic states." Once those Islamic states have "power and resources," their obligation is to "fight and destroy non-Islamic governments and establish Islamic states in their place. … [T]heir ultimate objective is none other than world revolution." It's worth noting that while Mawdudi did not suffer most infidels gladly, he wrote admiringly of the "ingenious and mighty leadership of Hitler and his comrades."
I have encountered senior government officials who were unfamiliar with Qutb, Mawdudi and other radical Muslim voices. That's disturbing. But how much worse if it has now become the policy of the U.S. government to demand ignorance, to insist upon it as a matter of principle and strategy?
During a hearing earlier this month, Rep. Dan Lungren (R-CA) repeatedly asked Paul Stockton, Assistant Defense Secretary for Homeland Defense, whether America is "at war with violent Islamist extremism." Stockton repeatedly insisted that America is at war only with "al-Qaida and its allies" and "violent extremism." An exasperated Lungren stressed that understood — that he was making a distinction between "violent Islamist extremism" and Islam. Stockton replied: "Sir, with great respect, I don't believe it's helpful to frame our adversary as Islamic with any set of qualifiers that we might add, because we are not at war with Islam."
Gorka comments: "The Obama Administration is right to assert that America is not at war with Islam, but to deny that a violent strain of Islam is inspiring a wave of terrorist attacks against Americans and American targets is to invite disaster."
I'd add this: Those who tar all Muslims with a single brush make a serious mistake, unwittingly assisting not just bin Ladenists but also Iran's theocrats. Muslim liberals and reformers should be our allies in the war that must be waged against totalitarianism and supremacism in their contemporary manifestations.
But combining sensitivity and intellectual honesty is not so difficult. To acknowledge that Nazism was a German ideology hardly makes one a Germanophobe. You can love Italy while recognizing that Fascism was deeply rooted in Italian soil. Russia gave the world Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky. It also gave us Leninism and Stalinism. And can you imagine the U.S. government banning any linkage of the Spanish Inquisition with the Vatican— lest it offend Roman Catholics?
The radical ideologies that today most threaten America, Israel and Europe arise from within the Muslim world and are justified by fundamentalist interpretations of Islamic scripture. Those who lead movements and regimes based on these ideologies have been inspired by the Islamic conquests of centuries past. They believe a second age of Islamic power and glory is achievable — if Muslims are willing to fight for it as did Mohammad, his companions and the "Soldiers of Allah" (a phrase, you may recall, that the "violent extremist" Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan proudly printed on his calling cards).
Muslim liberals and reformers do not deny this. Those who do deny it are not Muslim liberals or reformers — but they are exerting influence at the highest levels of the U.S. government.
That can be explained in part by the fact that in the Middle East there is an enormous amount of money — nearly every penny of it derived from the sale of oil to the West — backing those who seek to revive Islamic imperialism and colonialism.
To forbid American officials and those who work with them from even discussing such matters is either an attempt at appeasement that is sure to fail or a manifestation of madness that, if not checked, can only contribute to the West's decline and, ultimately, submission.
Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism. A veteran news reporter, foreign correspondent and editor (at The New York Times and other publications), he has covered stories in more than two dozen countries, including Iran, Pakistan, Sudan, Ethiopia, China, Uzbekistan, Northern Ireland and Russia. He is a frequent guest on national and international television and radio news programs, providing analysis and participating in debates on national security issues.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5)Jordan Is Palestinian
By Mudar Zahran
Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2012, pp. 3-12
Thus far the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan has weathered the storm that has swept across the Middle East since the beginning of the year. But the relative calm in Amman is an illusion. The unspoken truth is that the Palestinians, the country's largest ethnic group, have developed a profound hatred of the regime and view the Hashemites as occupiers of eastern Palestine—intruders rather than legitimate rulers. This, in turn, makes a regime change in Jordan more likely than ever. Such a change, however, would not only be confined to the toppling of yet another Arab despot but would also open the door to the only viable peace solution—and one that has effectively existed for quite some time: a Palestinian state in Jordan.
Abdullah's Apartheid Policies
The majority Palestinian population of Jordan bridles at the advantages and benefits bestowed on the minority Bedouins. Advancement in the civil service, as well as in the military, is almost entirely a Bedouin prerogative with the added insult that Palestinians pay the lion's share of the country's taxes.
Despite having held a comprehensive national census in 2004, the Jordanian government would not divulge the exact percentage of Palestinians in the kingdom. Nonetheless, the secret that everyone seems to know but which is never openly admitted is that Palestinians make up the vast majority of the population.
In his 2011 book, Our Last Best Chance, King Abdullah claimed that the Palestinians make up a mere 43 percent. The U.S. State Department estimates that Palestinians make up "more than half" of Jordanians[1] while in a 2007 report, written in cooperation with several Jordanian government bodies, the London-based Oxford Business Group stated that at least two thirds of Jordan's population were of Palestinian origin.[2] Palestinians make up the majority of the population of Jordan's two largest cities, Amman and Zarqa, which were small, rural towns before the influx of Palestinians arrived in 1967 after Jordan's defeat in the Six-Day War.
In most countries with a record of human rights violations, vulnerable minorities are the typical victims. This has not been the case in Jordan where a Palestinian majority has been discriminated against by the ruling Hashemite dynasty, propped up by a minority Bedouin population, from the moment it occupied Judea and Samaria during the 1948 war (these territories were annexed to Jordan in April 1950 to become the kingdom's West Bank).
As a result, the Palestinians of Jordan find themselves discriminated against in government and legislative positions as the number of Palestinian government ministers and parliamentarians decreases; there is not a single Palestinian serving as governor of any of Jordan's twelve governorships.[3]
Jordanian Palestinians are encumbered with tariffs of up to 200 percent for an average family sedan, a fixed 16-percent sales tax, a high corporate tax, and an inescapable income tax. Most of their Bedouin fellow citizens, meanwhile, do not have to worry about most of these duties as they are servicemen or public servants who get a free pass. Servicemen or public employees even have their own government-subsidized stores, which sell food items and household goods at lower prices than what others have to pay,[4] and the Military Consumer Corporation, which is a massive retailer restricted to Jordanian servicemen, has not increased prices despite inflation.[5]
Decades of such practices have left the Palestinians in Jordan with no political representation, no access to power, no competitive education, and restrictions in the only field in which they can excel: business.
According to the Minority Rights Group International's World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples of 2008, "Jordan still considers them [Palestinian-Jordanians] refugees with a right of return to Palestine."[6] This by itself is confusing enough for the Palestinian majority and possibly gives basis for state-sponsored discrimination against them; indeed, since 2008, the Jordanian government has adopted a policy of stripping some Palestinians of their citizenship.[7] Thousands of families have borne the brunt of this action with tens of thousands more potentially affected. The Jordanian government has officially justified its position: Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior Nayef Qadi told the London-based al-Hayat newspaper that "Jordan should be thanked for standing up against Israeli ambitions of unloading the Palestinian land of its people" which he described as "the secret Israeli aim to impose a solution of Palestinian refugees at the expense of Jordan."[8] According to a February 2010 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report, some 2,700 Jordanian-Palestinians have had their citizenship revoked. As HRW obtained the figure from the Jordanian government, it is safe to assume that the actual figure is higher. To use the words of Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of the Middle East and North Africa division of HRW, "Jordan is playing politics with the basic rights of thousands of its citizens."[9]
But Abdullah does not really want the Palestinians out of his kingdom. For it is the Palestinians who drive the country's economy: They pay heavy taxes; they receive close to zero state benefits; they are almost completely shut out of government jobs, and they have very little, if any, political representation. He is merely using them as pawns in his game against Israel by threatening to make Jerusalem responsible for Jordanians of Palestinian descent in the name of the "right of return."
Despite systematic marginalization, Palestinians in Jordan seem well-settled and, indeed, do call Jordan home. Hundreds of thousands hold "yellow cards" and "green cards," residency permits allowing them to live and work in Israel while they maintain their Jordanian citizenship.[10] In addition, tens of thousands of Palestinians—some even claim hundreds of thousands—hold Israeli residency permits, which allow them to live in Judea and Samaria. Many also hold a "Jerusalem Residency Card," which entitles them to state benefits from Israel.[11] Yet they have remained in Jordan. Despite ill treatment by the Jordanian government, they still wish to live where most of their relatives and family members live and perhaps actually consider Jordan home.
Playing the Islamist Card
The Hashemites' discriminatory policies against the Palestinians have been overlooked by the West, Washington in particular, for one main reason: the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was the beating heart of Palestinian politics, and thus, if the Palestinians were empowered, they might topple the Hashemites and transform Jordan into a springboard for terror attacks against Israel. This fear was not all that farfetched. The Palestinian National Charter, by which the PLO lives, considers Palestine with its original mandate borders (i.e., including the territory east of the Jordan River, or Transjordan) as the indivisible homeland of the Palestinian Arab people.[12] In the candid admission of Abu Dawoud, Yasser Arafat's strongman in the 1970s, "Abu Ammar [Arafat] was doing everything then to establish his power and authority in Jordan despite his public statements" in support of King Hussein.[13] This tension led to the 1970 Black September civil war where the PLO was expelled from Jordan and thousands of Palestinians were slaughtered by Hussein's Bedouin army.
With the threat of Palestinian militants removed, the idea of having the Muslim Brotherhood entrenched in a Palestinian state with the longest border with Israel would naturally be of concern to Israel and its allies.
The only problem with this theory is that the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan is dominated by Bedouins, not Palestinians. The prominent, hawkish Muslim Brotherhood figure, Zaki Bani Rushiad, for example, is a native of Irbid in northern Jordan—not a Palestinian. Salem Falahat, another outspoken Brotherhood leader, and Abdul Latif Arabiat, a major tribal figure and godfather of the Brotherhood in Jordan, are also non-Palestinians. Upon President Obama's announcement of the death of Osama bin Laden, tribal Jordanians in the southern city of Ma'an mourned the terror leader's death and announced "a celebration of martyrdom."[14] Other cities with predominantly Bedouin populations, such as Salt and Kerak, did the same. The latter, a stronghold of the Majali tribe (which has historically held prominent positions in the Hashemite state) produced Abu Qutaibah al-Majali, bin Laden's personal aide between 1986 and 1991, who recruited fellow Bedouin-Jordanian, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, head of al-Qaeda in Iraq who was killed in a 2006 U.S. raid.[15]
The Hashemite regime is keenly aware of U.S. and Israeli fears and has, therefore, striven to create a situation where the world would have to choose between the Hashemites and the Muslim Brotherhood as Jordan's rulers. To this end, it has supported the Muslim Brotherhood for decades, allowing it to operate freely, to run charitable organizations and youth movements, and to recruit members in Jordan.[16] In 2008, the Jordanian government introduced a new law, retroactively banning any existing political party unless it had five hundred members and branches in five governorates (counties). Since such conditions could only be fulfilled by the Muslim Brotherhood, most political parties were dissolved de jure because they did not meet the new standards, leaving the Islamic Action Front as the strongest party in the kingdom.
Both Jerusalem and Washington are aware of the Jordanian status quo yet have chosen to accept the Hashemite regime as it is, seduced by the conventional wisdom of "the devil you know is better than the devil you don't." The facts on the ground, however, suggest that the devil they think they know is in deep trouble with its own supposed constituency.
The Bedouin Threat
Despite their lavish privileges, Jordanian Bedouins seem to insist relentlessly on a bigger piece of the cake, demanding more privileges from the king, and, in doing so, they have grown fearless about defying him. Since 2009, fully-armed tribal fights have become commonplace in Jordan.[17] Increasingly, the Hashemite regime has less control than it would like over its only ruling foundation—the Bedouin minority—which makes up the army, the police forces, all the security agencies, and the Jordanian General Intelligence Department. The regime is, therefore, less likely to survive any serious confrontations with them and has no other choice but to keep kowtowing to their demands.
What complicates the situation even further is that Bedouin tribes in Jordan do not maintain alliances only with the Hashemites; most shift their loyalties according to their current interests and the political season. Northern tribes, for example, have exhibited loyalty to the Syrian regime, and many of their members hold dual citizenships.[18] In September 1970, when Syrian forces invaded Jordan in the midst of the civil war there, the tribes of the northern city of Ramtha raised the Syrian flag and declared themselves "independent" from the Hashemite rulers.
Likewise, Bedouin tribes of the south have habitually traded loyalty for privileges and handouts with whoever paid better, beginning with the Turks, then replacing them with the better-paying Britons, and finally the Hashemites. This pattern has expanded in the last twenty years, as tribesmen exchanged their loyalties for cash; in fact this is how they got involved in the British-supported Arab revolt of World War I, in which the Bedouins demanded to be paid in gold in advance in order to participate in the fighting against the Ottomans despite their alignment with the Ottoman Empire before joining the revolt.[19]
This in turn means that the Jordanian regime is now detested not only by the Palestinians but also by the Bedouins, who have called for a constitutional monarchy in which the king hands his powers to them.[20] Should the tribes fail to achieve their goals, they will most likely expand their demonstrations of unrest—complete with tribal killings, blockades, armed fights, robberies, and attacks on police officers—which the Jordanian state finds itself having to confront weekly. In 2010, an average of five citizens was killed each week just as a result of tribal unrest.[21]
The Hashemite regime cannot afford to confront the tribesmen since they constitute the regime's own servicemen and intelligence officers. In 2002, the Jordanian army besieged the southern Bedouin city of Ma'an in order to arrest a group of extremists, who were then pardoned a few years later.[22] Similarly, Hammam Balaoui, a Jordanian intelligence double agent was arrested in 2006 for supporting al-Qaeda, only to be released shortly thereafter, eventually blowing himself up in Afghanistan in 2009 along with seven senior CIA officers and King Abdullah's cousin.[23]
Palestinian Pawns
These open displays of animosity are of a piece with the Hashemite regime's use of its Palestinian citizens as pawns in its game of anti-Israel one-upmanship.
King Hussein—unlike his peace-loving image—made peace with Israel only because he could no longer afford to go to war against it. His son has been less shy about his hostility and is not reluctant to bloody Israel in a cost-effective manner. For example, on August 3, 2004, he went on al-Arabiya television and slandered the Palestinian Authority for "its willingness to give up more Palestinian land in exchange for peace with Israel."[24] He often unilaterally upped Palestinian demands on their behalf whenever the Palestinian Authority was about to make a concession, going as far as to threaten Israel with a war "unless all settlement activities cease."[25]
This hostility toward Israel was also evident when, in 2008, Abdullah started revoking the citizenship of Jordanian Palestinians. By turning the Palestinian majority in Jordan into "stateless refugees" and aggressively pushing the so-called "right of return," the king hopes to strengthen his anti-Israel credentials with the increasingly Islamist Bedouins and to embarrass Jerusalem on the world stage. It is not inconceivable to envision a scenario where thousands of disenfranchised Palestinians find themselves stranded at the Israeli border, unable to enter or remain in Jordan. The international media—no friend of the Jewish state—would immediately jump into action, demonizing Israel and turning the scene into a fiasco meant to burden Jerusalem's conscience—and that of the West. The Hashemite regime would thereby come out triumphant, turning its own problem—being rejected and hated by the Palestinians—into Israel's problem.
A Pot Boiling Over
The Jordanian government's mistreatment of its Palestinian citizenry has taken a significant toll. Today, the Palestinians are a ticking bomb waiting to explode, especially as they watch their fellow Arabs rebelling against autocrats such as Egypt's Mubarak, Libya's Qaddafi, or Syria's Assad.
The complex relationship between the Palestinian majority and the Hashemite minority seems to have become tenser since Abdullah ascended the throne in 1999 after King Hussein's death. Abdullah's thin knowledge of the Arabic language, the region, and internal affairs, made him dependent on the Bedouin-dominated Jordanian Intelligence Department standing firmly between the king and his people, of which the Palestinians are the majority.[26] A U.S. embassy cable, dated July 2009, reported "bullying" practiced by the fans of al-Faisali Soccer Club (predominantly Bedouin Jordanians) against the fans of al-Wihdat Soccer Club (predominantly Palestinians), with al-Faisali fans chanting anti-Palestinian slogans and going so far as to insult Queen Rania, who is of Palestinian descent.[27] Two days after the cable was released, Jordanian police mercilessly attacked Palestinian soccer fans without provocation, right under the eyes of the international media.[28]
Palestinians in Jordan have also developed an intense hatred of the military as they are not allowed to join the army; they see Bedouin servicemen getting advantages in state education and health care, home taxes, and even tariff exemption on luxury vehicles.[29] In recent years, the Jordanian military has consumed up to 20.2 percent of the country's gross domestic product (GDP).[30]
Government spending does not end with the army. Jordan has one of the largest security and intelligence apparatuses in the Middle East, perhaps the largest compared to the size of its population. Since intelligence and security officers are labeled as "military servicemen" by the Jordanian Ministry of Finance, and their expense is considered military expenditure, Jordanian Palestinians see their tax dollars going to support job creation for posts from which they themselves are banned. At the same time, the country has not engaged in any warfare since 1970, leading some to conclude that this military spending is designed to protect the regime and not the country—a conclusion underscored by the Black September events.
A Path to Peace?
The desperate and destabilizing measures undertaken by the Hashemite regime to maintain its hold on power point to a need to revive the long-ignored solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict: the Jordanian option. With Jordan home to the largest percentage of Palestinians in the world, it is a more logical location for establishing Palestinian statehood than on another country's soil, i.e., Israel's.
There is, in fact, almost nothing un-Palestinian about Jordan except for the royal family. Despite decades of official imposition of a Bedouin image on the country, and even Bedouin accents on state television, the Palestinian identity is still the most dominant—to the point where the Jordanian capital, Amman, is the largest and most populated, Palestinian city anywhere. Palestinians view it as a symbol of their economic success and ability to excel. Moreover, empowering a Palestinian statehood for Jordan has a well-founded and legally accepted grounding: The minute the minimum level of democracy is applied to Jordan, the Palestinian majority would, by right, take over the political momentum.
For decades, however, regional players have entertained fears about empowering the Palestinians of Jordan. While there may be apprehension that Jordan as a Palestinian state would be hostile to Israel and would support terror attacks across their long border, such concerns, while legitimate, are puzzling. Israel has allowed the Palestinians to establish their own ruling entities as well as their own police and paramilitary forces on soil captured in the 1967 war, cheek by jowl with major Israeli population centers. Would a Palestinian state on the other side of the Jordan River pose any greater security threat to Israel than one in Judea and Samaria?
Moreover, the Jordan Valley serves as a much more effective, natural barrier between Jordan and Israel than any fences or walls. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed the centrality of Israeli control over the western side of the Jordan Valley, which he said would never be relinquished.[31] It is likely that the area's tough terrain together with Israel's military prowess have prevented the Hashemite regime from even considering war with Israel for more than forty years.
It could be argued that should the Palestinians control Jordan, they would downsize the military institutions, which are dominated by their Bedouin rivals. A Palestinian-ruled Amman might also seek to cut back on the current scale of military expenditures in the hope that the U.S. military presence in the region would protect the country from unwelcome encroachments by Damascus or Tehran. It could also greatly benefit from financial and economic incentives attending good-neighbor relations with Israel. Even if a Jordanian army under Palestinian commanders were to be kept at its current level, it would still be well below Israel's military and technological edge. After all, it is Israel's military superiority, rather than regional goodwill, that drove some Arab states to make peace with it.
The Palestinians in Jordan already depend on Israel for water[32] and have enjoyed a thriving economic boom driven by the "Qualified Industrial Zones," which allow for Jordanian clothing factories to export apparel to the United States at preferred tariff rates if a minimum percentage of the raw material comes from Israel.[33] Hundreds of Palestinian factory owners have prospered because of these zones. Expanding such cooperation between a future Palestinian state in Jordan and Israel would give the Palestinians even more reasons to maintain a good relationship with their neighbor.
Both the United States and Israel should consider reevaluating the Jordan option. Given the unpopularity of the Hashemite regime among its subjects, regime change in Amman should not be that difficult to achieve though active external intervention would likely yield better results than the wait-and-see-who-comes-to-power approach followed during the Egyptian revolution. After twelve years on the throne, and $7 billion dollars in U.S. aid, Abdullah is still running a leaky ship and creating obstacles to resolving the Palestinian issue.
Washington's leverage can come into play as well with the Jordanian armed forces which are, in theory, loyal to the king. With hundreds of troops undergoing training in the United States each year and almost $350 million handed out in military aid, the U.S. establishment could potentially influence their choices.
Recent events in the Middle East should serve as guidelines for what ought to be pursued and avoided. U.S. diplomacy failed to nurse a moderate opposition to Egypt's Mubarak, which could have blocked Islamists and anti-Americans from coming to power. The current turmoil in Libya has shown that the later the international community acts, the more complicated the situation can get. An intervention in Jordan could be much softer than in Libya and with no need for major action. Abdullah is an outsider ruling a poor country with few resources; his only "backbone" is Washington's political and financial support. In exchange for a promise of immunity, the king could be convinced to let the Palestinian majority rule and become a figurehead, like Britain's Queen Elizabeth.
As further assurance of a future Palestinian Jordan's peaceful intentions, very strict antiterrorism laws must be implemented, barring anyone who has incited violence from running for office, thus ruling out the Islamists even before they had a chance to start. Such an act should be rewarded with economic aid that actually filters down to the average Jordanian as opposed to the current situation, in which U.S. aid money seems to support mainly the Hashemites' lavish lifestyle.
Alongside downsizing the military, a defense agreement with Washington could be put in place to help protect the country against potentially hostile neighbors. Those who argue that Jordan needs a strong military to counter threats from abroad need only look again at its history: In 1970, when Syria invaded northern Jordan, King Hussein asked for U.S. and Israeli protection and was eventually saved by the Israeli air force, which managed to scare the Syrian troops back across the border.[34] Again in 2003, when Washington toppled Saddam Hussein, Amman asked for U.S.-operated Patriot missile batteries and currently favors an extended U.S. presence in Iraq as a Jordanian security need.[35]
Should the international community see an advantage to maintaining the military power of the new Palestinian state in Jordan as it is today, the inviolability of the peace treaty with Israel must be reasserted, indeed upgraded, extending into more practical and tangible economic and political arenas. A mutual defense and counterterrorism agreement with Israel should be struck, based on one simple concept—"good fences make good neighbors"—with the river Jordan as the fence.
Conclusion
Considering the Palestinian-Jordanian option for peace would not pose any discrimination against Palestinians living in the West Bank, nor would it compromise their human rights: They would be welcome to move to Jordan or stay where they are if they so wished. Free will should be the determinant, not political pressure. Besides, there are indications that many would not mind living in Jordan.[36] Were the Palestinians to dominate Jordan, this tendency will be significantly strengthened. This possibility has also recently been confirmed by a released cable from the U.S. embassy in Amman in which Palestinian political and community representatives in Jordan made clear that they would not consider the "right of return" should they secure their civil rights in Jordan.[37]
Empowering Palestinian control of Jordan and giving Palestinians all over the world a place they can call home could not only defuse the population and demographic problem for Palestinians in Judea and Samaria but would also solve the much more complicated issue of the "right of return" for Palestinians in other Arab countries. Approximately a million Palestinian refugees and their descendents live in Syria and Lebanon, with another 300,000 in Jordan whom the Hashemite government still refuses to accept as citizens. How much better could their future look if there were a welcoming Palestinian Jordan?
The Jordanian option seems the best possible and most viable solution to date. Decades of peace talks and billions of dollars invested by the international community have only brought more pain and suffering for both Palestinians and Israelis—alongside prosperity and wealth for the Hashemites and their cronies.
It is time for the international community to adopt a more logical and less costly solution rather than to persist in long discredited misconceptions. It is historically perplexing that the world should be reluctant to ask the Hashemites to leave Jordan, a country to which they are alien, while at the same time demanding that Israeli families be removed by force from decades-old communities in their ancestral homeland. Equally frustrating is the world's silence while Palestinians seeking refuge from fighting in Iraq are locked in desert camps in eastern Jordan because the regime refuses to settle them "unless foreign aid is provided."[38]
The question that needs to be answered at this point is: Has the West ever attempted to establish any contacts with a pro-peace, Palestinian-Jordanian opposition? Palestinians today yearn for leaders. Washington is presented with a historical opportunity to support a potential Palestinian leadership that believes in a peace-based, two-state solution with the River Jordan as the separating border between the two countries. Such leadership does seem to exist. Last September, for example, local leaders in Jordanian refugee camps stopped Palestinian youth from participating in mass protests against the Israeli Embassy in Amman;[39] as a result, barely 200 protesters showed up instead of thousands as in similar, previous protests.[40] As for East Jerusalem, under Israel's 44-year rule, Muslims, Christians, and members of all other religions have been able to visit and practice their faith freely, just as billions of people from all over the world visit the Vatican or Muslim pilgrims flock to Mecca. Yet under the Hashemite occupation of the city, this was not done. Without claiming citizenship, Jerusalem would remain an open city to all who come to visit.
The Jordanian option is an overdue solution: A moderate, peaceful, economically thriving, Palestinian home in Jordan would allow both Israelis and Palestinians to see a true and lasting peace.
Mudar Zahran is a Jordanian-Palestinian writer who resides in the United Kingdom as a political refugee. He served as an economic specialist and assistant to the policy coordinator at the U.S. Embassy in Amman before moving to the U.K. in 2010.
[1] "Jordan: Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, 2001," Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, U.S. Department of State, Mar. 4, 2002.
[2] "The Report: Emerging Jordan 2007," Oxford Business Group, London, Apr. 2007.
[3] "Jordan: Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, 2001," Mar. 4, 2002.
[4] "Brief History," Civil Service Consumer Corporation, Government of Jordan, Amman, 2006.
[5] Jordan News Agency (PETRA, Amman), Jan. 10, 2011.
[6] "Jordan: Palestinians," World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples, Minority Rights Group International, 2008, accessed Sept. 20, 2011.
[7] "Stateless Again," Human Rights Watch, New York, Feb. 1, 2010.
[8] The Arab Times (Kuwait City), Jan. 13, 2011.
[9] "Jordan: Stop Withdrawing Nationality from Palestinian-Origin Citizens," Human Rights Watch, Washington, D.C., Feb. 1, 2010.
[10] "Jordan: Information on the right of abode of a Palestinian from the West Bank who holds a Jordanian passport which is valid for five years," Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, Oct. 1, 1993, JOR15463.FE.
[11] "Jordan's treatment of failed refugee claimants," Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, Mar. 9, 2004, JOR42458.E.
[12] The Palestinian National Charter, Resolutions of the Palestine National Council, July 1-17, 1968.
[13] Al-Jazeera (Riyadh), Oct. 1, 2005.
[14] Amman News, May 2, 2011.
[15] Ibid., May 2, 2011.
[16] Awni Jadu al-Ubaydi, Jama'at al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin fi al-Urdunn wa-Filastin, 1945-1970 (Amman: Safahat Ta'arikhiyya, 1991), pp. 38-41.
[17] Samer Libdeh, "The Hashemite Kingdom of Apartheid?" The Jerusalem Post, Apr. 26, 2010.
[18] CNN, Nov. 28, 2007.
[19] Michael Korda, Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (New York: Harper, 2010), p. 19.
[20] Hürriyet (Istanbul), Mar. 4, 2011.
[21] Libdeh, "The Hashemite Kingdom of Apartheid?"
[22] PETRA, Aug. 6, 2011.
[23] "Profile: Jordanian Triple Agent Who Killed CIA Agents," The Telegraph (London), Jan. 2010.
[24] Al-Arabiya TV (Dubai), Aug. 3, 2004.
[25] The Jerusalem Post, Sept. 24, 2010.
[26] Los Angeles Times, Oct. 1, 2006.
[27] The Guardian (London), Dec. 6, 2010.
[28] Qudosi Chronicles (Long Beach, Calif.), Dec. 16, 2010.
[29] "Assessment for Palestinians in Jordan," Minorities at Risk, Center for International Development and Conflict Management, University of Maryland, College Park, Md., Dec. 31, 2006.
[30] "Jordan Military Expenditures—Percent of GDP," CIA World Factbook, May 16, 2008.
[31] Ha'aretz (Tel Aviv), Mar. 2, 2010.
[32] Lilach Grunfeld, "Jordan River Dispute," The Inventory of Conflict and Environment Case Studies, American University, Washington, D.C., Spring 1997.
[33] Mary Jane Bolle, Alfred B. Prados, and Jeremy M. Sharp, "Qualifying Industrial Zones in Jordan and Egypt," Congressional Research Service, Washington, D.C., July 5, 2006.
[34] Mitchell Bard, "Modern Jordan," Jewish Virtual Library, accessed Aug. 11, 2011.
[35] The Christian Science Monitor (Boston), Jan. 30, 2003.
[36] The Forward (New York), Apr. 13, 2007.
[37] "The Right of Return: What It Means in Jordan," U.S. Embassy, Amman, to Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, U.S. Department of State, Washington, D.C., Feb. 6, 2008.
[38] "Non-Iraqi Refugees from Iraq in Jordan," Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Feb. 20, 2007.
[39] Mudar Zahran, "A Plan B for Jordan?" Hudson Institute, Washington, D.C., Sept. 16, 2011.
[40] The Washington Post, Sept. 15, 2011.
5a)'Beware Arab Spring'
By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE, UPI Editor at Large
To those who hail the "Arab Spring" and the first free elections in Egypt in 60 years, a prominent Israeli responded, "Remember Mussolini, remember Hitler."
Two years after seizing power in 1922 with a march on Rome, one-time socialist Benito Mussolini's fascist party won 64 percent of the popular vote and 374 seats out 535 in Parliament.
Once in power, Mussolini outlawed left-wing parties. His coup inspired Adolf Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch, which failed. But in 1933, Hitler legally came to power in a free election.
For Zalman Shoval, 81, twice Israel's ambassador to the United States, a member of the Knesset for 40 years and close adviser to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, the "Arab Awakening" is an "anti-democratic, anti-human rights movement camouflaged as a victory for human rights."
Most Arab elections, warned Shoval, will produce anti-U.S., anti-Israel parliaments.
Twenty years after the Cold War, he says, "Israel is facing the longest erosion of its strategic environment" while "America's strategic environment is also eroding."
In Egypt, said Shoval, 87 million hungry people can't be fed, so a perfect geopolitical storm is generated to divert the people toward "enmity toward Israel."
Syria, now in a civil war, under its present leadership "is the indisputable link between Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon. If President (Bashar) Assad falls, there is no way of predicting what comes next."
Hezbollah, said Shoval, has 30,000 missiles and Hamas, the no-peace-with-Israel regime in Gaza, is also dominant in the West Bank.
"Today everyone is more concerned about Iran and its drive for nuclear weapons and it will seek hegemony irrespective of a Palestinian settlement," he explained.
Islamist advances in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia "have made the next six, 12, 18 months totally unpredictable," Shoval said.
Arab-Israeli negotiations are at a dead end, he argued, "Because the Palestinians do not wish to negotiate. They ask for a freeze on settlements in the West Bank but the settlements are only 1.1 percent of that territory."
He was presumably referring to the settlements that lie beyond the 420-mile wall of separation. Everything between the 120-mile 1967 border and the wall is now presumably annexed to Israel.
The 1.1 percent refers to Jewish settlements between the wall and the Jordan River. And those will presumably be dismantled in a final settlement, much the way 21 Jewish settlements with 9,000 people in Gaza were abandoned in 2005.
But Shoval made clear Israel will also demand a physical security presence for the Israeli military along the Jordan River.
The Palestinians believe time is on their side, Shoval said. But "security cooperation between Israel and the U.S. is at the highest level in memory." And the $3 billion Israel receives yearly from the United States for defense is a tiny fraction of America's $3 trillion budget, "which enhances stability and makes it less likely the Arab world would start a new war. And the $3 billion goes back to U.S. (defense) jobs."
"The Middle East is increasingly topsy-turvy and there is only one stable ally who shares America's values. The U.S. has pre-positioned dual-use equipment in Israel and this should be expanded as it doesn't cost any money."
"The debate on the solidity of the U.S. relationship is key to understanding that if we stopped building settlements and returned the entire West Bank, it still would not be Scandinavia," Shoval said, adding that he didn't see "any erosion in the U.S. relationship."
"Once you believe you're becoming weak and impotent, you will become so," he warned.
The emergence of a Palestinian state in the West Bank as a result of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations has never seemed more remote.
An Islamist majority in Egypt's new Parliament -- 37 percent for the Muslim Brotherhood and 24 percent for the ultra-radical Islamist Nour ("Light") party -- is a given. The radicals, known as Salafists, want to turn the clock back to the behavior of the first Muslim converts. They are violent, demand a ban on alcohol (which would kill the tourist industry -- 15 percent of the economy) and a dress code for women that make them look like ambulatory tents.
Salafism is the key religious ingredient in jihadism. In normally moderate Tunisia, the Salafi message is circulating freely, unimpeded by now dismantled censorship.
The less dogmatic Muslim Brotherhood projected moderation in the campaign but is quietly purging those who became genuinely moderate. It is also talking about revisions in Egypt's peace treaty with Israel, which it says the Jewish state isn't respecting.
The Arab Spring was a Western construct, based on the illusory hope of real democracy.
Hence the Egyptian army high command's determination to hang on to real power behind the scenes. It will resist any move that might provoke Israeli retaliation. But to placate Islamists, the army will be less accommodating with Israel on minor border issues.
Next door in Libya, the array of weapons and ammunition stashed in underground depots is staggering. And it would be nothing short of a miracle if al-Qaida's supporters hadn't absconded with some of what the new Libyan armed forces discovered in the Sokna and al-Rawagha regions near the Niger and Chad borders: stockpiles of nerve and mustard gas.
A plant was built with special barrels for the production of these agents with a capacity of 10,000 liters.
Scores of old Soviet SAM-7 anti-aircraft missile launchers as well as mortars and artillery pieces with shells were left unguarded for months.
New Libyan leaders from all walks of life are now feeling each other out to determine who might be best qualified to assess the country's defense needs. They say they need another 100 days.
On the eastern side of the Mediterranean Sea, Syria is, by all accounts, another Arab country in the throes of a civilian revolution against the army. Not good news there, either.
Salafists and Muslim Brotherhood sympathizers were busy there, too.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
6)Mitt Romney needs a sparring partner to make him fit to compete with heavyweight champ Barack Obama. That would be Newt Gingrich.
By DANIEL HENNINGER
Mitt Romney needs a sparring partner to make him fit to compete with heavyweight champ Barack Obama-and that's Newt Gingrich.
The best sparring partner is a madman who goes all out.
—Bruce Lee
Every presidential election is a heavyweight fight. It is big, bloody and long.
An incumbent president is always favored to win. No matter what the numbers say, running against a sitting president, you generally are overmatched from day one. See the Kerry and Dole campaigns.
Now comes Mitt Romney. Is he a contender? That eternal 25% ceiling on him says no, not yet.
For months, Mitt has been The Front-Runner, whatever the polls said. It's hard to say that after last Saturday's GOP debate.
About a third of the way in, Newt Gingrich said to Mr. Romney: "The only reason you didn't become a career politician is you lost to Teddy Kennedy in 1994."
The Front-Runner looked stunned, as if he'd just been hit with a left hook out of nowhere. No one—not Undercards Bachmann, Cain or Perry—had been able to land one like this. Literally, you could see Mitt trying to clear his head. His words came in clumps: "Now, now wait a second, that—I mean you'll—OK, go ahead."
What we saw Saturday is that Mitt Romney is reachable personally. Somewhere under that cool front is a wafer of thin skin. If we have learned anything about Barack Obama the past three years it's that he enjoys hitting. He will be merciless with Mitt. Ask Hillary. Ask the respectful Republicans that Obama pistol-whipped in that George Washington University speech. Ask Wall Street's Democrats.
To compete against a do-what-you've-gotta-do opponent, Mitt Romney needs more of what Newt Gingrich gave him Saturday night: pressure. Forget the pleasures of a no-sweat primary season. He needs a sparring partner, someone who will toughen him to handle what he's going to get next fall. That would be Newt Gingrich, the best sparring partner in American politics.
Barack Obama, a novice in February 2007 when he announced for the presidency, survived an arduous set of primary battles and debates with Hillary Clinton, who was plenty tough herself. John McCain had to contend with . . . Mitt Romney. (And a tough guy named Rudy Giuliani, who failed to answer the bell.)
The Republican establishment is writing at great length that no matter how smart Newt is, he can't be part of this because he is an unhinged and unreliable creature of the Beltway cesspool. But if he were gone or discredited, the Romney candidacy will go into a virtual coma.
The Romney campaign may think their man is ready to compete against the president. They should watch the tape of the Saturday night "$10,000 bet" meltdown. In that brief, disastrous exchange over the Massachusetts health-insurance "mandate," a smirking, taunting Rick Perry showed why he won three governor's races. And Mitt buckled, as he had 10 days earlier when Fox's Bret Baier leaned on him about the mandate.
If Mitt Romney still can't handle needling attacks on the Massachusetts mandate, there's not much chance he'll stand up under the withering mockery of Barack Obama over Bain Capital. Newt's own Bain Capital attack on Mr. Romney this week is taken as proof Newt is no conservative. What difference does that make so long as someone forces Mr. Romney to find a persuasive defense of Bain and free-market capitalism before September?
Newt Gingrich will either get Mitt Romney into shape for 2012, or he will take Mitt down in next year's primary contests before the former Massachusetts governor gets himself, and his party, in over his head.
And what if the man who was House speaker 13 years ago does defeat Mr. Romney? If somehow he steals the party's nomination, the Republican establishment—its leadership and its donor base—can blame themselves for failing to find one strong Republican willing to run against a vulnerable president.
For all the guff he is getting now from that same establishment, Mr. Gingrich is the one who was willing to stand in and—altogether predictably—take it in the neck over everything from spending at Tiffany to his often antic speakership. The top-tier candidates stayed home. They wouldn't do it. He did.
So let's push past the sparring- partner metaphor. If this improbable figure wins those primaries, Newt Gingrich will become the Rocky Balboa of American politics—a flawed, scarred figure who, against the odds, resurrects himself. If he self-destructs in the primaries, he's gone. If not, he's got a shot in the general. (As for Newt's egregious Freddie Mac lucre, let the record show that Rocky was working as a loan shark's collector.)
It has come to this—a Republican nomination out of Hollywood, which too often is where this process has been the past seven months. But it isn't going to have a Hollywood ending. Tinker Bell isn't going to conjure Chris Christie or anyone else out of fairy dust before the primaries begin. These two are it.
Newt Gingrich's flaws have been posited. Mitt Romney's inadequacies are known. It's time to put these two in a cage together so that one can emerge a fighter, ready to compete for the presidency.
6a)Some Republican lawmakers wary of Newt Gingrich presidential nomination
By Paul Kane
Republicans on Capitol Hill are increasingly worried about the potential of a Newt Gingrich presidential nomination, fearful that the former House speaker’s reputation for volatility could drive away independent voters and jeopardize GOP prospects for controlling Congress in 2013.
Just a few months ago, Gingrich was an afterthought in the campaign. But his sudden rise over the past month has given pause to congressional Republicans who thought President Obama’s troubles with the economy could firm up their majority in the House and a new majority in the Senate.
The resistance to Gingrich’s surge is based on his reputation for unpredictabilty and a recognition that the success of Republican congressional campaigns will be inextricably linked to the party’s nominee.
One GOP strategist, Mike Murphy, this week described the potential of a Gingrich nomination as a “train wreck,” while Tom Davis, a former House campaign chairman, worries that Gingrich at the top of the ticket could be a drag on the party’s congressional chances, particularly in the Northeast.
Gingrich’s fiery speeches have energized some conservative voters on the campaign trail. But his tumultuous tenure in Congress has many Republicans fearing that his presidential campaign could jolt House and Senate candidates off their message of shrinking federal spending and blaming Obama for an economic malaise.
“The formulation of your message and the discipline with which you deliver it becomes much more important when you’re on a national stage every day,” said Sen. John Thune (S.D.), the newly elected message chief for the Senate GOP and a backer of Gingrich’s top rival, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. “I do think that it’s going to be critical to our overall effort, if we’re going to be successful in both House and Senate campaigns next year, to be able to have a coherent message and one which is very much synced up with our nominee.”
With the economic recovery struggling to take hold, House Republicans had hoped to consolidate their gains from the 2010 midterm elections, aiming to return in 2013 with a conference close to its current size of 242. Senate Republicans, needing just four seats to claim the majority, are in a strong position because Democrats are defending 23 seats and have several key incumbents retiring. Republicans are defending only 10 seats.
“He’s an idea guy, and a lot of his ideas are good and some of them are wacko. So he’s the kind of guy that needs to be involved somehow — I just don’t think he needs to be the leader,” said Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), a seven-term congressman who recently endorsed Romney.
According to data compiled by Roll Call, Romney has secured 56 endorsements from congressional Republicans, while Gingrich has eight.
House Speaker John A. Boehner (Ohio), who was one of Gingrich’s lieutenants after the GOP won control of the House in 1994, would say only that Gingrich is “a friend.”
At a policy forum Wednesday sponsored by Politico, Boehner stressed differences between his background as a small-business man and Gingrich’s as a college professor.
“Like all big thinkers, they have got some great ideas, then they have some other ideas,” Boehner said, echoing a frequent criticism that Gingrich too often hopscotched from one incomplete idea to the next.
Some leading Democrats share the thinking that a Gingrich nomination could help them with independent voters, in both the presidential and congressional elections.
“Newt Gingrich leading the Republican ticket brings those independent voters back to Democrats,” said Rep. Steve Israel (N.Y.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “He is the king of gridlock. These are the very independent voters who had it with him in 1995 when he tried to shut down the the government.”
Not all Republicans agree that Gingrich would be political dynamite for down-ballot contests. Some simply cannot decide how he would play in a general election.
“If this becomes a race between competing visions of America, and not about personalities, I can’t think of a better spokesman than Newt Gingrich getting up there and being able to articulate a competing vision,” said Davis, a former congressman from Virginia who was first elected in 1994 as part of the Gingrich revolution. But Davis warned that Gingrich’s past ethics issues and his extramarital affairs provide Democrats with ammunition against GOP candidates.
“If this becomes about all the other baggage and so on, he’s a loser,” said Davis, who twice chaired the National Republican Campaign Committee, the House GOP’s campaign operation. “The question is: Can you get there or can you not get past [the baggage]? I think that the jury is still out on that.”
Many of the junior conservative Republicans who never served with Gingrich are confused, and they would now prefer that the race go on long enough to reveal which of the top candidates has the greater vulnerabilities.
“The longer that this goes on, the better, to really flesh out where these guys are going to be on issues and see the team they’re going to put around them,” said Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who was elected in 2002. “I’m actually hoping this goes all the way to California.”
The thought of such an extended primary campaign — the Golden State GOP primary is slated for June 5 — scares many Republican strategists, who prefer that a nominee emerge by early spring to begin raising the hundreds of millions of dollars needed for a general-election campaign.
Topping the list of Gingrich’s detractors are many of these senior GOP strategists who have run the House and Senate campaigns for the past decade, along with senior lawmakers who recall Gingrich’s rocky tenure as House speaker. These Republicans heard Gingrich’s recent claim that the Palestinians were an “invented people” and recalled the many times GOP lawmakers were called on to defend controversial statements Gingrich made during his four years as speaker.
“This is ‘Newtonium.’ Newt Gingrich is radioactive material. The establishment thinks if they get too close, he could kill every Republican on the ballot,” pollster Alex Castellanos said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
By the time Gingrich announced his retirement from the House in November 1998, he had become a polarizing figure, with a favorability rating of 34 percent, according to an ABC News poll at the time.
He had become a political liability, particularly in the Northeast. In the 1996 and 1998 elections, House Republicans lost more than half a dozen seats in that region, beginning a long slide that culminated with the loss of the House in 2006 and and no House Republican from New England after the 2008 elections.
In 2010, however, the party bounced back and picked up 15 House seats in the Northeast — seats that some see as being in danger with Gingrich as the GOP standard-bearer.
“It’s tougher. You want Romney, period,” Davis said. “He plays more in the Northeast. I don’t think there’s any question about that.”
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment