Iran Back on Center Stage!

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As the economy stalls, partly due to bad domestic policy and even worse ones overseas, politicians become very vulnerable.  (See 1 below.)
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Is Obama ready to pull the trigger and bring about  The October Surprise, I have speculated could happen? 


A macho follow up to his claims regarding bin Laden and need to energize his poll numbers and support? (See 2 below.)


But, since an attack might prove dangerous and unpopular, Obama could always finesse and fall back on some flimsy agreement and assent  believing/claiming  Iran is serious this time.

The article below suggests what is about to happen  endangers Israel but fails to acknowledge the danger to the entire world and most specifically The Middle East.(See 2a below.)


Having observed Obama for the past three years I suspect he will do whatever he can to avoid any tough decision and will accept a deal that creates the appearance of victory so he will not have to confront such prior to the election . (See 2b below.)
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This was sent to me by a dear friend, memo reader who also happens  to be Catholic.


I am not Catholic but, as politicians say at the end of their ad, I support this statement:  

Test of Fire: Election 2012 (Official HD Versio...

By creativelab7| 1 video

Watch

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One thing Obama has accomplished with his own attacks on religion and his pitting citizen against citizen - he has stirred the bee hives/hornet nests.  (See 3 and 3a below.)
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Are the repercussions of Obama's appeasing foreign policy initiatives, which pretty much began when he visited Egypt and offered his apologies etc.,  coming home to roost?
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There are those who profess Obama has the vote of women.  I remain suspect because I cannot believe women are as stupid as the press and media would have us believe they are and this (too long to post) article is a must read: Obama's Oprah Problem - Lee Habeeb, National Review. Just left click .
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Dick
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1)Whalen to Moneynews: Economic 'Fatigue' Will Force Voters to Oust Incumbents

By Forrest Jones and John Bachman

Improving economic indicators don't mean the broader economy is following suit, and politicians seeking re-election this year may be out of a job, says Christopher Whalen, Senior Managing Director of Tangent Capital Partners in New York.

Unemployment rates are falling but mainly due to more people exiting the labor force and are no longer factored into the percentage rate, which makes it seem fewer people are out of work than in reality.

Meanwhile, consumer sentiment and auto sales figures have bumped up but mainly due to improvements in parts of the economy or due to seasonal factors.

"Certainly the fatigue that Americans feel after almost five years of crisis has not gone away," Whalen tells Newsmax TV. 

"I think all incumbents and not just Democrats and Republicans, in particular, but all incumbents are going to be facing a very tough road in terms of reelection this year."

Sectors focusing on trade, the auto industry and energy are doing well as are many others that aren't tied to the battered housing industry, while consumer sentiment is improving.

Yet consumer sentiment tends to rise in the spring anyway, Whalen says, which would account for increased spending and rising credit-card balances.

"But with all of that said, I really don't think we have enough underlying growth to fix the situation. We need different leadership," Whalen says.

That means different leadership in both the White House and in Congress.

"We have gotten zero leadership out of the Congress in part because they are fighting with one another," Whalen says.

Turning to housing, which threw the country into the Great Recession and continues to hamper its revival today, Whalen says full recovery is a long way off, and the sector will probably never see its pre-recession strength again.

Credit is not available for those willing to buy like in the past and many would-be buyers don't have the income to buy houses for sale anyway.

The whole economy is redefining itself thanks to the changing nature of the housing sector.

"Remember consumption is three-quarters of the economy and an awful lot of that consumption is related to housing. So if we are changing the model in terms of home ownership, if we have larger households, we don't need as many houses, and if we have fewer homebuyers, I think that's going to change the dynamic," Whalen says. 

"This is important because Americans were using housing as a source of income. If they can't refinance and get access to credit, then we are going to have slower growth."

Meanwhile the Federal Reserve can't help much.

Since the downturn, the Fed has slashed interest rates to near zero and have bought trillions of dollars in bonds and other assets from banks, injecting them with liquidity in the process with the aim of spurring growth by keeping long-term borrowing costs low.

Such asset purchases, known officially as quantitative easing but dubbed by many as printing money out of thin air, aim to stave off further decline but arguably lay the seeds for inflation down the road.

The Fed should at least work to bring its benchmark lending rate, the fed funds target rate, up from its current level of zero to 0.25 percent to around half a point to protect those who save from seeing inflation eat away at their investments.

"If we don't let rates go up and let savers earn money so Grandma can buy Christmas presents, for example, or buy groceries, and if we don't let insurance companies start to earn money on their investments again, we're going to have a big problem next year," Whalen says. 

"I think Morgan Stanley and some of the other broker-dealers in New York are literally going to fall apart next year because they are not making anything on their inventories — repos, securities lending, all of these old-fashioned businesses were particularly a third of the profits of a broker-dealer in a given year," Whalen says. 

"But under the Fed's policies, no savers, whether you are talking about individuals or corporates, are making any money," he adds.

"Let's get the fed funds rate up to half a point. Then, at least, you'd start seeing banks lending to each other again, they'd start lending securities again and we could rebuild the marketplace."
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2) U.S. Envoy: Plans to Strike Iran Are ‘Ready’

American Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro says plans for a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities are “fully available” and “ready.”

In remarks aired by Israel’s Army Radio on Thursday, Shapiro said: “It would be preferable to resolve this diplomatically and through the use of pressure than to use military force. But that doesn’t mean that option is not fully available — not just available, but it’s ready.

“The necessary planning has been done to ensure that it’s ready.”

Israel has hinted it could launch a pre-emptive attack on Iran’s nuclear development program, which Iran insists is for peaceful purposes but Israel believes is aimed at producing nuclear weapons.

However, many analysts believe the United States alone has the ability to inflict lasting damage on Iran’s program, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported.

Award-winning journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave recently told Newsmax in an interview that a U.S. strike against Iran would be “the height of strategic madness” because it could escalate rapidly into a regional war.

But Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak recently asserted that a “radical Islamic Republic of Iran with nuclear weapons would be far more dangerous both for the region and, indeed, the world” than an attack on Iran.

Ambassador Shapiro’s comments came days before the scheduled resumption of talks between Iran and Western allies in Baghdad.

2a)Emerging US-Iran interim nuclear deal endangers Israel

Yukiya Amano, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, is entrusted with a decisive mission in Tehran Sunday, May 20: collecting Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s broad endorsement of the interim eight-point deal he and US President Barack Obama have drafted through secret dialogue. 

These are the  exclusive the eight points - with the caveat that they may not be final. The details are still to be hammered out and proved practicable. But the way the deal stands now, it will be unacceptable to Israel because if affords Iran enough leeway to carry on developing a nuclear bomb program with no real hindrance.

The White House is waiting tensely for Khamenei’s nod to activate the link promised by Obama between their back-track talks and the formal negotiations the Six Powers (P5+1) negotiations with Iran, which go forward in Baghdad on May 23. This link would grant the bilateral US-Iranian deal UN-world power imprimatur and vindicate the US president’s contested Iran policy.

From that moment, Israel would find it doubly hard to go through with its military option against Iran’s nuclear sites without risk of international isolation and opprobrium.

Until that moment, the Obama administration had found Israel’s threatening stance useful for bending Iran to a diplomatic accommodation on its nuclear plans, while at the same time holding Jerusalem back from actually going through with its threat.

It was this double game that made the US-Iranian dialogue workable.
It was also used adroitly by Khamenei to achieve another of the Islamic Republic’s key strategic goals, to destroy the abiding friendship between the US and the Zionist state. The Iranian leader’s main argument to his colleagues in support of his secret dealings with the US president was that sanctions were well worth enduring if at the end of the road a deal with the US forced a breach between Washington and Jerusalem and so substantially weakened the Jewish state.

The details remain to be hammered out and proved practicable:

1. Because the US and Iran agree that a real and comprehensive accord for halting Tehran’s nuclear program is unobtainable, they are accepting an interim agreement with each party at liberty to interpret its substance and future implementation in its own manner.

This wording allows Obama to assure the American voter and Western public that Tehran has capitulated on its nuclear ambitions while, at the same time, Khamenei portrays America to Iranians and Muslims as having yielded on recognizing Iran’s right to develop an independent nuclear program, enrich uranium and continue its drive for a bomb.

2.  Iran will suspend uranium enrichment up to the near-weapons grade of 20 percent but not dismantle or stop work at the Fordo underground nuclear plant as Israel demands.

3.  Iran will export its stock of 110 kilograms of 20-percent enriched uranium which can be used for producing a weapon. This material will be reprocessed and returned as fuel plates from which it is much more difficult though not impossible to make a bomb.

4. No ceiling will be placed on the production of low-enriched uranium of 3.5-5 percent purity.Washington tacitly grants this concession by leaving it off the record.

5.  Iran will sign the Non-Proliferation Accord’s additional protocol and so permit the expansion of IAEA on-site inspections.

6.  The secret Iranian nuclear sites of which Washington has no explicit knowledge will also be omitted from the record and therefore outside the sphere of international inspection.

The guiding principle governing America’s approach to the eight-point interim accord therefore is, “Don’t know; don’t want to see.”

7.  The US and European Union will dilute sanctions against Iran stage by stage. 

Here too, dual tactics will be used: The formal embargo on Iran’s central bank and its exclusion from the SWIFT international money transfer system will not be formally annulled. However a blind eye will be applied to any small banks in the West executing Iran’s international business, just as the sanction-busting measures used by China, Russia, India and Turkey to their trade with Iran, were tolerated.
8.  The US and Europe will revoke the oil embargo due to go into effect on July 1, 2012.

While the Obama administration has given its “agreement-in-principle on the interim deal,” the Iranian leader has not yet endorsed it. Hence the Amano mission to Tehran Sunday.

If he comes away with a nod from Tehran, Obama will have achieved two key objectives:  the world power talks with Iran can proceed through sessions spaced several weeks apart until the November date of the US presidential election, and Israel will be constrained from striking Iran before that date.

Last week, Israel reiterated its demand for Iran to stop uranium enrichment at any grade and dismantle the Fordo nuclear facility as non-negotiable.

The interim agreement drafted by Obama and Khamenei will therefore be unacceptable to Israel because it provides for neither and so affords Iran enough leeway to carry on developing a nuclear bomb program with no real hindrance.




2b)Israel gives qualified okay to Obama’s interim deal with Iran


Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak have decided to stand back for Barack Obama to put his interim deal with Iran to the test, according to sources. They decided to go along with it despite their reservations after receiving assurances from the White House that any Iranian violations would result in the immediate termination of all negotiations and bring military action forward as the sole remaining option for stopping a nuclear Iran. It was not clear if US intended to exercise the military itself. The Obama administration handed similar assurances to the G-8 leaders meeting at Camp David Saturday May 19.

Israel’s qualified acquiescence to the deal negotiated by Washington was accompanied by assertions by its ministers that Iran was lying about its nuclear intentions and playing the world for a fool. Tehran would therefore not stand up to the test.

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3)Jews, Jewish Leftists, and the Anti-Semitic Left

By Rick Richman

Last week, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research held an extraordinary conference in New York, with 18 scholars presenting formal papers on "Jews and the Left," addressing such issues as "present-day understandings of Jewish attraction to the Left in the 19^th and 20^th centuries," whether today's left is "in whole or in part anti-Semitic," and the relationship between the left and Israel.

The response to these issues -- coming from a group of scholars who were largely leftists or liberals themselves -- was quite remarkable.

In his "Introductory Remarks," Prof. Jack Jacobs of CUNY asserted that "the one-time ties between Jews and the left can best be explained by political, economic, and sociological conditions which existed in the 19^th century, and which went out of existence in the twentieth" -- that Jewish leftism was thus a creation of a time and place that no longer exists, not an enduring reflection of either Jewish religion or Jewish traits.

The uncertain relationship between Jewish leftism and Jewish religion was the theme of Michael Walzer's keynote address, "The Strangeness of Jewish Leftism."  He listed the various ways in which Jewish leftism and Judaism are inconsistent and noted that Jewish leftism was a historical rejection of both Jewish tradition and traditional Jews.  He quoted what he called the "profoundly accurate" observation by Polish poet Czesław Miłosz about many Jewish leftist intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s:

From general ideas about the equality of men, they drew the conclusion that the past does not count. They were unwilling to take an interest in Yiddish literature or translations into Polish, because they saw it as provincial and inferior, left over from the ghetto, the very mention of which was a tactless blunder. If anyone mentioned the Jews in their presence, they took offense, at once reading racism into the remarks. They tried at all costs to forget who they were.

But one result of forgetting "who they were," in order to become immediate universalists, was an inability to transmit that culture over generations, in the way traditional Jewish culture reproduces itself each year with its particular rituals and readings.  Prof. Walzer called for a re-engagement by Jewish leftists with Jewish tradition, acknowledging the remarkable political achievement of Jewish politics in exile, sustaining a national existence for 2,000 years without sovereignty or territory.  He seemed effectively to be proposing a sort of particular Jewish leftism, one he hoped that, unlike the Jewish leftism of the past, "might be strong enough to pass on to our grandchildren."  

But the problem is not only that Jewish leftists left the Jews, but that leftism itself has left them as well.  Ron Radosh of the Hudson Institute and PJ Media made a fascinating presentation, entitled "When the American Jewish Left Loved Israel," reviewing the critical support given to the re-creation of Israel by the Soviet Union, the Nation, and I.F. Stone -- whom Radosh called second only to Leon Uris in creating a wave of support for a beleaguered people trying to return to their homeland while opposed by the "true colonial power" of the time (Britain).  He closed by noting that such leftist support for Israel is long gone.

These days, the Nation is the source of vitriolic opposition to Israel, and a significant part of the left is not only anti-Israel, but anti-Semitic.  Prof. Mitchell Cohen of CUNY, who co-edited Dissent for nearly two decades, said he has gotten indigestion from "what parts of the Left have swallowed without getting indigestion."  He said the left "has a Zionist problem," and part of it has a Jewish problem as well, and he repeated British novelist Iain Pears' observation that anti-Semitism is like alcoholism: "You can go for 25 years without a drink, but if things go bad and you find yourself with a vodka in your hand, you can't get rid of it."

University of Manchester Professor Emeritus Norman Geras presented a stunning paper, entitled "Alibi Anti-Semitism," describing the anti-Semitic climate that now affects what he called a "substantial section" of the left, which uses Israel as its "convenient alibi" for views that cannot be regarded as merely critical of particular Israeli policies.  His conclusion, which he described as painful for a leftist such as himself -- but as "necessary" in light of what his paper described -- was this:

It is a moral scandal that some few decades after the unmeasurable catastrophe that overtook the Jewish people in Europe, these anti-Semitic themes and ruses are once again respectable; respectable not just down there with the thugs but pervasively also within polite society, and within the perimeters of a self-flattering liberal and left opinion. It is a bleak lesson to all but those unwilling to see.

University of Chicago Professor Moishe Postone, another leftist scholar, offered "Thoughts on History, the Holocaust, and the Left," extending some themes he has described elsewhere -- that the Jews "have once again become the singular object of European indignation," with some forms of fascistic Arab nationalism "coded as singularly progressive" in order to provide a form of anti-Semitism "that was 'legitimate' for the Left, and was called anti-Zionism."

Was Jewish radicalism a break with Jewish tradition or a movement inspired by Jewish history?  In a historical look at "Jews and Communism in the Soviet Union and Poland," Brandeis Professor Antony Polonsky juxtaposed two remarks -- one by the great Jewish historian Simon Dubnov, and the other from Vassili Grossman's novel Forever Flowing.  In a 1917 speech, Dubnov observed that:

[M]any demagogues came from among us, who joined the heroes of the street and the prophets of power grabbing. They use Russian pseudonyms because they are ashamed of their Jewish origin (Trotsky, Zinoview etc.), but maybe it is their Jewish name which is not genuine, because they have no roots to bind themselves to our people.

Grossman wrote about the "powerful flame of fanaticism" that captured one of his characters -- a "sad, sly shopkeeper from the shetl" who had no reason to hate capitalism based on his own circumstances and who caught the flame, perhaps, from the "wisdom" of the Communist Manifesto, or the suffering of "the impoverished people right beside him" -- or perhaps something else that extended further back:

Or was it that the smoldering coals were buried deep within his thousand-year inheritance, ready to burst into flame -- to do battle with Caesar's Roman soldiers, to confront the bonfires of the Spanish inquisition, to join in the starving frenzy of the Talmudists, to emerge in the shetl organization for self-defense during the pogroms? Was it the age-old chain of abuses, the anguish of the Babylonian captivity, the humiliations of the ghetto, or the misery of the Pale of Settlement that had produced and forged that unquenchable thirst that was scorching the soul of the Bolshevik Lev Mekler?

Prof. Polonsky ended his paper with a touching reference to the Polish-Jewish poet Stanislaw Wygodzki, who emigrated to Israel in 1968 and whose 1990 interview in a Polish paper was entitled "I Served an Evil Cause."  The poet said he nevertheless still believed in the ideals of "something that was once called Communism" -- which he characterized as the rejection of "exploitation, oppression and subjugation."

For one who heard the two days of presentations at YIVO, however, what was most striking was not the old ideals of the utopian left, or Michael Walzer's eloquent call for a leftist engagement with Jewish tradition in the future, but the ugly picture of "actually existing" leftism now.  Prof. Geras ended his paper with this:

We now know, as well, that should a new calamity ever befall the Jewish people, there will be, again, not only the direct architects and executants but also those who collaborate, who collude, who look away and find the words to go with doing so. Some of these, dismayingly, shamefully, will be of the left.

Rick Richman's articles have appeared in American Thinker, COMMENTARY, The Jewish Press, the New York Sun, PJ Media, and elsewhere.

3a)Why Wright Matters: Obama's on a Mission from God

By Tom Rowan

When Elwood retrieved his brother Jake from Joliet prison, the two went on a pilgrimage to their childhood Catholic orphanage.  Their pitiful orphanage was under siege from Chicago's infamously oppressive tax regime and was being put out of business.  For inspiration, the brothers were directed to a Chicago Baptist church.  The church was filled with laughter and love, song and dance, and miraculous divine inspiration that set the Blues Brothers on their own mission with a purpose: keep hope alive for Chicago orphans by paying off the corrupt Chicago regime.

The movie rendition of an all-black Baptist church led by the charismatic James Brown preacher, thrilling his flock with high-spirited love and devotion, is what gave The Blues Brothers soul.  This was what America imagined successful, loving black churches in Chicago looked like.  No wonder, then, that Reverend Wright's scream for God to damn America is so jarring even to this day.

Reverend Wright's sentiment and his rants do not belong in any American church.  Getting people high on hating America and its so-called white oppressors is what carnival barkers like Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson do for a living.  Most Americans still find it hard to reconcile the rage and the hate being preached at our president's old house of worship.  Christians get high on love, not hate.  Christians are encouraged to be forgiving, not condemning.  Christians seek to spread the good news and Christ's commandment that "[y]ou shall love your neighbor as yourself."  The hate and seeds of division being spouted at the president's church are an assault on Jesus Christ, and everyone knows it.

So is Mitt Romney right?  Should we dismiss Jeremiah Wright as just another phony street agitator like Sharpton and Jackson?  Do we need this distraction from the economic ruin Obama has wrought?  As an exercise in academic free thought, I think we do. 

Black Liberation Theology is a phony cult concocted by Marxists to divide America along racial lines on the American continents.  It explains how Hugo Chávez came to power.  This toxic Marxist theology helps explain Obama's destructive presidency.  It explains why racial division is being stoked by Obama's White House and his legions in the media.  Obama is a true believer in the idea that "rich white people" are to blame for the poor living standards of black Chicago orphans.  To wit: blacks and minorities are victims of an unjust system that rewards the few at the expense of the many.  Our system is inherently unfair, and Obama inherited an unjust system.  And Obama seeks to fundamentally transform that system -- "the man," the free market, and the powers of each uniquely individual American.  To Obama, a true believer, all the world's ills can be laid at the feet of America's enlightened Western free-enterprise economic system. 

Obama's false religion explains why he seems to have a chip on his shoulder about the country he is supposed to serve.  It explains the truly queer Reverend Wright quotation which Obama says inspired him to write Dreams from My Father: "White folks' greed runs a world in need."  Obama claims that it was this hateful sermon that brought tears to his eyes.  And it is no wonder Obama has a dim view of white people in power; he was and is surrounded by dishonest, power-grabbing white liberals from the corrupt Chicago Democrat Party.

Obama's faith that America is to blame for the world's ills is why he avoids talking about how America liberated over 5 million Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kuwait.  Obama does not know, nor does he care, that Kuwaiti children are named after Bush and not Hussein.  Obama's inculcated hatred for the American system explains why he married a woman who was not proud of her country until Barack ran for office.  Obama's inculcation into Black Liberation Theology explains why the president felt the need to go on a global apology tour on behalf of a disbelieving nation.  It helps to explain why the American left blithely describes the Israeli nation as illegitimate invaders and occupiers who practice Apartheid.

It's not that the Reverend Wright is anti-Semitic per se.  Wright and Obama simply see the Palestinians as all theologians of Marxist Liberation Theology do; what ails the Palestinians is that they are oppressed to live in the freest, safest, and most prosperous nation in the middle east: Israel.  To Obama, the Palestinians living in Israel are suffering under a Western free-market democracy; therefore, they are suffering in a "world of need" run by white people's greed.

Obama's worldview is so simple to see. It is so simple to understand.  What motivates Obama is so simple to explain, if only a free media would bother to expose it.  Cockamamie, but simple.  Obama believes he is on a mission from God to upend our oppressive free-market system and replace it with mystic utopian "fairness" as yet to be determined by enlightened ruling-class elites like him.

Black Liberation Theology explains Obama's fuzzy utopian vision, where everybody pays his fair share (to government statists like Obama), and everyone has equal work and equal pay in a government-subsidized fantasy industry.  Obama's mission explains his blind hubris and his laughable preaching to his fellow Americans to "be their brother's keeper" while his own brother, George Obama, lives in a hut in crushing poverty under Marxist rule.  What an embarrassment.  According to Obama's own written words, the American free-market system is to blame for George Obama's crushing poverty.  Indeed, white men's greed runs a world in need.

Obama's religion of hate explains the rabid protesters bused into various cities last year.  The Occupy (bowel) Movement was an orchestrated Obama-White-House human waste of time.  America is not clamoring to eat the rich, for we are our brother's keeper.

Obama's religion of hate helps explain the hatred of Sarah Palin.  Governor Palin is proud of and confident in America and the Western free-market system.  This is why the left is trying to destroy her to this day.  She speaks like Rush Limbaugh and looks dynamite in a skirt.  You want to see a real "war on women"?  Obama's supporters burned down Sarah Palin's church while women and children were inside. 

Obama's religion of hate explains his administration of the truly Orwellian "two minutes of hate."  First we are to hate on the banks for two minutes.  Next we hate on the oil companies for two minutes.  Next we hate on doctors.  Then we are to hate the insurance companies, Wall Street, pharmaceutical companies, Warren Buffett's tax rate, and let us not forget the two-minute hate of this particular day: we are to hate 1% of our American brothers and sisters because it's not fair that they are rich while Obama's brother lives in a hut. 

The problem with seeding hatred is that while it gives an adrenalin high and a quick fix for the stupid, in the end, it is not uplifting -- nor is it the truth.  It is not inspirational.  It is the stuff that motivates mobs, not nations.  It is as tiring and boring as a liberal college professor.  It is understandable why Romney does not want to focus on Obama's motivational belief system.  Marxist Liberation Theology is just too cockamamie to explain in a political ad.

Obama is blinded by hatred of the "system."  He was inculcated at a young age by skilled practitioners of his cult.  Obama is, after all, a red-diaper baby raised by committed Marxists, mentored by committed Marxists, baptized by a committed Marxist, schooled by committed Marxists, and being given kudos and policy advice by the committed Marxists he surrounds himself with to this very day.  Obama can be excused for being an indoctrinated true believer and the left's last best hope for "social justice," but that doesn't mean that we should put up with his deep-seated Marxism ruining our nation.

Alas, liberalism is dead, and socialism is killing nations far and wide in front of everyone's eyes.  Most Americans would rather avoid the crushing poverty that the un-kept George Obama must endure. 

We Hobbits should remember that our president's misguided mission to transform America is being put to a vote and coming to an end.  Too many people are on to the scams of the liberal left.  It will be important to remember and teach to others what you saw at the American Communist coup d'état.  It was a fizzling flop narrated by white folks who defecated on police cars.  Pity the left and their blind hatred for America.  And vote them out.

I tend to agree with Romney.  America does not need to know the horrible "truths" that motivate our president's policies.  Obama's mission to transform America was doomed from the beginning.  We love our country, and we each other.  We even love poor lost souls like Reverend Wright.  May God bless him, and may God bless America.

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4) Losing Egypt, Losing the Mid-East

By Michael Widlanski

l

While the world debates the threat of Iranian weapons and their long-term
effects on Israel and the Persian Gulf area, events may soon reach a
critical mass in the most central and important Arab country, Egypt, in
ways that endanger not only Egyptian-Israeli ties, but also the entire
fabric of stability in the oil-rich Mid-East.

Iran, though large and important, makes for both the geographical and
religious fringe of the Mid-East. Egypt, meanwhile, lies at the heart of
the Mid-East and symbolizes the region's dominant Sunni Arab community.

Recently, Israel warned all its citizens vacationing in the Sinai Desert to
evacuate the area immediately because of an influx of armed Libyan
extremists bent on killing Israelis.

"The whole area is becoming a kind of 'Wild West' with all kinds of groups,"
declared Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a radio interview.

A few days earlier, Israel's Shin Bet security agency confirmed that two of
the rockets used in recent attacks on the Israeli resort city of Eilat came
from the weapons depots of Libya, smuggled across the border into Egypt.
But there are other troubling signs.

Egyptian officials recently said they were unilaterally changing or
annulling the treaty under which Egypt sells natural gas to Israel.
Ex-Foreign Minister Amr Moussa applauded the gas cut-off. Moussa is a
leading candidate to win the coming election, and he projects a variant of
the Pan-Arab views of the late and not lamented Gamal Abdul-Nasser, who
tried to destroy Israel and leaned hard against U.S. interests in the area.
This is an area of agreement between the largely secular Moussa and some of
the leading Islamist candidates.

Some Egyptian officials deny abrogating signed agreements with Israel,
saying they merely want a better price for Egyptian gas, but this appears to
be the first time the Egyptian officials have shown that they are acting
parallel to terrorists who have blown up the pipeline to Israel and Jordan
fourteen times in the last year.

Egypt's military regime, these events show, may be losing control as
presidential elections near next month, and the military has banned several
leading presidential election candidates, especially angering the Islamic
parties. The generals may need a way to placate them, and Israel (and the
ties with it) are a convenient scapegoat.

There is also trouble on Egypt's western border. Obama's idea of "leading
from behind" in Libya was slow and ineffective, allowing Libyan weapons to
proliferate.

Israeli officials say al-Qaeda, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Libyan terrorists
are all operating in the Sinai Desert on Israel's southern border, some of
them having developed strong working relationships with members of the
eleven Bedouin tribes in Sinai who specialize in smuggling drugs, weapons,
and even enslaved women.

This is a recipe for disaster. A failed state in Afghanistan led to an
al-Qaeda base there, but a similar situation in Egypt, the most important
and populous Arab country, would be far worse. It might be even more
strategically disastrous than the fall of Iran to the ayatollahs when Jimmy
Carter was president.

The Arabs have a saying: Alf sanna istibdaad, wa la-sanna fawda. "Better a
thousand years of authoritarianism and not one year of anarchy." What we
now see in Egypt is the result of one year of anarchy, helped by President
Barack Obama.

Obama made a dramatic speech in Cairo in 2009 in which he courted the Muslim
Brotherhood, thus undermining Egypt's Husni Mubarak. Mubarak might have
been a less-than-perfect ally, but he was far better than the Brotherhood
that Obama and his aides mistakenly consider "moderates." He who asks
terrorists to dinner should expect terror and anarchy for dessert.

Obama's anti-Mubarak stance was not a new position. After 9-11, he spoke to
a Chicago newspaper about the need for the U.S. not to fight in Iraq, but
instead to fight against government corruption in the Middle East, citing
Egypt as an example. He strongly suggested that corruption in Egypt fed
poverty and helped cause 9-11.

But Obama was wrong. Corruption is not the main cause of Egyptian poverty,
and poverty was not the main cause of 9-11 or terror anywhere. Fighting
corruption is fine, everywhere from the Mid-East to the Mid-West -- and even
in Chicago. But corruption is not the driver of terror, and fighting it
does not require casting off a nearly irreplaceable ally.

Mubarak, for all his faults, worked like President Anwar Sadat to lead Egypt
to Infitaah -- opening Egypt to the West, much like Mikhail Gorbachev did
with glasnost. Sadat and Mubarak felt that a Western orbit could put a bit
more money in the average person's pocket. Egypt pulled away from Russian
political/economic models. Tourism and foreign investment grew.

Both Mubarak and Sadat did not make miracles overnight, but their move
toward the West and peace with Israel showed slow but steady gains for
average Egyptians.

Yet Egypt is a place where a million babies are born every nine months,
where 97% of the people live on two percent of the land, a thin strip on the
Nile. For Egyptians, it often feels like Egypt is running up a down
escalator, fighting just to stay in the same spot. Now even that is gone,
as tourism and foreign currency reserves have both plummeted.

Years from now we may not recall Obama's well-parsed words in Cairo, but we
will definitely be seeing the way they helped destroy the Sadat-Mubarak
heritage of peace and stability in the region.

Mubarak should have left on his own, and he should not have tried to pass
power to his son, Gamal. But Obama, Hillary Clinton, and then-CIA boss Leon
Panetta all pushed Mubarak out the door too quickly. They were patient with
rulers of Syria or Iran, who did far worse to their people than Mubarak did
to his, while also trying to harm the U.S. and its allies.

Elsewhere in the Mid-East, Obama's hasty comments and impatient policy have
hurt U.S. interests in Iraq and Afghanistan, by forcing U.S. soldiers to
punch a public clock timed to Obama's campaign schedule rather than to the
situation on the ground. This allowed a Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan
and Iranian intervention in Iraq.

What Iraqi or Afghani wants to ally himself with a U.S. sheriff about to
leave town? Obama brags about keeping his withdrawal timetable, but in the
Mid-East, Obama's version of "hope and change" has become "hype and chaos."

The last time a U.S. president's anti-corruption and pro-human rights
crusade failed so miserably was when Jimmy Carter and his advisers thought
Ayatollah Khomeini was a better bargain than the shah of Iran. We are still
paying for that error. Jimmy Carter's U.N. ambassador even spoke of
Khomeini as "some kind of saint," while Obama and his aides believe that
Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and Turkey's Islamist leadership are the face of
moderate Arab democracy.

One can only guess how long we will pay for Obama's many errors.

Dr. Michael Widlanski, an expert on Arab politics and communications, is the
author of Battle for Our Minds: Western Elites and the Terror Threat, just
published by Threshold/Simon and Schuster. He is a former reporter,
correspondent, and editor respectively at The New York Times, Cox
Newspapers, and The Jerusalem Post, and he served as a strategic affairs
adviser in Israel's Ministry of Public Security and as an adviser to Israeli
negotiating teams in 1991-92 at the Madrid Summit and thereafter.