More Relevant than Ever and America Adrift?

Though the words Conservative and Capitalist are in the title, the booklet is non-political in nature. If you find my Memo efforts of interest and maybe even challenging , whether you agree or not with what I write and/or post, then consider this a personal appeal to support my effort to raise money for The Wounded Warrior project. Buy my book expressing my thoughts on raising children. Please make your check for $10.99/copy to Paul Laflamme for a soft cover version and deduct half the cost as a donation to The Wounded Warrior Project. (Add $2.50 for postage and handling.) If you want a pdf version you can download the cost is $5.99. Click on WWW.Brokerberko.com --- Tom Sowell on Republican nice losers. He too has concern for our future. (See 1 below.) Meanwhile Bret offers the Republcans a piece of his mind and leads them to the path of future victories if they have the good sense to heed his advice. (See 1a below.) --- Marc Faber's inflation view as reported on by Dr. Steve Sjuggerud . (See 2 below.) --- Steve McCann and Rabbi Steven Pruzansky see us as a nation adrift. You decide. (See 3 and 3a below.) --- UNRWA Hypocrisy. Whenever the world community loses its moral gyroscope and cowers in the face of bullies bad things ultimately happen. Are we headed for a repeat performance? I believe we are. You decide. (See 4 below.) --- As my friend pointed out yesterday Conservatives lost the culture war and Prof. Tom Edsall verifies this view. I understand conservative reluctance to embrace standards you do not accord with but if you want to win you must find a way to alter your views and still be able to live with your decision. Not easy to accomplish but conservatives have no choice if they want to have some input regarding America going off the moral cliff.(See 5 below.) --- For all practical purposes Israel must be assumed Iran is already nuclear capable. Therefore, Israel must prepare a defense along other theoretical lines. (See 6 below.) --- Dick ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1)Nice Losers By Thomas Sowell Mitt Romney now joins the long list of the kinds of presidential candidates favored by the Republican establishment-- nice, moderate losers, people with no coherently articulated vision, despite how many ad hoc talking points they may have. The list of Republican presidential candidates like this goes back at least as far as 1948, when Thomas E. Dewey ran against President Harry Truman. Dewey spoke in lofty generalities while Truman spoke in hard-hitting specifics. Since then, there have been many re-runs of this same scenario, featuring losing Republican presidential candidates John McCain, Bob Dole, Gerald Ford and, when he ran for reelection, George H.W. Bush. Bush 41 first succeeded when he ran for election as if he were another Ronald Reagan ("Read my lips, no new taxes"), but then lost when he ran for reelection as himself-- "kinder and gentler," disdainful of "the vision thing" and looking at his watch during a debate, when he should have been counter-attacking against the foolish things being said. This year, Barack Obama had the hard-hitting specifics-- such as ending "tax cuts for the rich" who should pay "their fair share," government "investing" in "the industries of the future" and the like. He had a coherent vision, however warped. Most of Obama's arguments were rotten, if you bothered to put them under scrutiny. But someone once said that it is amazing how long the rotten can hold together, if you don't handle it roughly. Any number of conservative commentators, both in the print media and on talk radio, examined and exposed the fraudulence of Obama's "tax cuts for the rich" argument. But did you ever hear Mitt Romney bother to explain the specifics which exposed the flaws in Obama's argument? On election night, the rotten held together because Mitt Romney had not handled it roughly with specifics. Romney was too nice to handle Obama's absurdities roughly. He definitely out-niced Obama-- as John McCain had out-niced Obama in 2008, and as Dewey out-niced Truman back in 1948. And these Republicans all lost. In this year's first presidential debate, Obama out-niced Romney. But, when he lost out doing that, he then reversed himself, became the attacker, and ultimately the winner on election night, despite a track record that should have buried him in a landslide. When you look at this as a horse race, there is no question that the Republicans deserved to lose. But the stakes for this great nation, at this crucial juncture in its history and in the history of the world, are far too momentous to look at this election as just a contest between two candidates or two political parties. Quite aside from the immediate effects of particular policies, Barack Obama has repeatedly circumvented the laws, including the Constitution of the United States, in ways and on a scale that pushes this nation in the direction of arbitrary one-man rule. Now that Obama will be in a position to appoint Supreme Court justices who can rubber stamp his evasions of the law and usurpations of power, this country may be unrecognizable in a few years as the America that once led the world in freedom, as well as in many other things. Barack Obama's boast, on the eve of the election of 2008-- "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America"-- can now be carried out, without fear of ever having to face the voters again. This "transforming" project extends far beyond fundamental internal institutions, or even the polarization and corruption of the people themselves, with goodies handed out in exchange for their surrendering their birthright of freedom. Obama will now also have more "flexibility," as he told Russian President Medvedev, to transform the international order, where he has long shown that he thinks America has too much power and influence. A nuclear Iran can change that. Forever. Have you noticed how many of our enemies in other countries have been rooting for Obama? You or your children may yet have reason to recall that as a bitter memory of a warning sign ignored on election day in 2012 1a)Earth to GOP: Get a Grip Conservatives should demand IQ tests of Republican candidates. By Bret Stephens In January I was rebuked by some readers for predicting that the GOP would lose, and for saying it deserved to lose, too. "It doesn't matter that Americans are generally eager to send Mr. Obama packing," I wrote. "All they need is to be reasonably sure that the alternative won't be another fiasco. But they can't be reasonably sure, so it's going to be four more years of the disappointment you already know." I quote these lines less to boast about my prescience than to establish some credibility for what I'm about to say. Fellow conservatives, please stop obsessing about what other adults might be doing in their bedrooms, so long as it's lawful and consensual and doesn't impinge in some obvious way on you. This obsession is socially uncouth, politically counterproductive and, too often, unwittingly revealing. Also, if gay people wish to lead conventionally bourgeois lives by getting married, that may be lunacy on their part but it's a credit to our values. Channeling passions that cannot be repressed toward socially productive ends is the genius of the American way. The alternative is the tapped foot and the wide stance. Also, please tone down the abortion extremism. Supporting so-called partial-birth abortions, as too many liberals do, is abortion extremism. But so is opposing abortion in cases of rape and incest, to say nothing of the life of the mother. Democrats did better with a president who wanted abortion to be "safe, legal and rare"; Republicans would have done better by adopting former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels's call for a "truce" on social issues. By the way, what's so awful about Spanish? It's a fine European language with an outstanding literary tradition—Cervantes, Borges, Paz, Vargas Llosa—and it would do you no harm to learn it. Bilingualism is an intellectual virtue, not a deviant sexual practice. Which reminds me: Can we, as the GOP base, demand an IQ exam as well as a test of basic knowledge from our congressional and presidential candidates? This is not a flippant suggestion: There were at least five Senate seats in this election cycle that might have been occupied by a Republican come January had not the invincible stupidity of the candidate stood in the way. On the subject of idiocy, can someone explain where's the political gold in demonizing Latin American immigrants? California's Prop 187, passed in 1994, helped destroy the GOP in a once-reliable state. Yet Republicans have been trying to replicate that fiasco on a national scale ever since. If the argument is that illegal immigrants are overtaxing the welfare state, then that's an argument for paring back the welfare state, not deporting 12 million people. If the argument is that these immigrants "steal" jobs, then that's an argument by someone who either doesn't understand the free market or aspires for his children to become busboys and chambermaids. And if the argument is that these immigrants don't share our values, then religiosity, hard work, personal stoicism and the sense of family obligation expressed through billions of dollars in remittances aren't American values. Here's another suggestion: Running for president should be undertaken only by those with a reasonable chance of winning a general election. It should not be seen as an opportunity to redeem a political reputation or audition for a gig on Fox News. Mitt Romney won the nomination for the simple reason that every other contender was utterly beyond the pale of national acceptability, except Michele Bachmann. Just kidding. Though conservatives put themselves through the paces of trying to like Mr. Romney, he was never a natural standard bearer for the GOP. He was, instead, a consensus politician in the mold of Jerry Ford and George H.W. Bush; a technocrat who loved to "wallow in data"; a plutocrat with a fatal touch of class guilt. His campaign was a study in missed opportunities, punctuated by 90 brilliant minutes in Denver. Like a certain Massachusetts governor who preceded him, he staked his presidential claims on "competence." But Americans want inspiration from their presidents. Mr. Romney was never likely to deliver on that score. And though I have my anxieties about the president's next term, I also have a hunch the GOP dodged a bullet with Mr. Romney's loss. It dodged a bullet because a Romney victory would have obscured deeper trends in American politics the GOP must take into account. A Romney administration would also have been politically cautious and ideologically defensive in a way that rarely serves the party well. Finally, the GOP dodged ownership of the second great recession, which will inevitably hit when the Federal Reserve can no longer float the economy in pools of free money. When that happens, Barack Obama won't have George W. Bush to kick around. So get a grip, Republicans: Our republican experiment in self-government didn't die last week. But a useful message has been sent to a party that spent too much of the past four years listening intently to echoes of itself. Change the channel for a little while. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------2)EXACTLY Which Investments Do Well During Inflation By Dr. Steve Sjuggerud "The market on [Obama's] re-election should be down at least 50%," Marc Faber told Bloomberg news last week… "I think Mr. Obama is a disaster for business and a disaster for the United States," he continued. "Not that Mr. Romney would be much better… You also have in the background Mr. Bernanke, who with artificially low interest rates enables the debt to essentially escalate endlessly." Faber – a legendary contrarian investor – sees a future of endlessly rising government debts in America, paid for by money printing from the Fed. The end result, he says, is inevitable: inflation. While you might not agree with Faber's views, he certainly knows his financial history. In 2002, he wrote a book called Tomorrow's Gold. He included an important table in that book, which showed the performance of different asset classes during the period of massive inflation from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. Take a look… Asset Class Performance During the Last Inflation: 1970-1980 Gold 31.6% U.S. Coins 27.7% Silver 23.7% Stamps 21.8% Chinese Ceramics 21.6% Japanese Stocks * 20.0% Diamonds 15.3% U.S. Farmland 14.0% U.S. Housing 10.2% Inflation (U.S. CPI) 7.7% Treasury Bills 7.7% Bonds 6.6% U.S. Stocks 6.1% * Not included in Faber's book I find this table enlightening… It shows plenty of important things about inflation and investments that are important to take note of today as well… • U.S. stocks and bonds didn't even manage to keep up with inflation. • Real, income-generating assets that adjust with inflation (like farmland and housing) far outpaced inflation. • Gold was king… and silver was not far behind. • High-end collectibles did very well (i.e. coins and stamps). I included Japanese stocks in the table above, even though they were not in Faber's book. Japan's stock market was more of an emerging market back then, and it was somewhat uncorrelated to the U.S. stock market. That emerging market soared – compounding at 20% a year (plus dividends). I expect we'll see some specific emerging-market stock markets do well when inflation hits this time around, too… particularly those that are uncorrelated to the U.S., just like Japan did in the 1970s. India in particular could do very well, for reasons I have previously explained. I've spoken with a lot of investors in the last week… from CEOs of huge companies to individual investors. They're all worried about inflation. And none of them has the perfect answer. I think this table of what worked in the 1970s is the best starting point for what could work if inflation starts to worsen again this time around… Good investing, Steve ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------3) A Nation Adrift By Steve McCann It is now an unquestionable reality that the United States is no longer the beacon of freedom and hope for all mankind. As America careens toward not only a fiscal cliff, but a societal one, theories abound as to why, including changing demographics and technology. But the answer is relatively simple: an increasing number of people in the United States, in their pursuit of lives of relative ease, have turned their backs on the basic rules of human behavior as espoused by Judeo-Christian teachings and have instead placed more and more trust in man. The moral fiber of a country, and the religious basis upon which the United States and European nations developed, is being replaced by a misguided faith in people. Although mankind has accomplished great things, the human race has always been overwhelmingly susceptible to its base nature. The historic consequence of repudiating established moral and ethical guidelines is a society that gradually and inevitably becomes devoid of humility, honor, decency and respect for the uniqueness of all mankind. Within that society, the governing class inexorably develops an unrestrained craving for power and self-aggrandizement which ultimately manifests itself in the subjugation of the populace--either by force or the exploitation of the primary human foibles of greed, envy and lust coupled with state control of the means of individual livelihood. The major casualty of this evolutionary process is the abandonment of God-given rights of life and liberty eventuating in a collapse or violent overthrow of the society. In the most recent national election cycle the Democrats and the Obama re-election team, with the complicity of the media, cast aside any pretext of honor and integrity as they, utilizing today's all-encompassing media world, engaged in the most deceptive and unethical campaign in recent American history. In order to maintain their grip on power the end justified any means. Including playing on and exacerbating the fears and foibles of the populace while promoting government, controlled by the Democratic Party, as the source of salvation and survival. The message being conveyed to an ever larger portion of a willing and susceptible American population is: there are no restraints on personal behavior and it is acceptable, using the auspices of government, to forcefully take from one group and give to another. In fact by the mere circumstance of living in America one is entitled to a livelihood and a vast panoply of rights as defined by and granted by the government. As this mindset takes hold in any country, a calamitous cycle begins. In order to satisfy the unleashed greed and envy of more and more people and to fulfill unsustainable promises, the governing class must tax, spend and borrow at an ever-increasing rate until they can no longer borrow on the open market or tax a rapidly diminishing producer class. At that point either the nation descends into chaos or revolution or its leadership embarks on war and conquest. Over the past century, the nations of Europe, by tolerating the ascendancy of man's ignoble nature, experienced the near-total destruction of a continent and the loss of countless millions of lives in two wars, and the emergence of communism. Yet today, many of these same nations are again facing tumult and instability. Their ruling classes and populations have become almost universally agnostic, as the pursuit of an unfettered lifestyle has become the new religion. Further, an overwhelming percentage of the people look to and rely on government to satisfy their needs and their expectation of an ever-growing standard of living. These needs and expectations can no longer be met as these nations are now bankrupt. They have destroyed their economic base attempting to placate the populace and honor their unsustainable promises. Rather than face reality, these governments and their citizens do not have the fortitude and determination to make the difficult choices and change course, as they live in societies that have repudiated the ethical and moral guidelines that should govern human behavior and were once the foundation of these nations. Their descent into chaos is unstoppable. Unfortunately, a majority of the American people, as revealed in the most recent national election, whose numbers have consistently increased over the past twenty years, are choosing to follow in the footsteps of European political, economic and moral failings. In the post-mortems following the re-election of Barack Obama, many Republicans and conservatives were focused on the usual platitudes of better messaging or to be more "inclusive" as the solutions to winning future elections and reversing the course of the nation. Nothing could be further from the truth. The American left dominates the cultural and political scene because they exploit and appeal to the most fundamental trait of the human race: the desire to survive and prosper with the least amount of effort and hardship. No amount of conservative messaging or supposed inclusion will counter that human impulse as long as the government, controlled by its current leadership, can tax, print and borrow money while convincing the people all is under control, there are no behavioral boundaries, and as for whatever problems that do exist -- they are the fault of the greedy, self-centered and anachronistic political opposition. The United States is now at the point where the last chance to avoid an ignominious fate is for the nation to descend to the depths of experiencing first-hand the early stages of the turmoil and suffering extant in Europe and elsewhere. Perhaps when reality does finally set in, the people will turn to the leadership of their fellow citizens who are still committed to the nation's founding tenets. Unlike Europe, there remains in America a large swath of the populace that lives by and understand the importance of not only the moral underpinnings but the historical success of individual liberty and freedom. However, in order to weather the potential catastrophe looming over the horizon and the tumult inherent in a requisite change of direction, the American people must begin to acknowledge that throughout history, the key to peace and prosperity lies in a relationship with God and striving to live by traditional moral and ethical guidelines. In the 1840's Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: "Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith." Once established, liberty cannot be sustained without a just and moral society. 3a)THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE By Rabbi Steven Pruzansky, spiritual leader of Congregation Bnai Yeshurun, Teaneck , New Jersey The most charitable way of explaining the election results of 2012 is that Americans voted for the status quo – for the incumbent President and for a divided Congress. They must enjoy gridlock, partisanship, incompetence, economic stagnation and avoidance of responsibility. And fewer people voted. As I write, with almost all the votes counted, President Obama has won fewer votes than John McCain won in 2008, and more than ten million off his own 2008 total. But as we awake from the nightmare, it is important to eschew the facile explanations for the Romney defeat that will prevail among the chattering classes. Romney did not lose because of the effects of Hurricane Sandy that devastated this area, nor did he lose because he ran a poor campaign, nor did he lose because the Republicans could have chosen better candidates, nor did he lose because Obama benefited from a slight uptick in the economy due to the business cycle. Romney lost because he didn’t get enough votes to win. That might seem obvious, but not for the obvious reasons. Romney lost because the conservative virtues – the traditional American virtues – of liberty, hard work, free enterprise, private initiative and aspirations to moral greatness – no longer inspire or animate a majority of the electorate. The notion of the “Reagan Democrat” is one cliché that should be permanently retired. Ronald Reagan himself could not win an election in today’s America. The simplest reason why Romney lost was because it is impossible to compete against free stuff. Every businessman knows this; that is why the “loss leader” or the giveaway is such a powerful marketing tool. Obama’s America is one in which free stuff is given away: the adults among the 47,000,000 on food stamps clearly recognized for whom they should vote, and so they did, by the tens of millions; those who – courtesy of Obama – receive two full years of unemployment benefits (which, of course, both disincentivizes looking for work and also motivates people to work off the books while collecting their windfall) surely know for whom to vote; so too those who anticipate “free” health care, who expect the government to pay their mortgages, who look for the government to give them jobs. The lure of free stuff is irresistible. Imagine two restaurants side by side. One sells its customers fine cuisine at a reasonable price, and the other offers a free buffet, all-you-can-eat as long as supplies last. Few – including me – could resist the attraction of the free food. Now imagine that the second restaurant stays in business because the first restaurant is forced to provide it with the food for the free buffet, and we have the current economy, until, at least, the first restaurant decides to go out of business. (Then, the government takes over the provision of free food to its patrons.) The defining moment of the whole campaign was the revelation (by the amoral Obama team) of the secretly-recorded video in which Romney acknowledged the difficulty of winning an election in which “47% of the people” start off against him because they pay no taxes and just receive money – “free stuff” – from the government. Almost half of the population has no skin in the game – they don’t care about high taxes, promoting business, or creating jobs, nor do they care that the money for their free stuff is being borrowed from their children and from the Chinese. They just want the free stuff that comes their way at someone else’s expense. In the end, that 47% leaves very little margin for error for any Republican, and does not bode well for the future. It is impossible to imagine a conservative candidate winning against such overwhelming odds. People do vote their pocketbooks. In essence, the people vote for a Congress who will not raise their taxes, and for a President who will give them free stuff, never mind who has to pay for it. That engenders the second reason why Romney lost: the inescapable conclusion that the electorate is dumb – ignorant, and uninformed. Indeed, it does not pay to be an informed voter, because most other voters – the clear majority – are unintelligent and easily swayed by emotion and raw populism. That is the indelicate way of saying that too many people vote with their hearts and not their heads. That is why Obama did not have to produce a second term agenda, or even defend his first-term record. He needed only to portray Mitt Romney as a rapacious capitalist who throws elderly women over a cliff, when he is not just snatching away their cancer medication, while starving the poor and cutting taxes for the rich. Obama could get away with saying that “Romney wants the rich to play by a different set of rules” – without ever defining what those different rules were; with saying that the “rich should pay their fair share” – without ever defining what a “fair share” is; with saying that Romney wants the poor, elderly and sick to “fend for themselves” – without even acknowledging that all these government programs are going bankrupt, their current insolvency only papered over by deficit spending. Obama could get away with it because he knew he was talking to dunces waving signs and squealing at any sight of him. During his 1956 presidential campaign, a woman called out to Adlai Stevenson: “Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!” Stevenson called back: “That’s not enough, madam, we need a majority!” Truer words were never spoken. Similarly, Obama (or his surrogates) could hint to blacks that a Romney victory would lead them back into chains and proclaim to women that their abortions and birth control would be taken away. He could appeal to Hispanics that Romney would have them all arrested and shipped to Mexico (even if they came from Cuba or Honduras ), and unabashedly state that he will not enforce the current immigration laws. He could espouse the furtherance of the incestuous relationship between governments and unions – in which politicians ply the unions with public money, in exchange for which the unions provide the politicians with votes, in exchange for which the politicians provide more money and the unions provide more votes, etc., even though the money is gone. He could do and say all these things because he knew his voters were dolts. One might reasonably object that not every Obama supporter could be unintelligent. But they must then rationally explain how the Obama agenda can be paid for, aside from racking up multi-trillion dollar deficits. “Taxing the rich” does not yield even 10% of what is required – so what is the answer, i.e., an intelligent answer? Obama also knows that the electorate has changed – that whites will soon be a minority in America (they’re already a minority in California) and that the new immigrants to the US are primarily from the Third World and do not share the traditional American values that attracted immigrants in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is a different world, and a different America . Obama is part of that different America , knows it, and knows how to tap into it. That is why he won. Obama also proved again that negative advertising works, invective sells, and harsh personal attacks succeed. That Romney never engaged in such diatribes points to his essential goodness as a person; his “negative ads” were simple facts, never personal abuse – facts about high unemployment, lower take-home pay, a loss of American power and prestige abroad, a lack of leadership, etc. As a politician, though, Romney failed because he did not embrace the devil’s bargain of making unsustainable promises, and by talking as the adult and not the adolescent. Obama has spent the last six years campaigning; even his governance has been focused on payoffs to his favored interest groups. The permanent campaign also won again, to the detriment of American life. It turned out that it was not possible for Romney and Ryan – people of substance, depth and ideas – to compete with the shallow populism and platitudes of their opponents. Obama mastered the politics of envy – of class warfare – never reaching out to Americans as such but to individual groups, and cobbling together a winning majority from these minority groups. Conservative ideas failed to take root and states that seemed winnable, and amenable to traditional American values, have simply disappeared from the map. If an Obama could not be defeated – with his record and his vision of America , in which free stuff seduces voters – it is hard to envision any change in the future. The road to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and to a European-socialist economy – those very economies that are collapsing today in Europe – is paved. A second cliché that should be retired is that America is a center-right country. It clearly is not. It is a divided country with peculiar voting patterns, and an appetite for free stuff. Studies will invariably show that Republicans in Congress received more total votes than Democrats in Congress, but that means little. The House of Representatives is not truly representative of the country. That people would vote for a Republican Congressmen or Senator and then Obama for President would tend to reinforce point two above: the empty-headedness of the electorate. Americans revile Congress but love their individual Congressmen. Go figure. The mass media’s complicity in Obama’s re-election cannot be denied. One example suffices. In 2004, CBS News forged a letter in order to imply that President Bush did not fulfill his Air National Guard service during the Vietnam War, all to impugn Bush and impair his re-election prospects. In 2012, President Obama insisted – famously – during the second debate that he had stated all along that the Arab attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi was “terror” (a lie that Romney fumbled and failed to exploit). Yet, CBS News sat on a tape of an interview with Obama in which Obama specifically avoided and rejected the claim of terrorism – on the day after the attack – clinging to the canard about the video. (This snippet of a “60 Minutes” interview was not revealed - until two days ago!) In effect, CBS News fabricated evidence in order to harm a Republican president, and suppressed evidence in order to help a Democratic president. Simply shameful, as was the media’s disregard of any scandal or story that could have jeopardized the Obama re-election. One of the more irritating aspects of this campaign was its limited focus, odd in light of the billions of dollars spent. Only a few states were contested, a strategy that Romney adopted, and that clearly failed. The Democrat begins any race with a substantial advantage. The liberal states – like the bankrupt California and Illinois – and other states with large concentrations of minority voters as well as an extensive welfare apparatus, like New York , New Jersey and others – give any Democratic candidate an almost insurmountable edge in electoral votes. In New Jersey , for example, it literally does not pay for a conservative to vote. It is not worth the fuel expended driving to the polls. As some economists have pointed out generally, and it resonates here even more, the odds are greater that a voter will be killed in a traffic accident on his way to the polls than that his vote will make a difference in the election. It is an irrational act. That most states are uncompetitive means that people are not amenable to new ideas, or new thinking, or even having an open mind. If that does not change, and it is hard to see how it can change, then the die is cast. America is not what it was, and will never be again. For Jews, mostly assimilated anyway and staunch Democrats, the results demonstrate again that liberalism is their Torah. Almost 70% voted for a president widely perceived by Israelis and most committed Jews as hostile to Israel . They voted to secure Obama’s future at America ’s expense and at Israel ’s expense – in effect, preferring Obama to Netanyahu by a wide margin. A dangerous time is ahead. Under present circumstances, it is inconceivable that the US will take any aggressive action against Iran and will more likely thwart any Israeli initiative. That Obama’s top aide Valerie Jarrett (i.e., Iranian-born Valerie Jarrett) spent last week in Teheran is not a good sign. The US will preach the importance of negotiations up until the production of the first Iranian nuclear weapon – and then state that the world must learn to live with this new reality. As Obama has committed himself to abolishing America’s nuclear arsenal, it is more likely that that unfortunate circumstance will occur than that he will succeed in obstructing Iran’s plans. Obama’s victory could weaken Netanyahu’s re-election prospects, because Israelis live with an unreasonable – and somewhat pathetic – fear of American opinion and realize that Obama despises Netanyahu. A Likud defeat – or a diminution of its margin of victory – is more probable now than yesterday. That would not be the worst thing. Netanyahu, in fact, has never distinguished himself by having a strong political or moral backbone, and would be the first to cave to the American pressure to surrender more territory to the enemy and acquiesce to a second (or third, if you count Jordan ) Palestinian state. A new US Secretary of State named John Kerry, for example (he of the Jewish father) would not augur well. Netanyahu remains the best of markedly poor alternatives. Thus, the likeliest outcome of the upcoming Israeli elections is a center-left government that will force itself to make more concessions and weaken Israel – an Oslo III. But this election should be a wake-up call to Jews. There is no permanent empire, nor is there is an enduring haven for Jews anywhere in the exile. The most powerful empires in history all crumbled – from the Greeks and the Romans to the British and the Soviets. None of the collapses were easily foreseen, and yet they were predictable in retrospect. The American empire began to decline in 2007, and the deterioration has been exacerbated in the last five years. This election only hastens that decline. Society is permeated with sloth, greed, envy and materialistic excess. It has lost its moorings and its moral foundations. The takers outnumber the givers, and that will only increase in years to come. Across the world, America under Bush was feared but not respected. Under Obama , America is neither feared nor respected. Radical Islam has had a banner four years under Obama, and its prospects for future growth look excellent. The “Occupy” riots across this country in the last two years were mere dress rehearsals for what lies ahead – years of unrest sparked by the increasing discontent of the unsuccessful who want to seize the fruits and the bounty of the successful, and do not appreciate the slow pace of redistribution. Two bright sides: Notwithstanding the election results, I arose this morning, went to shul, davened and learned Torah afterwards. That is our reality, and that trumps all other events. Our relationship with G-d matters more than our relationship with any politician, R or D. And, notwithstanding the problems in Israel , it is time for Jews to go home, to Israel . We have about a decade, perhaps 15 years, to leave with dignity and without stress. Thinking that it will always be because it always was has been a repetitive and deadly Jewish mistake. America was always the land from which “positive” aliya came – Jews leaving on their own, and not fleeing a dire situation. But that can also change. The increased aliya in the last few years is partly attributable to young people fleeing the high cost of Jewish living in America . Those costs will only increase in the coming years. We should draw the appropriate conclusions. If this election proves one thing, it is that the Old America is gone. And, sad for the world, it is not coming back. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4)UNRWA Keeps Quiet on Syria By Asaf Romirowsky and Alexander Joffe When two employees of UNRWA, the United Nations organization for Palestinians, were killed in Syria, one by a sniper and the other in a crossfire, the organization responded by deploring "the tragic loss of life." It was even more subdued when Syrian artillery shells slammed into a United Nations school for Palestinians in a Damascus suburb, as it called for "all sides to refrain from conducting the conflict in civilian areas and to comply with their obligations under international law." These mild responses were utterly unlike the cries of condemnation and calls for war-crimes investigations that came forth when an Israeli shell struck outside an UNRWA school during the 2009 Gaza. But double standards are sometimes revealing. The responses point to a new predicament for UNRWA and Palestinians. Simply put, they are no longer the Middle East's premier refugees. Some three hundred thousand Syrian refugees are now registered with the UN in neighboring countries, with estimates of up to seven hundred thousand refugees by year's end. The way the UN deals with these developments is instructive. Syrian refugees must rely on the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which deals with crises the world over. Palestinian refugees have their own dedicated organization, which for more than sixty years has acted as their internationally funded health, education and welfare ministry. UNHCR has a staff of 7,600 spread across 126 countries. UNRWA has a staff of twenty thousand in the West Bank and Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. UNHCR's budget in 2010 was $1.3 billion, while UNRWA's was roughly $600 million. One organization is about helping refugees; the other is about keeping Palestinians refugees. The amount of international money and attention paid to the Palestinian refugees has no precedent. For decades, it has relied on the predictable and concerted efforts of Arab and Muslim states to demand ever-increasing amounts of money from Western donors, as well as majorities in the UN General Assembly who will condemn every Israeli abuse, real or imagined, of Palestinians. The rebellions across the Middle East and the underlying Sunni-Shia conflict that is tearing Syria and other countries apart have changed the rules of the game. The Assad regime and Syria supported UNRWA as a weapon against Israel and the United States rather than out of sympathy for the Palestinians. Palestinian terror groups including Hamas and Islamic Jihad also have long been based in Syria and, like Hezbollah, have benefitted from the Assad regime's patronage. But this support also had a price—the refusal of Syria to permit integration of fellow Arabs, namely Palestinians, into the Syrian society in which they have resided for six decades. Unlike Lebanon, the 470,000 Palestinians in Syria have been granted the right to work in any profession but are not citizens and cannot own property besides the houses in which they reside. But most Palestinians in Syria have never known any other home and are effectively as Syrian as other groups in that country's ethnic-religious patchwork. Unlike Christians, Druze and other groups now being turned into refugees or internally displaced persons, Palestinians have the UNRWA to provide support and act as their advocate. Syrian refugees will now ask why one resident population has its own UN support organization while the rest do not. But broader Arab and international support for UNRWA and the Palestinian cause can no longer be taken for granted. Nominally, the Palestinian issue is the only thing that can unite the Arab and Muslim worlds, even though in material terms their support has been utterly trivial. Now, the Arab and Muslim worlds have been gripped—and sharply divided—by a genuine humanitarian tragedy. The Palestinian issue is no longer as immediate. UNRWA must now compete for attention and support while not alienating either the Baathist regime or the rebels and their various patrons. UNRWA is therefore playing a cautious game. The organization has a patented sense of outrage, honed against Israel, as well as a keen sense of public relations. But these cannot be used against Syria, which could, as in Kuwait in 1991, simply expel Palestinians without any international challenge. Palestinians themselves are equally unaccustomed to the lack of attention and to assuming a secondary position in the Arab world's litany of crises, even as they have been maintained as second-class citizens for decades by states such as Syria or Lebanon. The tragic scale of the human-rights crisis in Syria—some thirty thousand dead, hundreds of thousands displaced and murderous abuses on all sides—has put the Palestinian situation in proper perspective. Decades of unwillingness to resettle Palestinians on the part of Syria, the UN and the Palestinians themselves have again had the unintended consequence of making Palestinians vulnerable. Any just solution to the Syrian situation will demand that Palestinians be granted full citizenship rights and at the same time be made to stand on their own two feet without special international aid that only retards their reintegration and infuriates their neighbors. Such a solution would also inevitably put UNRWA out of business. UNRWA is more likely to play a quiet waiting game. It should not be permitted to do so. Asaf Romirowsky an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Forum and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Alex Joffe is a Shillman-Ginsburg Fellow of the Middle East Forum. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------5)The Culture War and the Jobs Crisis By THOMAS B. EDSALL Struggling to remain optimistic the day after the election, the anti-abortion activist Charles A. Donovan, president of the Charlotte Lozier Institute, argued that the moral collapse he sees in the re-election of President Obama and in Democratic Senate victories is only a temporary setback. On the National Review web site, Donovan declared: We may be on the verge of a new Babylonian captivity for religious conservatives. As we know, the story does not end there. Actually, Donovan and his fellow right-wingers can expect to be living in a Babylonian captivity for quite some time. The right has lost the culture war. On Nov. 6, voters in three states (Maine, Maryland and Washington) approved same-sex marriage; two states (Colorado and Washington) passed ballot initiatives allowing the recreational use of marijuana; Wisconsin elected the first openly gay Senator, Tammy Baldwin; and Florida voters rejected a ballot initiative prohibiting the use of public funds for abortions by ten points. In the next Congress, women and minorities will hold a majority of the Democratic Party’s House seats — white men, in other words, for the first time in history, will not make up a majority of a party’s delegation to the House. Every member of the House and Senate from New Hampshire will be a woman and the total number of female senators will jump from 15 to 20 in 2013. To the dismay of the conservative movement, on virtually every burning issue that preoccupies the right, the country has moved steadily leftward. Election Day exit polling found, by a margin of 49 to 46, that a plurality of voters supported same-sex marriage. The same survey found that 59 percent of voters believe abortion should be legal in all (29 percent) or most (30 percent) cases, while only 36 percent believe it should be illegal in most (23 percent) or all (13 percent) cases. The chart, Fig. 1, from Gallup on the “morality” of same-sex “relations” reflects the leftward cultural trend with the percentage of respondents saying that homosexual relations are morally acceptable growing from 40 percent in 2001 to 54 percent in 2012: Gallup Fig. 1. CLICK TO ENLARGE Similarly, researchers at American National Election Studies have found continuing growth, Fig. 2, in the level of support for the equality of women: Fig. 2. Republicans and conservatives are clearly struggling to come to terms with the changing character of the nation. From the hard right, Erick Erickson calls for purging the Republican party of moderates in order to achieve ideological purity: We must lay the groundwork now with fresh ideas embedded with timeless principles sold by voices who understand people forget and must be reminded why America is great and why conservatism helped make it that way. We must continue, as a conservative movement, challenging and ending the political careers of Republicans who carry the banner of conservatism while selling it out. It is unlikely, however, that bloodletting within the Republican Party will solve its current problems. The roots of the party’s dilemma run deeper, with two parallel and mutually reinforcing developments structuring political change The first is the coalescing of “issue clusters” – particularly on the left. Throughout much of the period of conservative domination of presidential elections from 1968 to 1988 — and in terms of Congressional power from 1994 to 2006 — the Republican Party had a major election-day edge: there was far more ideological cohesion and less divisive conflict on the right than on the left. Conservatives, from white evangelicals to corporate C.E.O.s, found common ground in their support for an aggressive national defense and in their opposition to what they saw as a coercive, redistributive tax collecting and intrusively regulatory domestic government. The left was often split: between environmentalists and pro-development unions; between proponents and opponents of affirmative action; between law-and-order whites and liberal advocates of criminal defendants’ rights. As a result, the Democratic Party was vulnerable to Republican wedge issue strategies that produced such famous political commercials as Jesse Helms’s “Hands” — a k a. “White Hands” — and Ronald Reagan’s “Bear” More recently, there has been a steady diminution of conflict and a growing consensus on the left culminating in the 2008 and 2012 election victories. Issues now linked – clustered — in the minds of many Democratic voters include not only traditional socio-cultural, moral and racial issues like women’s, minority and gay rights, abortion and contraception, non-marital child-bearing, and the obligation of government to provide a safety net, but also to matters pertaining to the overarching role of government in generating greater social justice. In this view, the achievement of a just society requires a government active in pursuing a progressive distribution of income (through the tax code, for example), and the reduction of armed conflict, as well as the active regulation of matters as diverse as sustainable development, environmental protection and consumer-friendly reform of the finance and banking sectors. Essentially, the new core of the party – minorities, unmarried men and women, young voters and whites with advanced degrees – is in general agreement on this broader spectrum of issues, forming a coalition of shared ideas. The aggregation of a broad set of issues in forming a left or right political orientation marks a major change in American politics. Philip Converse, of the University of Michigan, studied data from the 1956 and 1960 elections and found that only a small minority of highly educated and well-informed voters viewed politics through what might be called an ideological lens. But things have really changed since then. Alan Abramowitz of Emory University has documented a major shift as voters have made decisions based on a collection of variables that once would have been seen as unrelated. In a study based on 2008 polling, Abramowitz found majorities or solid pluralities of voters formed consistently liberal or conservative views – not centrist positions – on a continuum of issues including gay rights and abortion; off-shore oil drilling; the Iraq war; health care; financial regulation; climate change and mortgage assistance to low-income homeowners. In effect, Abramowitz writes, the historical dependence of the Democratic Party on moderate-to-conservative whites has decreased considerably while the contribution of liberal whites and especially nonwhites has increased. While moderate-to-conservative whites made up a majority of those who voted for Carter, they comprised barely a quarter of those who voted for Obama. Demographic groups that favor social justice dispute the even-handedness of the marketplace; they often view business and corporations with suspicion; and they believe that the state has an obligation to provide for those struggling in a free market system. These demographic constituencies have grown in numbers, and today form a relatively robust coalition: the Democratic Party. Single voters are more amenable than are their married counterparts to a government focused on social justice. Unmarried voters are substantially more vulnerable to economic downturns and the loss of a job; they look more favorably on such safety net programs as unemployment benefits, government-sponsored health insurance, and government initiatives to ensure food security. Married couples, on the other hand, are more focused on minimizing their tax burden. The share of the electorate made up of single voters has been growing steadily. In 1992, 34 percent of voters were unmarried; in 2012, it was 40 percent. In the population as a whole, 72 percent of adults were married in 1972; in 2010, it was just 51 percent. On a larger scale, the Pew Research Center has produced an analysis, Fig. 3, that shows that minority voters, who backed Obama by an 8-2 margin, will be an absolute majority of the population in 38 years, growing from 15.1 percent in 1960 to 34 percent in 2011 to 51 percent in 2050. Minority voters hold policy and ideological views very similar to those of unmarried men and women – they are in fact an overlapping population because a much lower percentage of African American (at 31 percent) and Hispanic adults (at 48 percent) are married than whites (at 55 percent). Minority voters are noticeably more supportive of activist government policies than the average white voter. Fig. 3 The contrasting issue priorities of Democrats and Republicans ­— marital status aside — were evident in the answer to a particular question the 2012 exit polls asked. When voters were prompted to pick the most important issue facing the country – foreign policy, the federal deficit, the economy or health care – only 15 percent chose the deficit, but those who chose the deficit were overwhelmingly Romney voters by a 2-1 margin, 66-32. A slightly higher percentage, 18 percent, chose health care, and these voters supported Obama voters by a 3-1 margin, 75-24. An illuminating chart that tracks demographic shifts from 2004 to 2008 to 2012, appropriately headlined “Obama Was Not as Strong as in 2008, but Strong Enough,” and a similar graphic presentation by the Washington Post, show that demographic shifts have reached a point at which Democrats have a decisive advantage. Compared to 2008, Obama’s major gains this year were limited to Hispanics, who went from 67-31 Democratic in 2008 to 71-27 in 2008; and Asian-Americans, who went from 62-35 Democratic to 73-26. Those gains were adequate to produce victory by off-setting enough of the decline in support for Obama from many other groups, including men, who went from 48-49 to 45-52; whites, down from 43-55 to 39-59; voters with incomes above $100,000, from 49-49 to 44-54; Jewish voters, from 78-21 to 69-30; independents, from 52-44 to 45-50; and young voters below the age of 30, from 66-32 to 60-37. In a setback to conservatives, the Nov. 6 exit polls gave strong support to liberalized immigration reform, which is likely to become a top priority for the Obama administration, with 65 percent of respondents agreeing that illegal immigrants should be “offered a chance to apply for legal status,” while only 28 percent of those surveyed opposed such reform. Since the election, a number of conservative pundits, including Sean Hannity of Fox News and Charles Krauthammer, a Washington Post columnist, have called on the Republican Party to reevaluate its opposition to comprehensive immigration reform. Voters gave a more modest boost to the administration’s call to raise taxes on those making over $250,000, with a 47 percent plurality backing the proposal, another 13 percent supporting raising everyone’s taxes, and 35 percent opposed to any tax hike. On a more sobering note for Democrats, a slight majority (51 percent) of voters agreed with the statement “Government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals” compared to 43 percent saying “Government should do more to solve problems.” This despite the fact that, as The New York Times reported in a Feb. 11, 2012 story, “Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on It”: The government safety net was created to keep Americans from abject poverty, but the poorest households no longer receive a majority of government benefits. A secondary mission has gradually become primary: maintaining the middle class from childhood through retirement. The share of benefits flowing to the least affluent households, the bottom fifth, has declined from 54 percent in 1979 to 36 percent in 2007. The story points out that many people say they want to reduce the role of government in their own lives. They are frustrated that they need help, feel guilty for taking it and resent the government for providing it. They say they want less help for themselves; less help in caring for relatives; less assistance when they reach old age. In many respects, the growing liberalization of America on social issues has made the culture war an attractive battleground for Democrats – perhaps dangerously attractive. At the moment, in almost every region of the country except the South, the liberal stance is gaining adherents. Social, cultural and moral issues have become favorable terrain for the Democratic Party, in the way that they once were for the Republicans, but there are economic trends that do not bode so well for core Democratic constituencies, given their disproportionately low income and high-unemployment rates. The issue of mounting salience – unaddressed so far by Democrats and Republicans – is the hollowing out of the job market. A growing body of evidence demonstrates that jobs that provide mid-range incomes are disappearing, but just as important, the kinds of jobs that have long served as stepping-stones up the ladder of opportunity are disappearing too. One recent contribution to this literature, “Jobless Recoveries and the Disappearance of Routine Occupations” by Henry Siu, an economist at the University of British Columbia, and Nir Jaimovich, an economist at Duke, reports that there is job growth at the top and bottom of the payscale, but declining employment throughout the mid-pay range. The technical term is job polarization: The fact that polarization is occurring should not surprise anyone who understands the influence of robotics and automation on machinists and machine operators in manufacturing. Indeed, the influence of robotics is increasingly being felt on routine occupations in transportation and warehousing. Of equal importance is the disappearance of routine employment in “white-collar” occupations — think bank tellers being replaced by ATMs, or secretarial work being replaced by personal computers and Siri, Apple’s iPhone-integrated “intelligent personal assistant.” In the authors’ view, past trends suggest a worsening future: Thus, all of the per capita employment growth of the past 30 years has either been in ‘non-routine’ occupations located at the high-end of the wage distribution, such as software engineers and economists, or in low-paying jobs, such as service occupations like restaurant waiters and janitors. For this last set of occupations, this has been especially true in the past decade. Siu and Jaimovich find that the decline in routine middle-income jobs that lend themselves to mechanization and automation occurs during recessions, and, most importantly, does not reverse itself in periods of subsequent recovery. This chart, Fig. 4, in which the pink areas represent economic recessions, demonstrates how, starting during the recession of 1991, recoveries do not lead to revived job markets: Fig. 4: “Jobless recoveries and the disappearance of routine occupations” by Henry Siu, an economist at the University of British Columbia, and Nir Jaimovich, an economist at Duke. CLICK TO ENLARGE The conclusions reached by Siu and Jaimovich are pessimistic: Automation and the adoption of computing technology are leading to the decline of middle-wage jobs of many stripes, both blue-collar jobs in production and maintenance occupations and white-collar jobs in office and administrative support. It is affecting both male- and female-dominated professions and it is happening broadly across industries –manufacturing, wholesale and retail trade, financial services, and even public administration. The authors offer scant hope for the future. The pace of job polarization was greatly accelerated in this last recession, and the pace of automation and progress in robotics and computing technology is not slowing down either. If the past 30 years is any guide, we should expect future recessions to continue to spur job polarization. Jobless recoveries may be the new norm. Should it continue, lack of economic opportunity is likely to undermine the workings of American democratic capitalism: the willingness of the have-nots and have-lesses to tolerate high levels of inequality in the belief that everyone has a shot at making it into the middle class. The forces driving the evisceration of middle-income jobs — global production and automation — threaten the newly acquired rights of recently enfranchised populations. The “perennial gale of creative destruction” may be so powerful and inexorable that the political system cannot provide a remedy. Even so, if the Democrats fail to take on the issue, they will leave their party open to challenge as discontent over employment stagnation mounts. An alternative strategy would be for Democrats to unilaterally declare victory in the culture war — allowing Republicans to waste time on futile rear guard actions — and to shift the political agenda to the jobs crisis. The question is: Does the new and enlarged Democratic coalition have the capacity to re-engineer capitalism to produce sustained economic growth while working toward social justice? An earlier version of this column gave the correct figures for the percentage of whites, Hispanics and African-Americans who are married, but by reversing the terms lower and higher and single and married made it sound like the numbers referred to the percentage of singles in those groups. Thomas B. Edsall, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of the book “The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics,” which was published earlier this year. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 6)Israel Can Curb a Nuclear Iran By Louis René Beres When, back in March of this year, he was interviewed on CBS's 60 Minutes, Meir Dagan, former chief of Israel's Mossad, stated: “The regime in Iran is a very rational one.” Moments later, hedging a bit, Dagan admitted that it was “not exactly our rational.” He then proceeded to hedge even further, indicating that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was “not exactly rational based on Western thinking.” What, exactly, was Meir Dagan saying? Reduced to its bare essentials, his statement claimed only that Iran's leadership displays some form of “logical thinking.” Nothing more. To be sure, there was literally nothing in his remarks to suggest that the regime in Tehran would consistently value collective survival as its highest goal. Such an omission was plainly significant. This is because the rationale of strategic deterrence must always rest upon a uniformly presumed preeminence of national self-preservation. By definition, where such a presumption is absent, there can be no traditional deterrence. Ideally, therefore, Iran would still be prevented from becoming a nuclear weapons state. After all, if we can accept Dagan's personal and somewhat eccentric assessment of enemy rationality, that country's prospective nuclear force commanders could ultimately choose to value certain preferences more highly than Iran's survival as a state. Such a scenario of failed nuclear threat dynamics is improbable, but it is not inconceivable. Already, it is widely and authoritatively acknowledged that a nuclear Iran is a fait accompli. For several generally-discussed operational reasons, the remaining prospect of any viable and cost-effective preemption by Israel is exceedingly small. In consequence and also in compensation, there must now be heightened Israeli preparations for effective anti-missile defense, especially the Arrow and Iron Dome interceptors. Less obviously, perhaps, there must take place, in stark contradiction to the traditionally prevailing notion that “irrational” adversaries cannot be deterred, the thoughtful and systematic implementation of new forms of deterrence. What, exactly, does this mean? Irrationality is not the same as madness. Unlike a “crazy” or “mad” adversary, which would have no discernible order of preferences, an irrational Iranian leadership might still maintain a distinct and consistent hierarchy of wants. The pinnacle or very top of this hierarchy would almost certainly be represented by abundantly clear and widely held religious values. Although such an Iranian leadership might not be successfully deterred by the more usual threats of military destruction — because a canonical Shiite eschatology could genuinely welcome “end times” confrontations with “unbelievers” — it might still refrain from any attacks that could elicit credible harms to its most basic religious values. An overriding Iranian concern for safeguarding the holy city of Qom, for example, comes immediately to mind. It is also plausible that an Iranian leadership would simultaneously value certain of its prime military institutions, and could also be deterred by compelling and possibly coincident threats to these institutions. A pertinent consideration would be the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the power behind the Iranian dictatorship, the principal foe of the Iranian people, and the current leadership's main instrument of repression. Here, it could be purposeful for Jerusalem to hold at risk the Guard's physical facilities, its terrorist training camps, its navy of small attack boats, its missile program, the homes of its leaders, and even its space program. Most civilian targets would be deliberately excluded from attack vulnerabilities, as would those particular military targets that were not identifiably Guard-related. Such a calculated exclusion would not only be in Israel's best overall strategic interests. It would also be necessary to ensure proper Israeli compliance with the law of war. A nuclear Iran could be dangerous to Israel even if its leadership were entirely rational. Miscalculations, or errors in information, could still lead a perfectly rational Iranian adversary to strike first. In these unstable circumstances, the very best anti-missile defenses would prove thoroughly inadequate. All active defenses require a near-100 percent reliability of intercept to be useful for any “soft-point” protection of cities. Naturally, as purely a matter of physics, such an extraordinary degree of reliability could never be expected. In such defensive systems, there would inevitably be intolerable “leakage.” If Iran were presumed to be rational, in the usual sense of valuing its national physical survival more highly than any other preference, of combination of preferences, Jerusalem could then begin to consider certain benefits of pretended irrationality. Years ago, Israeli General Moshe Dayan, had warned: “Israel must be seen as a mad dog; too dangerous to bother.” In this crude but effective metaphor, Dayan had already understood that, sometimes at least, it can be distinctly rational to feign irrationality. An element of just such counter-intuitive reasoning may have been exhibited by U.S. President John F. Kennedy, during his handling of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Many years ago, when I was co-chairing a panel at the Naval Academy with Admiral Arleigh Burke, the former chief of naval operations repeated to me privately what had earlier been published by Ted Sorensen, JFK's biographer. Kennedy, confirmed Burke, had believed that his actions, a “quarantine” of Cuba, would entail potentially “even odds” of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. What if an Iranian adversary were presumed to be irrational in the sense of not caring most of all about its own national survival? In this case, there could be no discernible deterrence benefit to Israel in assuming a posture of pretended irrationality. Here, the more probable threat of a massive nuclear counterstrike by Israel would likely be no more persuasive in Tehran than if Iran's “Zionist” enemy were presumed to be totally rational. “Do you know what it means to find yourself face to face with a madman?” inquires Luigi Pirandello's Henry IV. While this pithy theatrical query does have some residual relevance to Jerusalem's current security concerns with Iran, the mounting strategic challenges from that country will be more apt to come from decision-makers who are not mad, and who are still more-or-less rational. Soon, with this particular idea in mind, an idea plainly accepted by Meir Dagan, Israel will need to fashion a more focused strategic doctrine from which essential policies and operations could be efficiently extrapolated. This coherent framework for decision would identify and correlate all available strategic options (deterrence; preemption; active defense; strategic targeting; and nuclear war fighting) with critical national survival goals. It would also take very close account of possible interactions between these discrete but conceivably intersecting strategic options. Purposefully calculating these interactions, or “synergies,” will present Israel with a computational task on the very highest order of intellectual difficulty. In some cases, it may develop that the anticipated “whole” of Iranian-inflicted harms could be even greater than the technical sum of its discrete “parts.” Nuclear strategy is a “game” that sane and rational decision-makers must play, but to compete effectively, a would-be victor must always first assess 1) the expected rationality of each opponent; and 2) the probable costs and benefits of pretending irrationality oneself. These are undoubtedly complex, interpenetrating, and glaringly imprecise forms of assessment, critical judgments that will require a) corollary refinements in both intelligence and counter-intelligence; and b) carefully calculated, selectively partial, nuanced, and incremental movements away from longstanding policies of deliberate nuclear ambiguity. The moment it was determined that so-called “red lines” had failed to stop Iranian nuclearization, Israel would need to implement certain selected and partial nuclear disclosures. For Israel, and perhaps tangentially for the United States, making these complex decisions correctly must be judged of altogether overriding importance. Louis René Beres (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) is professor of political science and international law at Purdue University. He is the author of many books and articles dealing with nuclear strategy and nuclear war, including “Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics” (The University of Chicago Press, 1980); “Mimicking Sisyphus: America's Countervailing Nuclear Strategy” (D.C. Heath/Lexington, 1983); “Security or Armageddon: Israel's Nuclear Strategy” (D.C. Heath/Lexington, 1986); and “Terrorism and Global Security: The Nuclear Threat” (Westview, 1987). In Israel, he was Chair of Project Daniel. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------