My brother in law is of the opinion our efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq will prove for naught, that we do not understand how little impact we can have on Arab and Muslim societies that are tribal oriented. His solution is to allow them to continue what they have been doing for centuries - kill each other and we should disengage.
He blames GW for going into Iraq based on specious reasoning and leaving the nation no better off than before and is more forgiving of Obama whom he believes inherited a mess.
In essence, he preaches isolation and suggests we have wasted trillions of dollars , much blood and human treasure and have little to prove for it .
His argument , though based on , I believe, a few false premises, is persuasive and I suspect after Obama creates more deficits and weakens us to the point that we will no longer be able to sustain a strong military and more assertive foreign policy initiatives we will find ourselves embracing a more isolationist approach, if only by default.
What will be the consequences is anyone's guess. Will the Taliban, Islamists and Muslim Brotherhood take over, eventually wear out their welcome and the cycle of their rejection will begin all over again?
Will the West be spared terrorist attacks as Arabs and Muslims internalize? Can Israel survive in such an atmosphere and does the world really give much of a damn?
Will what remains of this century witness wars , both hot and cold, as a consequence of the effort to re-establish a Caliphate as radical Islamists press their advantages?
My brother-in-law concludes America will be better off as it retrenches and any vacuum created will not necessarily be filled by China which has its own problems and, racially speaking, Chinese are easily identifiable and thus vulnerable if they become too aggressive.
My brother-in-law is a brilliant scientist, somewhat cynical and takes a pragmatic view of things. I believe much of his thinking will prevail because Americans are warn out fighting unproductive wars which have cost untold fortunes and which have had a severe impact on our economic fortunes.
Without trying to falsely characterize his feelings I would say in his eyes GW could do nothing right, Obama nothing wrong.
I take a somewhat different view and point to The Marshall Plan,The Berlin Airlift, The Berlin Wall,German unification, the break up of The Soviet Union and our ability to turn Japan into a democratic society as well as our wining the Cold War as evidence that America's engagements have not always been for naught though, I acknowledge the cost has been high.
Perhaps the circumstances of our previous actions lent themselves to more visible and tangible evidence of solid accomplishments whereas fighting radical Islamists is far more difficult and entails challenging endeavors that do not lend themselves to clear cut solutions as enumerated above.
Whatever the future holds it is going to be interesting, dangerous and fraught with uncertainty. So what is new?
The only thing I believe is new is we are more likely to experience devastating nuclear and cyber engagements as well as possible bacteriological and chemical episodes. (See 1 and 1a below.)
View: http://vimeo.com/52009124
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PJTV. Com :Uncommon Knowledge -- Is the GOP Dead or Alive?
Peter Robinson talks with veteran television writer and producer Rob Long, and law professor John Yoo about the state of the Republican Party. Long thinks conservatism is dead and that Republicans are living in a dream world. Yoo disagrees and cites popular vote totals and the GOP’s control of the House of Representatives. Is conservatism dead or alive? Hear from both sides, and let us know what you think in the comments section.
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Obama comes from a long line of rugs. (See 2 below.)
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Several years ago two young Israeli girls, who had finished their IDF training, stayed with us and one was a trainer and marksman. She could hit a target with a scope at 400 yards and they were both beautiful and fun to boot. (See 3 below.)
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Up, up and away. (See 4 below.)
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Obama comes from a long line of rugs. (See 2 below.)
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Several years ago two young Israeli girls, who had finished their IDF training, stayed with us and one was a trainer and marksman. She could hit a target with a scope at 400 yards and they were both beautiful and fun to boot. (See 3 below.)
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Up, up and away. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)
The Struggle for the Fertile Crescent
Syria's sectarian civil war has upended the political equation across the region, from Baghdad to Lebanon.
By FOUAD AJAMI
In Damascus on the first Sunday of the new year, an unrepentant Bashar Assad stepped out of his bunker to announce that there was no end in sight to Syria's ordeal. "We are in a state of war in the full sense of the word," he proclaimed. The enemies of his Alawite regime, mostly Sunni jihadists and non-Syrians, he said, were the "enemies of the people and the enemies of God."
Next door in Iraq, on that same day, Izzat al-Douri, Saddam Hussein's loyal henchman and a man on the run since the 2003 U.S. invasion, turned up in a videotaped message on Al Arabiya TV. The former Baath Party leader announced his support for his Sunni kinsmen, some of whom had taken to the streets of Anbar province and Baghdad to protest the rule of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Mr. Douri warned his Sunni brethren of a master plan, hatched by Mr. Maliki and his Shiite-controlled Dawa party, to "destroy Iraq and annex it to Iran."
On Syria's western border, in Lebanon, a country long in the orbit of Damascus, a Sunni community in hibernation has been stirred by the Syrian rebellion. Lebanon's second-largest city, Tripoli, has turned into a battleground between Sunni and Alawite militias. The Sunnis can now glimpse the possibility of their own restoration in Lebanon, a challenge to the writ and dominion of Hezbollah.
A struggle rages for a large swath of the Fertile Crescent, perhaps the most serious challenge to the borders of that slice of the Arab world since the European map makers stood up the states of Syria, Iraq and Lebanon in the aftermath of World War I.
Syria is the pivot of this tangled political space, which runs from the borders of Iran to the Mediterranean. Bashar Assad, the young, ruthless dictator in Damascus, had been certain that his country would be spared the turmoil of the Arab Spring—indeed he had dismissed that tumult as a "soap bubble" sure to burst.
Yet there is a greater irony behind the sectarian civil war that could bring down the Assad regime. During the Iraq War, the Alawite rulers in Damascus aided and abetted Sunni jihadists keen to do battle against the Americans and their Shiite supporters. With Syria ablaze, those jihadists, who see a chance to throw off the Alawite yoke, now war against Assad.
Meanwhile Iraq, the country that had been at the receiving end of Syrian-assisted jihadists for nearly a decade, supports Assad. The logic is sectarian through and through: Prime Minister Maliki and his Shiite coalition fear that a Sunni regime in Syria would spell trouble in Iraq's Sunni-dominated regions. Dispossessed of power by an American war and a Shiite coalition in Baghdad, Iraqi Sunnis were bound to see support for Assad as an affront to them, and as a tribute to the Iranian regime.
Iran's Shiite clerics don't rule Iraq, but the sense of Sunni disinheritance is a testament to the failure of the Maliki government to come up with a workable political compact among the principal communities. The bane of Iraqi history has been centralism, and the Maliki government has fallen into that malady. The domains of security and intelligence, and the armed forces, are all run out of the prime minister's office, where a willful and suspicious clique has virtually uncontested power.
Iraq's Sunnis are not alone in their discontent. Big Shiite players, Moqtada al-Sadr most notable among them, have signaled their determination to topple the Maliki government. To the northeast in Iraqi Kurdistan, military conflict hasn't broken out between Baghdad and the Kurdish Regional Government, but the protagonists have come close. The absence from the political scene of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, due to a massive stroke, bodes ill for the peace between Arab and Kurd, for he was a master of the healer's art.
Western (Sunni) Iraq will not secede and cast its lot with the Sunnis of Syria, but if Baghdad's rulers want to maintain a semblance of peace, they will have to show greater appreciation of their country's temper and of its delicate demographic balance.
Lebanon lacks the power of the Iraqi state and the wealth of its central treasury. But in Lebanon, too, the Syrian rebellion has upended the political equation. The unfettered reign of Hezbollah cannot survive the fall of the Damascus dictatorship. The legend of the "axis of resistance" that Hezbollah used to ride herd over a Lebanese population is in tatters. In reality, it was the rule of the gun that had given Hezbollah its edge, but guns are plentiful, and the Sunnis of Beirut, Tripoli and Sidon are now capable of fielding their own militias. The racket that Hezbollah ran, with Syria's connivance, for nearly two decades is losing its power. The Shiites of Lebanon will of course endure, but they might begin to find a way out from under Hezbollah's warlords.
The Fertile Crescent's protagonists do not fight alone: On one side, there is the Iranian state, influential in Iraq and committed to the Syrian regime and to Hezbollah. On the other is the Sunni pact of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Egypt is of course a Sunni country but it has, due to its immersion in its own troubles at home, remained largely neutral in this struggle. This is a Sunni-Shiite fight, but religious devotion is not the measure of things. This is a very worldly grab for power and wealth and trade routes, and it is fought without sentimentalism or scruples.
This is a malady of that greater Middle East—its atavisms and ambitions. And to this malady, the United States today is a spectator.
Perhaps things would not be as they are if the Obama administration had opted for a residual U.S. presence in Iraq that would have checked the influence of Iran and given Baghdad greater assurance and nerve. Perhaps the conflict in Syria would have played out differently had we been spared the courtship of Assad in 2009 and 2010 by the Obama administration, and by an eager Sen. John Kerry, who ran interference for the administration.
With a more assertive American policy, perhaps a line would have been drawn for the Syrians in Lebanon. They had been banished from that country in 2005 thanks to the Cedar Revolution and to the "diplomacy of freedom" practiced by George W. Bush. The Syrians made their way back in 2009, the price for the Obama administration's "engaging" the dictatorships in Damascus and Tehran.
Say one thing about the people in the Fertile Crescent: If they had expected help and deliverance from the pre-eminent liberal power in the world, they now know better.
Mr. Ajami is a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and the author most recently of "The Syrian Rebellion" (Hoover Press, 2012).
1a)
1a)
Is Egypt the Next Sudan?
Michael Armanious - Gatestone Institute, January 9th, 2013
Is El-Erian's strategy really to bring the Jews back, or to push the Copts out – a topic he carefully avoided mentioning [Dr. Mohamed A. El-Erian is the CEO and co- CIO of PIMCO, a global investment management firm and one of the world’s largest bond investors]?
In celebration of Egypt's new Islamic constitution, President Morsi went before the newly assembled upper house of the parliament – the Shura Council – and delivered another one of his enthusiastic and disconnected-from-reality speeches. In response to Egypt's economic troubles and high unemployment, especially among the youth (over 30%), he reminded the Egyptians that “God is the Provider” and because they are true believers, one day they will have their God-given income.
Morsi, who spoke to the Shura on December 30, is apparently unaware that other cultures such as the Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese have all achieved economic success despite the fact that they have different belief systems from his. Those cultures were built on the value of hard work, education and modernization. Perhaps God helps those who help themselves, whether they believe in Him or not.
He strongly downplayed Egypt's debts, saying that the debt is just 87% of the country's Gross Domestic Product for 2012 — a figure most economists would consider catastrophic.
Morsi also gave his administration credit for the increase in the number of ships that passed through the Suez Canal, and the number of visitors in 2012 to the Sinai resort of Sharm El Sheikh. Additionally, he publicly (and shamelessly) took a page from one of his political opponents, former presidential candidate General Ahmed Shafik: Morsi called for the economic development of land near the Suez Canal. Shafik, by the way, fled Egypt within days of losing the election in June 2012.
Morsi's speech was discredited soon after by experts and critics, who mocked him for taking credit for the flow of goods through the Suez Canal and for taking, without credit, an idea from his opponent's campaign agenda.
Essam El-Erian, Morsi's adviser and the vice president of the Freedom and Justice Party, the Muslim Brotherhood's political party, is already working along these lines. He is asking Jews to come back to the country, from which they were driven in the 1950s. In a televised interview, El-Erian urged Egyptian Jews living in Israel to come back to Egypt and contribute to the rebuilding of Egypt.
Nonetheless, Mr. El-Erian failed to mention that in the late 1940s and the early 50s, the Muslim Brotherhood, active since 1928, was responsible for killing and wounding hundreds of Egyptian Jews; for bombing the Jewish quarter in Cairo; and in an effort to drive Jews out of Egypt, for firebombing many Jewish business, such as the Cicurel and Gatenio department stores in downtown Cairo. Further, they sent thousands of “Fedayeen” to fight Jews in the 1948 Arab-Israel war.
It important to note that El-Erian's invitation was directed solely at the Egyptian Jews living in Israel – not at Jews living in Europe or in United States.
Under questioning from his interviewers, El-Erian admitted that his invitation was just a tactic to achieve the Muslim Brotherhood's long-term objective of emptying Israel of Jews to make room for the Palestinians to return to their homes. He also predicted the demise of Israel in the very near future.
Why would Egyptian Jews come back to Egypt – the most populous country in the Middle East where more than 65% of the population is illiterate, where nearly half of the people live under or just above the poverty line, and other minorities are now facing elimination?
Is El-Erian's strategy really to invite the Jews back, or to push the Copts out — a topic he carefully avoided mentioning?
There was not a word about the hostility and the discrimination directed at Egypt's Coptic Christian minority. In just the past two years, after the January 25 uprising and the rise of both the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists, attacks on Christians and churches sharply increased. Churches have been burned. On October 9, 2011, armoured military vehicles ran over peaceful Coptic protesters, killing more than 20. Would Jews really fare any better?
In response to El-Erian's invitation, other members of Muslim Brotherhood came up with their own ideas of how to deal with the Jews in Israel. Sheikh Youssef El-Badri suggested that instead of inviting them back to Egypt, why not just mobilize Jihadists to kill the Jews there?
It is unlikely that Egyptian Jews would respond positively to El-Erian's invitation, but they should know that the new constitution is intended to create an Islamic state in Egypt that severely restricts minority rights. Its drafting committee was controlled by extreme Islamists. On November 22, 2012 Sheikh Yasser Borhamy, a leading member of the constitution drafting committee, said in videotaped meeting with Salafi scholars and preachers that the “constitution imposes complete restrictions that have never before been imposed by any Egyptian constitution” and “places restrictions on freedom of thought, expression, and creativity.”
Sheikh Borhamy's video confirmed that this constitution was created for the benefit of the Muslim Brotherhood and hard-line Islamist factions intent on creating in Egypt an Islamic state.
Borhamy has called for the legalization of child marriage: a girl as young as three can get married because this what Allah said.
On the day Borhamy made his comments about the constitution, Morsi granted himself sweeping powers, including the power to safeguard the constitution drafting committee.
In the same video, Borhamy also thanked another member of the drafting committee, Islamist lawyer Selim al-Awa, for his legal tactics that allowed the Islamists to “deceive” the Christians and liberal members, and pass the constitution.
Al-Awa also helped to write Sudan's constitution, a document that smoothed the way for the Sharia law and enabled the hard-line Islamists in Sudan to stay in power for decades. Violence against Christians began in the 1980s, with the ascendancy of with Omar Al-Bashir, even before the more widely known violence in Darfur in the past decade. This Sharia-driven constitution made life impossible for Christians and Animists in that country, and eventually, in 2011, led to the secession of South Sudan. If this is what happened in Sudan, can you imagine what, in a few years, will happen to Egypt's Christians?
Mr. Al-Awa made a claim on Al-Jazeera in 2010 that Coptic churches and monasteries in Egypt had stockpiles of weapons in order to kill Muslims, and called for the state to inspect them. Following Mr. Al-Awa's claim, jihadists attacked and burned churches.
It appears that the Western media has been fooled by the Muslims Brotherhood's rosy messages. Time Magazine considered naming Morsi its “Man of the Year” for 2012 because of his successful brokering of a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Time either ignored or was unaware that Hamas and the Islamists see this cease-fire not as a peace treaty, but as a temporary truce or “hudna” that buys time for transferring the knowledge of how to make long-range missiles from Iran to the Islamic fighters of Hamas.
Egypt now is completely controlled by Islamists and jihadists. Women and Christians are oppressed; Egypt's media and judiciary are under siege.
Whether they like it or not, Western leaders need to consider what kind of relationship they will have with the Muslim Brotherhood and the new Islamic state in Egypt.
Egypt's Islamist regime will not abrogate its treaty with Israel and start a war with the West — at least not right away.
Many Islamists, including Sheik Mohammed Hassan, feel that it is in Egypt's best interests to wait a while before cancelling the treaty. Hassan spoke for these Islamists in 2011 when he said “It's not wise to start talking about such a treaty and invite more enemies while we are trying to build a country.” For the short term, the Islamic regime will regard the treaty signed 1979 as a hudna [cease-fire]. Under the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt will continue to take money from the U.S. and provide support to Hamas in the Gaza Strip — just like Iran.
If one watches Morsi's videos from as recently as 2010 and 2011, it is impossible not to understand the Muslim Brotherhood's jihadist agenda.
If Western leaders wish to prevent a catastrophe, and to support the Egyptians who oppose the mistreatment of women and the subjugation of Egypt's Christian minority, they would be advised to move quickly. These were the people who were at the forefront of the January 25 Revolution. Although they started it, they will need Western help to wrest control from the new autocratic system put in place by the Muslim Brotherhood. NATO's involvement in the Middle East last year is an encouraging move.
Michael Armanious, a Coptic rights activist, blogs at The New Egypt. His writings have appeared in The Boston Herald, PJ Media, and The Commentator.
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2)Count the Lies: President Obama Holds News Conference
List the lies in our comment section. Though they may be impossible to total…..
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2)Count the Lies: President Obama Holds News Conference
List the lies in our comment section. Though they may be impossible to total…..
President Obama used the final press conference of his first term to again warn congressional Republicans that he will not negotiate with them over the debt ceiling, saying that Washington must increase the limit to pay its bills and such brinksmanship would be “absurd” and “irresponsible.”
“The issue here is whether Washington will pay its bills,” Obama said. “We are not a deadbeat nation.”
The president’s comments opened the White House event that included a range of questions, including the topic of likely gun-control legislation.
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3)This is not a Vogue photo shoot: this is real.---
The following photos would lead you to believe that the IDF is an all-woman army. Be assured that men are also allowed to serve. The Photographer just wasn't interested in the ordinary.
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