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I know, the above have nothing in common.
THE COLLEGE FOOTBALL SEASON KICKS OFF THIS WEEKEND. HERE'S A LITTLE RECAP OF LAST YEAR:
Alabama beat Arkansas
and Arkansas fired their coach.
Alabama beat Tennessee
and Tennessee fired their coach.
Alabama beat Auburn
and Auburn fired their coach.
Then Alabama beat Notre Dame,
and the Pope resigned.
Sure Wish the White House had a team that would play Alabama......
===Sowell continues to pose the correct questions. (See 1 below.)
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It is one thing to believe you sit on a throne and it is another to be dethroned. (See 2 below.)
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Yes,how Obama handles the mess he helped create by inaction and then re-action in Syria has serious implications for our allies but far more important are the implications for our own nation as it potentially can embolden our enemies who are hell bent to achieve nuclear status and take advantage of our seeming impotency. (See 3, 3a and 3b below.)
And then sometimes a week for someone weak can make a difference. (See 3c below.)
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Significant impromptu speech by our president. (Listen to 4 below.)
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He who hesitates loses? (See 5 below.)
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Farber remains cautious. (See 6 below.)
===
Dick
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1)Reality Versus Mirages in Egypt
By Thomas Sowell
Nothing symbolizes the Utopianism of our times like both liberals and some conservatives calling for us to cut off aid to the Egyptian military, because of the widespread killings in what is becoming a civil war in Egypt. Such utter lack of realism from the left is not new, but hearing some conservatives saying the same things takes some getting used to
President Obama's call for the Egyptians to end the violence and form an "inclusive" government, with all factions represented, may sound good to many Americans. But there is not a snowball's chance in hell that it will happen.
Egypt existed for thousands of years before there was a United States of America. In all those millennia, Egypt has never had a free or democratic society. Nor is Egypt unique in that.
Of all the different nations that have existed at various times and places throughout recorded history, it is doubtful that even ten percent were free or democratic.
Even free and democratic nations existing today took centuries to achieve freedom and democracy. Barack Obama may have enough ego to imagine that he could accomplish, during his White House years, what took centuries to accomplish elsewhere. But do others, including some conservatives, need to share that delusion?
Yet Obama is only the latest in a long line of American officials, including Presidents, who have thought that a universal human desire for freedom meant that freedom and democracy could be exported, even to countries where they have never existed before.
However widespread the desire to be free, that is wholly different from a desire to live in a society where others are free. Nowhere is such tolerance harder to find than in the Middle East.
Has no one noticed the on-going lethal violence between different sects of Muslims in the Middle East, or their intolerance toward Christians and murderous hatred of Jews? Muslims in some other parts of the world have been more tolerant, and there have been five female heads of state in Muslim countries. But not in the Middle East.
Much is made of the fact that the United States gives financial support to the Egyptian military that is shooting down hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of Egyptians in the streets. But we have to make our choices among the options actually available. With the Muslim Brotherhood mounting armed attacks, what can anyone rationally expect, except shooting on both sides?
It would certainly be a lot nicer if everyone laid down their guns, and just sat down together and worked things out peacefully. But has anyone forgotten that, for centuries, Protestants and Catholics slaughtered each other and tried to wipe each other out? Only after the impossibility of achieving that goal became clear did they finally give it up and decide to live and let live.
As regards Egypt, it is not at all clear that any regime that has existed after Mubarak, or that is currently on the horizon, is better than Mubarak was. But the very idea of leaving well enough alone is foreign to those who are looking for moral melodramas and soaring rhetoric, such as talk about "the Arab spring."
What did we get for our money in Egypt under Mubarak? We got peace in a part of the world where peace cannot be taken for granted -- and a part of the world from which oil provides the economic lifeblood of Western civilization.
But we could not leave well enough alone. Now we are paying the price -- and perhaps it is only the first installment of the price.
The idea that, when a government we find unsatisfactory is overthrown, we can expect a better government to follow, goes back at least as far as President Woodrow Wilson. His intervention in the First World War -- a war "to make the world safe for democracy" -- turned out to be a war whose actual end results replaced old monarchies with new, and far worse, totalitarian governments.
Barack Obama's Middle East interventions have replaced stable and neutral despots in Egypt and Libya with anti-Western despots and chaos. Such is the price of pursuing ideological mirages.
After contributing to the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood to power, and the disastrous aftermath of that, the Obama administration is now publicly lecturing Egyptian leaders, and trying to micro-manage them from thousands of miles away. And some conservatives are joining the Quixotic chorus, playing with fire.
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2)Agony Lies Ahead as Obama Abdicates as Commander-in-Chief
By CONRAD BLACK,
As the United States contemplates military action against Syria, it must realize that it can no longer enter into and conduct wars in the way it has done since Korea. Vietnam was not really properly authorized or explained.
It was also mismanaged, in that — as General Eisenhower and General MacArthur both warned President Kennedy and President Johnson — it shouldn’t be attempted, but if it were, the supply flow from the North (the Ho Chi Minh Trail) had to be cut. It wasn’t. And MacArthur’s assertion that draftees cannot be asked to risk and give their lives in a cause less than a defined goal clearly in the national interest was demonstrated to be true, both morally and practically.
In Vietnam, the goal was never made clear; nor was the U.S. national interest clear, other than to avoid defeat once the country was engaged. That did not prevent the Democrats who plunged into the war from assuring defeat after President Nixon had disengaged the U.S. and preserved a non-Communist government in Saigon.
There should not have been two invasions of Iraq, though both were justified, militarily successful, and constitutionally impeccable; they were just politically mismanaged afterwards. With Bosnia, President Clinton invented the notion of a war worth killing for but not worth dying for; NATO aircraft flew at 30,000 feet to ensure risk-free bombing to the allies. (This was about the time that Mrs. Clinton fantasized that while little girls were curtsying and giving her flowers at Sarajevo Airport, she was actually under threat of her life from crackling sniper fire.)
George W. Bush had every justification to invade Afghanistan and led a great coalition in doing so, but then, leaving his allies undermanned and with an impossible mission, with, to say the least, insufficient thought and explanation, he decamped to Iraq with a much smaller coalition and leaped head-first into the bottomless morass of nation-building in both countries.
President Obama staved off what was shaping up as a complete disaster in Afghanistan, but now the U.S. is reduced to pleading with Pakistan to be less supportive of the anti-Western forces in Afghanistan and pursuing those elements for the privilege of discussing peace with them as we follow a pre-published and tight timetable for withdrawal from the country. It would be better just to leave without the window-dressing of fruitless negotiations where any agreements that are made will be ignored anyway. We went around that track in Vietnam, and in Iraq after the Gulf War.
With the latest twist in Syria, every previous criterion of national-security-policy formulation has been debunked. The entire process, built up over 75 years of generally successful policy planning under twelve previous presidents, six of each party, that led the West to victory in World War II and the Cold War, has just been jettisoned with the narcissistic breeziness this administration has brought to almost everything except disposing of bin Laden.
Even I could scarcely believe I was not watching “Saturday Night Live” or “The Gong Show” as the president, with Vice President Biden beside him — trying by his studiously grim countenance to contain the self-inflating hot-air balloon he seems to have as a brain — announced that he was sending his plan of a punitive but not really damaging cruise-missile strike on the Assad faction in Syria to the Congress, before having an afternoon of golf.
The national interest has to be defined. It has not been, in this case. What should have been done many years ago was that governments that committed outrages — especially terrorist outrages — against the West should have been marked down for overthrow when that could be done at moderate cost by assisting local dissidents. There should never have been the shilly-shallying in Libya that there was, that became an effective policy only thanks to the French. (And even the redemption of Libya was largely squandered by the administration’s shameful complicity in the murder of the U.S. ambassador in Benghazi, compounded by the macabre canard of Secretary Clinton’s Islamophilic television address to the Muslim world.)
The Assads have long been in this category, and in the early period of the uprisings, before 100,000 people were killed and 10 percent of the population fled in pitiful conditions, the U.S. and its allies, when it still had some, should have lifted the small finger necessary to dispose of Assad.
President Obama said Assad should go, just as he had said this about Qaddafi in Libya, but he did nothing to make this happen. He was the feckless Narcissus pulling the petals off the daisy: Assad should go, Assad can stay . . . As Bret Stephens aptly wrote in the Wall Street Journal on August 19, over the parallel debacle in Egypt, this administration seems unable to distinguish between a policy and an attitude.
It is no concern of the West whether the replacement government is better or worse for the Libyans and Syrians; that is their concern. We should never touch unsupported busybody nation-building again. Iraq and Afghanistan weren’t post-war Germany and Japan (sophisticated countries temporarily laid low) or even South Korea (a war-ravaged country eager to bootstrap itself up economically, with political institutions to follow).
What we have a right and duty to do is to dis-incentivize foreign countries from extreme provocations of the West. Just as Hamas stopped suicide attacks on buses and cafés in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv when Israeli premier Ariel Sharon killed the Hamas leader after each such outrage, there would be no more suicide attacks on the West if the ultimate instigators and facilitators paid with their lives, or at least their jobs, each time, despite their alleged yearning for the hereafter, as the cowardly, almost cave-dwelling, after-life of bin Laden illustrated.
International conventions should be attempted to define failed states and genocidal acts and to provide for international intervention to prevent failed states from becoming terrorist hotbeds, and to stop atrocities like the Cambodian Killing Fields and the massacres of Rwanda and Darfur.
Alliances are useful. The U.S. had allies when it led, and was perceived to be a reliable ally. NATO was the most successful alliance in history because it was an exclusively defensive alliance based on flexible response, and on the principle that an attack upon one was an attack upon all. The only time that clause was invoked was after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Every one of the then 18 other member countries declared itself to have been attacked when the U.S. was — and George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld squandered that support. The closest allies of the U.S. historically, Canada and the United Kingdom, are not as predisposed to cooperate as they once were. The George W. Bush administration at least showed the gratitude of an ally to the British; the Obama administration has very unwisely shown not the slightest interest in maintaining any of these relationships.
The reset on Russia has been a complete failure, and the downgrading of European missile defense to ensure that Russia retained its first-strike capability on America’s Western European allies was a very serious mistake. George W. Bush’s aerated promotion of democracy assisted the Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist organizations and undermined the Mubarak government in Egypt, which is already regarded with general nostalgia.
Jimmy Carter wrote the playbook on what not to do with his shameful meddling in Iran and the world; the Iranians in particular are still paying for it. No interested American should fail to understand the significance of the British Parliament’s rejection of Prime Minister David Cameron’s request for authority to join the U.S. in action in Syria. The British often change leaders who have not handled military action well:
They did so in the Seven Years’, American Revolutionary, Napoleonic, Crimean, and both World Wars, and after the Suez expedition in 1956, but that country has never denied authority to take military action to a prime minister who asked for it. Cameron is probably finished, but so, for now, is the British alliance with the U.S. The Grand Alliance of Roosevelt and Churchill and the Special Relationship of a sequence of leaders of both countries, especially Reagan and Thatcher, has come to this: political, moral, and strategic bankruptcy. And this president is chiefly responsible for it.
President Obama and his claque have unlearned the fact that you can’t declare red lines and then back away from them. It has happened in Iran, and now in Syria, and only creates a vacuum that will be filled by the most odious elements around.
More serious than all of this is the abdication: Each president swears to execute the office faithfully and to preserve,
protect, and defend the Constitution. Shuffling the role of commander-in-chief onto the Congress (in which no one, American or foreign, has the least confidence, and with good reason) is both cowardly and offensive to the Constitution, and aggravates the War Powers Act (which is itself unconstitutional and should be challenged).
Harry Truman famously said that the buck stops with the president. If Mr. Obama is not prepared to do the job he should not have run for it. The next three years will be an agony; it can only get worse, challenge to the imagination though that is.
cbletters@gmail.com. From the National Review.
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3)Obama shows Netanyahu that Israel is truly alone
In Syria, Iran and Lebanon, the president’s decision to seek Congressional approval for a military strike is recognized as proof of weakness and hesitancy. In Jerusalem, too
By Avi Issacharoff
Bashar Assad can relax. Barack Obama blinked, and entrusted the decision on whether to attack Syria to Congress.
It may be that this was a necessary step from Obama’s point of view. It may be that it was a wise decision politically, in an America traumatized by Iraq and Afghanistan. But the smiles on the faces of decision-makers in Syria, Lebanon and Iran, on hearing Obama’s Saturday speech, tell their own story.
Until Saturday, Obama’s Middle East policies were generally regarded by the Arab world as confused and incoherent. As of Saturday, he will be perceived as one of the weakest presidents in American history.
That scent of weakness has emphatically reached Iran. Amir Mousavi, the head of Tehran’s Center for Strategic Defense Studies, told Al-Jazeera in the immediate wake of the speech that Obama is uncertain and hesitant. At around the same time, Revolutionary Guards commander Mohammad Ali Jafari boasted that “the United States is mistaken if it thinks that the reaction to a strike on Syria will be limited to Syrian territory.” This was likely part of an effort to deter members of Congress from supporting military intervention against the Assad regime for its use of chemical weapons. In an act of solidarity, meanwhile, an Iranian parliamentary delegation, led by Alaeddin Boroujerdi, who heads the Security and Foreign Policy Committee and is close to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, is currently on a visit to Damascus.
Drawing the connection between Syria and Iran is unavoidable. If after Assad’s use of weapons of mass destruction to kill what Secretary of State John Kerry specified were 1,429 of his own people, Obama hesitates — when Assad has no real capacity to substantially harm American interests — what is he likely to do if Iran decides to develop nuclear weapons? Khamenei and his advisers recognize that the likelihood of this administration using military force against a country with Iran’s military capability are very low, if not nonexistent.
And they’re not the only ones who realize this. The same conclusions are being drawn by Hezbollah and al-Qaeda.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet colleagues, who will doubtless have been watching the Rose Garden speech, will have internalized what they had long suspected: that Washington will not be the place from which good news will emanate about thwarting Iran’s nuclear drive.
Meantime, Syria now returns to the routine of civil war. The Syrian army is fighting bitter battles against rebel forces across the country, and Assad is utilizing his air force to bomb residential neighborhoods — not, heaven forbid, with chemical weapons, merely with conventional weaponry.
It is clear to the Assad regime that an American response will ultimately come. But it will be limited and weak — of a scale that will enable Bashar Assad not merely to survive, but to hail victory.
3a)The Failed Grand Strategy in the Middle East
By WALTER RUSSELL MEAD
In the beginning, the Hebrew Bible tells us, the universe was all "tohu wabohu," chaos and tumult. This month the Middle East seems to be reverting to that primeval state: Iraq continues to unravel, the Syrian War grinds on with violence spreading to Lebanon and allegations of chemical attacks this week, and Egypt stands on the brink of civil war with the generals crushing the Muslim Brotherhood and street mobs torching churches. Turkey's prime minister, once widely hailed as President Obama's best friend in the region, blames Egypt's violence on the Jews; pretty much everyone else blames it on the U.S.
The Obama administration had a grand strategy in the Middle East. It was well intentioned, carefully crafted and consistently pursued.
Unfortunately, it failed.
The plan was simple but elegant: The U.S. would work with moderate Islamist groups like Turkey's AK Party and Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood to make the Middle East more democratic. This would kill three birds with one stone. First, by aligning itself with these parties, the Obama administration would narrow the gap between the 'moderate middle' of the Muslim world and the U.S. Second, by showing Muslims that peaceful, moderate parties could achieve beneficial results, it would isolate the terrorists and radicals, further marginalizing them in the Islamic world. Finally, these groups with American support could bring democracy to more Middle Eastern countries, leading to improved economic and social conditions, gradually eradicating the ills and grievances that drove some people to fanatical and terroristic groups.
President Obama (whom I voted for in 2008) and his team hoped that the success of the new grand strategy would demonstrate once and for all that liberal Democrats were capable stewards of American foreign policy. The bad memories of the Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter presidencies would at last be laid to rest; with the public still unhappy with George W. Bush's foreign policy troubles, Democrats would enjoy a long-term advantage as the party most trusted by voters to steer the country through stormy times.
It is much too early to anticipate history's verdict on the Obama administration's foreign policy; the president has 41 months left in his term, and that is more than enough for the picture in the Middle East to change drastically once again. Nevertheless, to get a better outcome, the president will have to change his approach.
With the advantages of hindsight, it appears that the White House made five big miscalculations about the Middle East. It misread the political maturity and capability of the Islamist groups it supported; it misread the political situation in Egypt; it misread the impact of its strategy on relations with America's two most important regional allies (Israel and Saudi Arabia); it failed to grasp the new dynamics of terrorist movements in the region; and it underestimated the costs of inaction in Syria.
America's Middle East policy in the past few years depended on the belief that relatively moderate Islamist political movements in the region had the political maturity and administrative capability to run governments wisely and well. That proved to be half-true in the case of Turkey's AK Party: Until fairly recently Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whatever mistakes he might make, seemed to be governing Turkey in a reasonably effective and reasonably democratic way. But over time, the bloom is off that rose. Mr. Erdogan's government has arrested journalists, supported dubious prosecutions against political enemies, threatened hostile media outlets and cracked down crudely on protesters. Prominent members of the party leadership look increasingly unhinged, blaming Jews, telekinesis and other mysterious forces for the growing troubles it faces.
Things have reached such a pass that the man President Obama once listed as one of his five best friends among world leaders and praised as "an outstanding partner and an outstanding friend on a wide range of issues" is now being condemned by the U.S. government for "offensive" anti-Semitic charges that Israel was behind the overthrow of Egypt's President Mohammed Morsi.
Compared with Mr. Morsi, however, Mr. Erdogan is a Bismarck of effective governance and smart policy. Mr. Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood were quite simply not ready for prime time; they failed to understand the limits of their mandate, fumbled incompetently with a crumbling economy and governed so ineptly and erratically that tens of millions of Egyptians cheered on the bloody coup that threw them out.
Tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorists and incompetent bumblers make a poor foundation for American grand strategy. We would have done business with the leaders of Turkey and Egypt under almost any circumstances, but to align ourselves with these movements hasn't turned out to be wise.
The White House, along with much of the rest of the American foreign policy world, made another key error in the Middle East: It fundamentally misread the nature of the political upheaval in Egypt. Just as Thomas Jefferson mistook the French Revolution for a liberal democratic movement like the American Revolution, so Washington thought that what was happening in Egypt was a "transition to democracy." That was never in the cards.
What happened in Egypt was that the military came to believe that an aging President Hosni Mubarak was attempting to engineer the succession of his son, turning Egypt from a military republic to a dynastic state. The generals fought back; when unrest surged, the military stood back and let Mr. Mubarak fall. The military, incomparably more powerful than either the twittering liberals or the bumbling Brotherhood, has now acted to restore the form of government Egypt has had since the 1950s. Now most of the liberals seem to understand that only the military can protect them from the Islamists, and the Islamists are learning that the military is still in charge. During these events, the Americans and Europeans kept themselves endlessly busy and entertained trying to promote a nonexistent democratic transition.
The next problem is that the Obama administration misread the impact that its chosen strategies would have on relations with Israel and Saudi Arabia—and underestimated just how miserable those two countries can make America's life in the Middle East if they are sufficiently annoyed.
The break with Israel came early. In those unforgettable early days when President Obama was being hailed by the press as a new Lincoln and Roosevelt, the White House believed that it could force Israel to declare a total settlement freeze to restart negotiations with the Palestinians. The resulting flop was President Obama's first big public failure in foreign policy. It would not be the last. (For the past couple of years, the administration has been working to repair relations with the Israelis; as one result, the peace talks that could have started in 2009 with better U.S. management are now under way.)
The breach with Saudis came later and this one also seems to have caught the White House by surprise. By aligning itself with Turkey and Mr. Morsi's Egypt, the White House was undercutting Saudi policy in the region and siding with Qatar's attempt to seize the diplomatic initiative from its larger neighbor.
Many Americans don't understand just how much the Saudis dislike the Brotherhood and the Islamists in Turkey. Not all Islamists are in accord; the Saudis have long considered the Muslim Brotherhood a dangerous rival in the world of Sunni Islam. Prime Minister Erdogan's obvious hunger to revive Turkey's glorious Ottoman days when the center of Sunni Islam was in Istanbul is a direct threat to Saudi primacy. That Qatar and its Al Jazeera press poodle enthusiastically backed the Turks and the Egyptians with money, diplomacy and publicity only angered the Saudis more. With America backing this axis—while also failing to heed Saudi warnings about Iran and Syria—Riyadh wanted to undercut rather than support American diplomacy. An alliance with the Egyptian military against Mr. Morsi's weakening government provided an irresistible opportunity to knock Qatar, the Brotherhood, the Turks and the Americans back on their heels.
The fourth problem is that the administration seems to have underestimated the vitality and adaptability of the loose group of terrorist movements and cells. The death of Osama bin Laden was a significant victory, but the effective suppression of the central al Qaeda organization in Afghanistan and Pakistan was anything but a knockout blow. Today a resurgent terrorist movement can point to significant achievements in the Libya-Mali theater, in northern Nigeria, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere. The closure of 20 American diplomatic facilities this month was a major moral victory for the terrorists, demonstrating that they retain the capacity to affect American behavior in a major way. Recruiting is easier, morale is higher, and funding is easier to get for our enemies than President Obama once hoped.
Finally, the administration, rightfully concerned about the costs of intervention in Syria, failed to grasp early enough just how much it would cost to stay out of this ugly situation. As the war has dragged on, the humanitarian toll has grown to obscene proportions (far worse than anything that would have happened in Libya without intervention), communal and sectarian hatreds have become poisonous almost ensuring more bloodletting and ethnic and religious cleansing, and instability has spread from Syria into Iraq, Lebanon and even Turkey. All of these problems grow worse the longer the war goes on—but it is becoming harder and costlier almost day by day to intervene.
But beyond these problems, the failure to intervene early in Syria (when "leading from behind" might well have worked) has handed important victories to both the terrorists and the Russia-Iran axis, and has seriously eroded the Obama administration's standing with important allies. Russia and Iran backed Bashar al-Assad; the president called for his overthrow—and failed to achieve it. To hardened realists in Middle Eastern capitals, this is conclusive proof that the American president is irredeemably weak. His failure to seize the opportunity for what the Russians and Iranians fear would have been an easy win in Syria cannot be explained by them in any other way.
This is dangerous. Just as Nikita Khrushchev concluded that President Kennedy was weak and incompetent after the Bay of Pigs failure and the botched Vienna summit, and then proceeded to test the American president from Cuba to Berlin, so President Vladimir Putin and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei now believe they are dealing with a dithering and indecisive American leader, and are calibrating their policies accordingly. Khrushchev was wrong about Kennedy, and President Obama's enemies are also underestimating him, but those underestimates can create dangerous crises before they are corrected.
If American policy in Syria has been a boon to the Russians and Iranians, it has been a godsend to the terrorists. The prolongation of the war has allowed terrorist and radical groups to establish themselves as leaders in the Sunni fight against the Shiite enemy. A reputation badly tarnished by both their atrocities and their defeat in Iraq has been polished and enhanced by what is seen as their courage and idealism in Syria. The financial links between wealthy sources in the Gulf and jihadi fighter groups, largely sundered in the last 10 years, have been rebuilt and strengthened. Thousands of radicals are being trained and indoctrinated, to return later to their home countries with new skills, new ideas and new contacts. This development in Syria looks much more dangerous than the development of the original mujahedeen in Afghanistan; Afghanistan is a remote and (most Middle Easterners believe) a barbarous place. Syria is in the heart of the region and the jihadi spillover threatens to be catastrophic.
One of the interesting elements of the current situation is that while American foreign policy has encountered one setback after another in the region, America's three most important historical partners—Egypt's military, Saudi Arabia and Israel—have all done pretty well and each has bested the U.S. when policies diverged.
Alliances play a large role in America's foreign policy success; tending the Middle Eastern alliances now in disarray may be the Obama administration's best hope now to regain its footing.
As the Obama administration struggles to regain its footing in this volatile region, it needs to absorb the lessons of the past 4½ years. First, allies matter. Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Egyptian military have been America's most important regional allies both because they share strategic interests and because they are effective actors in a way that groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and smaller states aren't. If these three forces are working with you, then things often go reasonably well. If one or more of them is trying to undercut you, pain comes. The Obama administration undertook the hard work necessary to rebuild its relationship with Israel; it needs to devote more attention to the concerns of the Egyptian generals and the House of Saud. Such relationships don't mean abandoning core American values; rather they recognize the limits on American power and seek to add allies where our own unaided efforts cannot succeed.
Second, the struggle against terror is going to be harder than we hoped. Our enemies have scattered and multiplied, and the violent jihadi current has renewed its appeal. In the Arab world, in parts of Africa, in Europe and in the U.S., a constellation of revitalized and inventive movements now seeks to wreak havoc. It is delusional to believe that we can eliminate this problem by eliminating poverty, underdevelopment, dictatorship or any other "root causes" of the problem; we cannot eliminate them in a policy-relevant time frame. An ugly fight lies ahead. Instead of minimizing the terror threat in hopes of calming the public, the president must prepare public opinion for a long-term struggle.
Third, the focus must now return to Iran. Concern with Iran's growing power is the thread that unites Israel and Saudi Arabia. Developing and moving on an Iran strategy that both Saudis and Israelis can support will help President Obama rebuild America's position in the shifting sands. That is likely to mean a much tougher policy on Syria. Drawing red lines in the sand and stepping back when they are crossed won't rebuild confidence.
President Obama now faces a moment similar to the one President Carter faced when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. The assumptions that shaped key elements of his foreign policy have not held up; times have changed radically and policy must shift. The president is a talented leader; the world will be watching what he does.
3b)
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4)
Give it a look, see and a listen.
The attached Obama short speech was delivered spontaneously and without the aid of his ubiquitous teleprompter, apparently while vacationing at Camp David.
Delivered outdoors, it was apparently taped by an alert news person with a handy video camera. The sound is rather good considering the outdoor conditions and the apparent spontaneity of the event.
Listen carefully to his words.
Give credit where credit is due, he actually makes more sense than anything he has said in over four years as President and two years prior to that while on the campaign trail.
P.S. He also looks much better without the TV makeup!
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5) Iran, Russia advise Assad to transfer chemical stockpile to Tehran - to avert US attack
The Iranian parliamentary delegation visiting Damascus Sunday, Sept. 1, advised Bashar Assad to move his chemical stockpile out of Syria and deposit it in Tehran under Iranian and Russian military supervision, to save himself from an American military strike.
Chairman of the Majlis Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ala-Eddin Borujerdi, who headed the delegation, explained that Presidents Hassan Rouhani and Vladimir Putin had discussed the stockpile’s removal ad hoc, as the basis of a Iranian-Russian plan for presenting to US President Barack Obama at the G-20 summit meeting in St. Petersburg later this week.
After the Americans accept the plan and the crisis blows over, the stockpile could be quietly returned to Syria, the Iranian lawmaker explained.
Another option was for Iranian and Russian teams to destroy the stockpile in return for US-Arab League guarantees that the Syrian rebels would not use this process for strategic war gains. The chemical agents would be destroyed in stages in accordance with rebel compliance with such guarantees.
Military sources explain Tehran’s quest for a deal on two grounds: One - Iran supplied Syria with most of the formulae and substances for the manufacture of the poison agents and fears exposure if they fall into American hands.
Another is anxiety lest an American military strike on Syria’s chemical stores – if it is allowed to go through – would serve as a precedent or prequel for a similar attack on Iran’s nuclear assets.
Tehran is therefore willing to put on an amenable face and meet the United States half way on the disposal of Syria’s chemical arsenal. The offer would be presented as good for President Obama and let him give the American people the glad tidings that he had managed to defuse the Syrian chemical crisis by procuring a joint Iranian-Russian guarantee to eliminate Syria’s chemical arsenal. He could then call off an attack Syria with honor, or postpone it indefinitely to avoid disrupting the process of Syria’s chemical disarmament.
Both the Russians and the Iranians saw an opening for their plan in a phrase President Obama used in his surprise announcement Saturday night, Aug. 31 that he would ask Congress to authorize a military attack on Syria before going ahead. It was this: “…the Chairman [of the Joint US Chiefs of Staff] has indicated to me that our capacity to execute this mission is not time-sensitive; it will be effective
tomorrow, or next week, or a month from now.”
The Russian-Iranian plan would turn those words back on the US president by offering him guarantees that if he was not satisfied that Syria’s chemical stocks were gone - either by transfer to Iran or destroyed - he had left himself with time to play with for reverting to his military option.
The Iranian lawmakers told Assad that Tehran is not fully in the picture of the secret Russian-US dialogue on Syria, but Tehran had reason to believe that the Russians had put out feelers to the Americans on the proposition and were not initially turned down.
Russian and Iranian intelligence experts on US politics expect Obama’s limited offensive plan for Syria to run into major obstacles in Congress. They hope the opposition will find added support for its counter-arguments in the Iranian-Russian proposition. And even if it is eventually turned down, the deliberations on its pros and cons would buy time for the Syrian ruler's war effort.
The Iranian parliamentary delegation also included Javad Karimi Qodusi and Fath-o-Allah Hosseini, two other prominent members of the Majlis foreign affairs panel
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6)
Marc Faber: US Stocks Are a 'Better Sell Than a Buy'
Marc Faber's forecast hasn't changed over the course of the year. The editor and publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report is still calling for a steep correction in the stock market.
Commenting on the stock rally in March, Faber told CNBC, "I believe it will end badly this year," predicting the market would see a 20 percent correction, or worse.
As we approach the end of the third quarter, Faber affirmed his conviction, telling CNBC that the trouble has already begun.
Pointing to Indonesia, India and other markets, he explained, in dollar terms, some have already dropped over 30 percent in two months.
"So we have some big setbacks globally. Not yet in the U.S.," he admitted.
"But in the U.S, you look at housing stocks. The homebuilders, they're down 30 percent from their highs. Tells you something about this wonderful housing recovery."
At this point, Faber sees U.S. equities as a "better sell than a buy."
"In my view, we'll go back to the lows in November 2012 — around 1,343," in the S&P 500, he predicted.
Instead of stocks, Faber recommended considering Treasurys.
"I think the sentiment is incredibly bearish about Treasury bonds and Treasury notes," he said. If the market drops, "people will again fear deflation, and they will move into 10-year Treasury notes."
And one reason he foresees trouble now is due to his expectation that investors will feel similarly about U.S. stocks.
"When emerging markets go down and the S&P goes up, the asset allocators say, 'Do I want to buy the S&P near a high, or do I venture back into emerging economies that are down 50 percent from their highs, like India or Brazil and so forth?" Faber asked.
"So you understand that the pool of money can flow back into emerging markets," he said.
In addition, the United States is making the mistake of pushing for military action in Syria, he noted.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has warned that Western intervention could result in a complete loss of control.
"Chaos and extremism would ensue. There is a risk of regional war," Assad told the Le Figaro newspaper, Bloomberg reported.
"The Middle East is a powder keg, and it will go up in flames because the Western imperialistic powers, they still meddle into the local affairs," Faber told CNBC.
"It's going to be a disaster. And it's going to strike from Syria and Egypt into Saudi Arabia, into the Emirates eventually, and so forth and so on, and you're going to have a huge mess," he said.
Faber also points to the fact that interest rates on 10-year Treasuries have doubled since July 2012 "despite Mr. Bernanke's maddening asset purchases."
Interest rates have become "a headwind," he noted.
"We're up almost 70 percent in two years and the economic expansion is four years old already," he added.
With weakness in emerging markets, looming rise from a crisis in the Middle East and rising Treasury yields, "where are the earnings going to come from?" he questioned.
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