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My New Year's Resolution is not to forget what I know to be the truth. I do not intend changing!!!
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You cannot argue against the merit of being honest.
America has become the land of the sucker. We are willing to tolerate this because government is distant and we remain detached. We are at fault not this recipient. She is acting rational!!!
http://safeshare.tv/w/
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Subject: Flight to New York
Shortly after a British Airways flight had reached its cruising altitude, the captain announced:
"Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your captain. Welcome to Flight 293, non-stop from London Heathrow to New York.
The weather ahead is good, so we should have a smooth uneventful flight. So, sit back, relax, and.........OH... MY GOD!"
Silence followed.
Some moments later, the captain came back on the intercom. "Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m sorry if I startled you. While I was talking to you, a flight attendant accidentally spilled coffee in my lap. You should see the front of my pants!"
From the back of the plane, an Irish passenger yelled....... "For the luvva Jaysus......you should see the back of mine!"
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Sledgehammer versus scalpel - results? (See 1 and 1a below.)
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Sledgehammer versus scalpel - results? (See 1 and 1a below.)
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Dick
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1) In 2013, America Swapped Its Sledgehammer for a Scalpel. Here's Who Won and Lost.
President Barack Obama waves as he walks toward Marine One with daughter Malia December 20, 2013, in Washington, D.C.(Alex Wong/Getty Images)
With the end of 2013 comes the end of the American era in the Middle East. To call the last 40 years a “Pax Americana” would probably be overstating the case because, this being the Middle East we’re talking about, there was an awful lot of violence—from the Israeli-Arab wars, to the Iran-Iraq war, to the American liberation of Kuwait and invasions of Iraq, to scores of bloody terror attacks stretching from the eastern Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. But no one doubted that America was in charge, and everyone in the region could place bets accordingly and with a reasonable idea of what might be in store.
If you were a Middle Eastern leader allied with Washington, you got financial assistance, weapons, and a photo of yourself with the president. This last was perhaps most important of all, because what mattered even more than U.S. planes, tanks, and billion-dollar aid packages was the idea that someday, when times got tough, your pal in the White House—who also happened to be the most powerful man in the world—might bring down his mighty hammer on your behalf and smite your enemies.
After all, it happened to Saddam Hussein—twice. And who knows but that it might have happened to Bashar al-Assad and the Islamic Republic of Iran, too, both of whom had done virtually everything in their power over the past 10 years—and in the case of Iran, since the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, and the taking of American hostages and killing of American servicemen—to identify themselves as America’s leading adversaries in the region.
But as these two examples show, times have changed. This was the year that America swapped the sledgehammer for the scalpel and reached out a hand of friendship to its enemies—leaving its friends to wonder what lay in store. For those actors who didn’t understand that the era of heroic U.S. engagement in the Middle East—everything from democracy promotion and big-ticket aid packages to “shock and awe” and regime change brought about by hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops—has ended, 2013 was a particularly bad year.
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Of these, the year’s biggest losers were the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, the Syrian rebels, and Israel. The MEK is the anti-Iranian regime resistance movement that the Clinton Administration listed as a foreign terrorist organization in 1997 to curry favor with the 1990s model of the moderate Iranian president, Mohammad Khatami. In the wake of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the MEK complied with American requests to disarm, in exchange for which the Pentagon gave them protected-persons status. Nonetheless, starting in 2009 they came under repeated attacks from Iranian allies, including security forces affiliated with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. U.S. officials agree that Iran was also responsible for the most recent attack at Camp Ashraf on Sept. 1 that killed 50 MEK members, with another seven taken hostage. The lesson is, when the United States tells you to put down your weapons and not to take matters into your own hands, don’t listen.
The Syrian rebels believed that for all the setbacks and casualties they suffered the last year, at least there was the possibility that the White House might make good on its stated policy of seeking the removal of Bashar al-Assad—if not by military means, then at least by diplomatic and political pressure. After all, how could Washington maintain its standing in the Middle East if its adversaries and allies came to believe that the Americans were bluffers?
What the Syrian opposition didn’t see was that America was no longer interested in its own prestige in the region; what interested American policymakers this past year was getting out of the Middle East. First, the White House failed to make good on delivery of arms promised in June. In September it backed off on striking Assad after the regime used chemical weapons, and crossed President Barack Obama’s famous “red line.” Instead of punishing Assad, it moved instead to close down avenues of rebel support from Turkey, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Then the administration signaled that everyone will now just have to deal with Assad sticking around—because he is a good partner for containing Al Qaeda. The lesson? When the U.S. says it doesn’t bluff, don’t listen.
White House aides also reportedly came to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last fall in the middle of the 2012 presidential campaign and asked him not to take matters into his own hands and bomb Iran. It turns out, as the Associated Press reported this week, that in July 2012, Obama aide Jake Sullivan was already in the midst of secret talks with Tehran, which ultimately led to the interim agreement announced Nov. 24, which effectively insulates the Iranian nuclear program from any future Israeli attack. The lesson there is, when the United States says it has your back, don’t listen.
Failure to learn the lessons the White House taught the region this year means that, at best, you will become perennial losers, like the Palestinians—powerless to shape your own destiny and dependent on the largesse of an easily distracted international community. While turning Israel into a helpless ward of America’s strategic relationship with Iran was hardly what Bibi Netanyahu had in mind for 2013, things can also get worse. As in the case of the MEK and the Syrian rebels, relying on Washington can also mean being slaughtered by your enemies, after giving up the freedom to respond in kind.
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The fact that this year’s big losers—the MEK, the Syrian rebels, and Israel—were all on the wrong end of the White House’s two major achievements this past year says something about what Washington now prizes. The initiative to get rid of Assad’s chemical weapons arsenal and the administration’s secret negotiations with Iran that led to an interim agreement at Geneva are the products of a larger belief in what Democratic party strategists like Joseph Nye and policymakers like Hillary Clinton call “smart power”—a term first coined in the aftermath of the Bush administration’s 2003 invasion of Iraq.
What “smart power” means is that American policymakers should rely on international institutions, diplomacy, alliance systems, and intimate knowledge of other cultures, instead of relying on blunt instruments of warfare—that America should use a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer. That is, “smart power” was simply another way of saying that George Bush’s war in Iraq was dumb. Abjuring military force in favor of other alternatives—any other alternatives—would be, these people argue, a smarter way to go. OK. But then perhaps one should examine not the results of the Iraq war, which are mixed at best, but instead focus on how America’s use of this “smart power”—international institutions, diplomacy, social media tools like Twitter, and traditional American allies—all fared this year.
In its rush to make a deal with Iran, the White House ignored U.N. resolutions demanding Iran stop all enrichment activity and implicitly granted Iran the “right” to enrich—thus trampling on the international consensus, which is supposedly so crucial for American “smart power” to function. In country after country, U.S.-backed old allies and new allies alike were quickly overthrown by regimes that didn’t fear American retribution. America’s allies, like Saudi Arabia and Israel, discovered that being America’s friend meant being kept in the dark, lied to, and spied on – and being deterred from pursuing their own national interest.
If American allies miss the shadow of big brother standing behind them to ward off their enemies, the fact is that Obama’s scalpel—drone strikes, SEAL raids, small arms and humanitarian assistance, and spur-of-the-moment diplomatic deals—is much less sloppy and dangerous than swinging a sledgehammer. The first problem for American policymakers is that sometimes you need a sledgehammer, especially if your house is on fire.
The second problem is that Washington has yet to prove it’s very adept at brain surgery. The deal with Russia over Assad’s chemical weapons hasn’t stopped the Damascus regime’s killing machine from further devastating the country, which has in turn become the greatest training ground for jihadi fighters since the Afghan wars. The smart power, like clandestine operations, cyberwarfare, and sanctions regime, that were supposed to bring Tehran to its knees hasn’t stopped the Iranian nuclear weapons program—and it seems quite possible that the interim agreement with Iran won’t even lead to a permanent agreement, but merely to the development of an Iranian nuclear bomb under an American protective umbrella.
So, either smart power doesn’t work very well in the Middle East, or this White House doesn’t know how to use it. Or, maybe neither is the case—and the reality is, as I’ve argued before, that Obama believes the entire game has changed. Maybe Obama believes that energy independence has finally bought us freedom from a recklessly violent part of the world. Maybe he believes that a nuclear weapon will finally make the Iranian regime less volatile and more responsible and more open to the rest of the world, once it no longer has to worry about being toppled by domestic rivals, Israel or the United States.
Maybe Obama is right, and maybe history will see him as a visionary leader who understood the emerging geopolitics of a multipolar Middle East better than generations of American Cold War power-players, oil men, and cultural exceptionalists. In any event, if America’s allies in the region don’t learn the lessons of 2013 quick, 2014 will be an even more costly year for many of them.
Lee Smith is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. He is also the author of The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations.
1a) Ignore Obama's lame-duck quacking
By Michael Freund
If the various rumors and reports are true, January may prove to be one tough month for US-Israeli relations.
According to several accounts, the Obama administration is said to be gearing up to push Israel into a corner by offering its own proposals regarding how to shape a deal with the Palestinians.
With the clock ticking on the nine months allotted for an agreement to be reached, US Secretary of State John Kerry likely will be twisting Israel's arm, and applying pressure to other anatomical parts, to coerce the Jewish state into capitulation.
Under normal circumstances, it would be difficult for an Israeli premier to rebuff a concerted, full-court press from Washington, particularly when it involves an issue about which both the president and America's top diplomat seem overly obsessed.
But these are not normal circumstances, and it behooves Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to stand firm and spurn any pressure that may be applied.
For although Barack Obama still has another three years in office, he is already starting to look a heck of a lot like a lame duck, one whose quacking can and should be ignored.
Consider the following: according to a Washington Post/ ABC poll released last week, Obama is closing out his fifth year in office with the lowest approval rating at this point in a presidency since Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon. That is not the kind of company that an occupant of the White House likes to keep.
The survey found that just 43 percent of Americans approve of the job that Obama is doing, which is less than the 47% that George W. Bush managed to garner at the end of his fifth year in office.
In other words, Obama is now less liked at this point in his presidency than even Bush was.
A Fox News national poll conducted jointly by Democratic and Republican polling firms produced similar results, with Obama earning an approval rating of 41% versus a 53% disapproval rating.
Even worse, the survey showed that more Americans now view him as dishonest rather than honest, with 45% saying Obama is trustworthy and 49% saying he is not.
By contrast, in 2009, a whopping 73% gave him a thumbs-up for honesty.
Even the normally pliant and reliably liberal American media has begun to wonder aloud about whether Obama is morphing into a Democratic version of Bush the younger, much of whose second term was spent in irrelevancy.
You might be wondering: does any of this really matter? Obama is still the president.
Actually, it does matter, both politically and diplomatically.
As Commentary editor John Podhoretz noted in a recent New York Post column, “the president has gone from being someone in charge of events to someone who is being buffeted about by them – and once a leader loses his hold on the levers of power it's very difficult to get them back.”
Obama's loss of standing and sliding popularity serve to feed into the perception that he too is entering an early lame-duck phase, when a president no longer enjoys the ability to ram through policies and steer the ship of state as he sees fit.
And Democrats are already looking ahead nervously to the 2014 midterm Congressional elections, when Republicans are expected to make big gains in both the House and Senate. Many Democrats worried about keeping their seats are unlikely to cuddle up to a weakened president who is increasingly viewed as incompetent and untrustworthy, nor will they be rushing to get behind any new initiatives he may try to pursue.
On top of it all, Obama has plenty of headaches at home, from the ongoing NSA surveillance scandal to the disastrous roll-out of Obamacare, which is causing chaos and confusion among millions of Americans.
Simply put, there is no reason for Israel to kowtow to a fading president desperate for a foreign policy “win,” whether the issue is Iran or the Palestinians.
Where our security is at stake or our existence is threatened, we must not be afraid of standing up to an American president, particularly one as anemic and ineffectual as Obama.
As the great comedian Bob Hope once noted, “The only thing chicken about Israel is their soup.” Let's keep it that way.
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