Journalism at its best.
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Pipes pipes up and yawns regarding what is happening in the Middle East. (See 1 and 1a below.)
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Can Obama build ladders of opportunity when he has missed so many co-operative rungs?
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Obama will allow Iran to become nuclear? You decide. (See 2 below.)
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Written before SOTU so check this against your own thoughts.(See 3 below.)
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Sam Nunn working overtime to get his daughter elected.and he brings a lot of political and corporate clout. (See 4 below.)
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Obama will allow Iran to become nuclear? You decide. (See 2 below.)
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Written before SOTU so check this against your own thoughts.(See 3 below.)
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Sam Nunn working overtime to get his daughter elected.and he brings a lot of political and corporate clout. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1) Yawning over the Latest from the Middle East
By Daniel Pipes
The Middle East does offer some signs of hope, such as the inspiring example of Israel, the metaphorical “villa in the jungle”; the bracing prospect of Islamists falling into disarray; and the emergence of an independent Kurdistan.
But these are the exceptions. In general, the regions these days hosts such unchanging, repetitious and dreary news that this commentator barely reads the news and has little to say about it. Consider some leading issues of the moment:
- Disagreement over the very terms of the Joint Plan of Action with Tehran.
- A futile peace conference aiming to settle the Syrian civil war.
- Futile Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy.
- Regional actors either alarmed by or appeasing Tehran – or both.
- Ghastly new atrocities in the Syrian civil war.
- Daily brutality in Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Iran, and Afghanistan.
- Political shuffling in Egypt and Tunisia.
- An increasingly dictatorial Turkish prime minister.
- Water crises developing in Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq.
Like the cat in the Tom and Jerry cartoons, the Middle East spins without reaching the goal.
How many times can one ridicule the diplomacy, bemoan the violence, or raise the alarms? What creative foreign policy other than a simple self-defense can one propose toward so toxic a region? Frenetic action and little movement reduce much analysis to repetition. With negative trends so predominant, one hardly knows whether to wish for continuity or change in the Middle East.
Disheartened and bored, I have somewhat pulled back from daily politics and am delving more into deeper, larger, and historical issues. My recent columns covered the African-American Muslim past, the Russian Muslim future, and surveyed Middle Eastern failures.
Two columns ahead deal with the extensive non-religious implications of adopting Islam and the possibility of an Islamism “with a human face.” Future analyses will discuss the devastation to the Middle East's environment, the temptation to ignore jihadi motives, and the inconsistent use of the word terrorism.
This dismal moment perhaps offers an opportunity to write longer articles and even return to book projects interrupted by 9/11. (January 26, 2014)
President Hassan Rouhani of Iran spoke during a panel session at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday.(Laurent Gillieron/European Press)
WASHINGTON — When President Hassan Rouhani of Iran commandeered the spotlight this week in Davos, Switzerland, with a message of peaceful intentions and a desire for dialogue, it was an eerie echo of 10 years ago, when Iran’s last would-be change agent, Mohammad Khatami, delivered the very same message at the World Economic Forum.
Comparing their appearances demonstrates how much Iran has changed in the last decade, but also how fragile the current diplomatic opening is, and how little time Mr. Rouhani may have to negotiate a nuclear deal, while holding Iran’s hard-liners at bay.
Iran, Mr. Rouhani said Thursday, was determined to pursue “constructive engagement” with the world and had no intention of acquiring a nuclear weapon. In 2004, Mr. Khatami said, “Anywhere that we sense and feel that the other side respects us and does not force anything upon us, we are prepared to talk.” He, too, ruled out a bomb.
Then, as now, Iran agreed to halt some enrichment of uranium and submit to United Nations inspections, as part of an effort to negotiate a nuclear deal. Then, as now, the Iranian leaders used Davos, the annual gathering of world leaders and captains of industry, as an opportunity to lure foreign investors back to their country.
But less than a month after Mr. Khatami’s star turn in the Swiss Alps, Iran held parliamentary elections marred by the government’s disqualification of thousands of reformist candidates. For Mr. Khatami, whose landslide election in 1997 had stirred hopes for change, it was the final blow to his own reformist credentials. By the following summer, the nuclear diplomacy had collapsed and Iran switched its centrifuges back on.
Mr. Rouhani faces a similarly treacherous path. To close a nuclear deal, he will have to make concessions that would engender fierce resistance from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and other conservative factions. His growing international celebrity — and that of his foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, who was also at Davos — could bring him into conflict with Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
“Rouhani knows Khatami’s history,” said Abbas Milani, an Iranian scholar at Stanford University. “He knows Khamenei’s delicate position. He reads the attacks on him and Zarif in Iran. So he is trying to walk this rather sensitive line to see if he can open doors.”
For a variety of reasons, Iran experts said, Mr. Rouhani has more room for maneuver than his predecessor. The pain of international sanctions on Iran’s economy is a much bigger motivation to signing a nuclear deal than Iran’s fear in 2004 that the United States, which had invaded Iraq the year before, would march on Tehran next.
Mr. Rouhani, never a reformist, was elected with a broad consensus of Iran’s clerical and military establishment to try to negotiate a deal that would ease those sanctions. Mr. Khatami, who had long spoken out in favor of democracy and civil society, was an unorthodox victor whose election presaged deep rifts within the ranks of the mullahs.
“In contrast to Khatami, there is a widespread perception that Rouhani is working with, rather than against, the supreme leader to carry out détente abroad and reconciliation at home,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Still, he added, “Rouhani has been winning global accolades by using a similar — although less articulate and arguably less genuine — script than Khatami began using in 1997.”
The surface similarities were on display in Davos. Both leaders projected a genial, reasonable image as they greeted participants. Both steered clear of the angry, anti-Israel vitriol of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who served as president between them. Mr. Ahmadinejad’s inflammatory talk all but ensured that he would never be a Davos Man.
Mr. Khatami larded his speech with references to German philosophers like Hegel and Weber, and said, “Democratic norms are not identical packaged-goods, ready for export.” Afterward, he gamely held a chaotic news conference, in which he brushed aside suggestions that he should meet with Vice President Dick Cheney, who was also in Davos that year.
At the time, Iran was not even the world’s No. 1 nuclear rogue state. Two days after Mr. Khatami spoke, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s military ruler at the time, admitted that his country’s top atomic scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, had sold nuclear designs to other countries.
This year, Mr. Rouhani was guaranteed a sold-out crowd. He had held a history-making phone call with President Obama; his country has signed an interim nuclear deal with the West, which has halted parts of its nuclear program for the first time in a decade; and Iran is viewed as something of a kingmaker in Syria, where its support for President Bashar al-Assad is one of the main reasons he has clung to power.
Speaking to an audience that included Israelis, Mr. Rouhani insisted that Iran would pursue a foreign policy of “prudent moderation.” While he did not seek common ground with the United States on Syria, he said “all of us should work to push terrorists out.”
Yet Mr. Rouhani also showed a more cautious, politically calculating side than Mr. Khatami. He canceled a planned news conference; his aides cited technical problems with the room. And in an interview with Fareed Zakaria of CNN, he insisted that Iran would not agree to dismantle a single centrifuge — a position that, if nonnegotiable, would be a deal breaker.
Mr. Rouhani, unlike Mr. Khatami, has shown little appetite for opening up Iranian society or challenging the authority of its clerical institutions. If he runs afoul of Ayatollah Khamenei, some experts say, it will be less because of what he said at Davos than because of his enthusiastic embrace of other first-world pursuits, like Twitter and Facebook, though he said in Davos that his frequent posts are ghostwritten.
“Davos is fully approved by the theocracy,” said Suzanne Maloney, a senior fellow and an Iran expert at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. “It’s the other elements of the strategy, like social media, that are problematic at home.”
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2) Obama Has Made it Impossible for Israel to Strike Iran
By Karin McQuillan
I called a hardheaded realist, a Harvard trained PhD who has been watching the Middle East professionally for decades, to ask him about Obama's Iran deal. This is what he told me.
The Iranians want to take over Mecca and Medina. They want to take over the Arab world. With their nuclear weapons they will pressure Israel. They don't need to bomb them. They will test a nuclear bomb, they will send in missiles, they will issue threats, they will strangle them economically. Israel's high tech people will leave. They can do start-ups in Silicon Valley just as easily as in Israel; the weather is just as nice. Investments in Israel will dry up.
Forget a dirty bomb against America. What about a real bomb? A ten thousand pound bomb could be on a cargo ship or a barge heading into an American port. There are many points of failure in trying to stop them. We do radiation testing on cargo ships, as much as we can. Iranians are smart, they have good engineers and scientists, they will take counter-measures. We can succeed 9 out of ten times. What about the tenth time? And how do we know it's from Iran? It has no signature. It could be from Pakistan. Iran absolutely is a threat to the U.S.
It's the U.S. that has the bunker buster bombs capable of taking out Iran's hardened nuclear sites, not Israel. Iran learned from Israel bombing Osirak. They distributed their nuclear program and put it in hardened sites. Israel doesn't have heavy bombers. They can't afford them; they don't have the men or the money. They rely on air superiority, which is what they've needed - F-15 and F-16s, multi-purpose aircraft.
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2) Obama Has Made it Impossible for Israel to Strike Iran
By Karin McQuillan
I called a hardheaded realist, a Harvard trained PhD who has been watching the Middle East professionally for decades, to ask him about Obama's Iran deal. This is what he told me.
It's done. Iran will get a bomb.
They want a bomb and they will not be denied unless somebody stops them. Obama does not want to stop them. He does not want a friendly regime in Iran. He wants Iran as a counterforce to America and Israel. Obama is not a Muslim, but he is a radical. He sees the U.S. and Israel as imperialistic and oppressive. He doesn't like the U.S. military. He'd cut it to nothing if he could get away with it.
We'll have to pull our troops and our aircraft carriers out of the Persian Gulf. We'll lose our ability to protect Middle Eastern oil. The Gulf Arabs will have to cooperate with Iran. So will Europe; they depend on that oil.
The Iranians want the ascendance of Shia Islam. People don't remember, but when Ayatollah Khomeini took over, he sent Revolutionary Guards to Saudi Arabia and they seized Mecca. French paratroopers had to go in secretly and get them out. The Saudis couldn't do it themselves.
The deal is indeed terrible. Obama has been changing the rules of the game -- he went from Iran not having the ability to make a bomb, which had been our policy, to Iran not actually making a complete bomb.
Once you've mastered enrichment, and Iran has, creating enough highly enriched uranium is just a choice; there are no technical hurdles left. They have thousands of centrifuges that can enrich uranium in a few months, starting from zero. Whether they have stocks on hand enriched to 5% or 20% is totally irrelevant.
Iran will have an unarmed bomb on the shelf ready to go. Loading the bomb takes a short time -- who will know when they do that? Bombs are not that big, especially ones meant to be loaded on missiles. So who will even know where it is?
The Threat to America
Forget a dirty bomb against America. What about a real bomb? A ten thousand pound bomb could be on a cargo ship or a barge heading into an American port. There are many points of failure in trying to stop them. We do radiation testing on cargo ships, as much as we can. Iranians are smart, they have good engineers and scientists, they will take counter-measures. We can succeed 9 out of ten times. What about the tenth time? And how do we know it's from Iran? It has no signature. It could be from Pakistan. Iran absolutely is a threat to the U.S.
The idea that the mullahs have not made the decision to make a bomb, and if they do so we will know, is absurd. Consider all the other instances in which our intelligence was caught flat footed -- 9/11, the second Indian bomb, Pakistan, North Korea, the fall of the Soviet Union.
They could well have a bomb ready to go right now -- it's not that hard. They probably don't have the highly enriched uranium -- probably, but not definitely.
This deal makes it essentially impossible for Israel to strike -- not least because the U.S. has Israel under a microscope, by satellite and other technical means, and also with spies in the government and the IDF (Israeli Defense Force). At the first hint that a mission is imminent, the White House will leak it to the Washington Post, the New York Times, destroying operational security. Just as the U.S. leaked about Israel's strikes into Syria.
If despite this Israel tries to strike, they are the ones who will be viewed as pariahs and warmongers. They could face economic sanctions. Obviously Bibi didn't trust Obama, but Obama managed to betray him and Israel anyhow.
It's the U.S. that has the bunker buster bombs capable of taking out Iran's hardened nuclear sites, not Israel. Iran learned from Israel bombing Osirak. They distributed their nuclear program and put it in hardened sites. Israel doesn't have heavy bombers. They can't afford them; they don't have the men or the money. They rely on air superiority, which is what they've needed - F-15 and F-16s, multi-purpose aircraft.
Israeli military cooperation with the Saudis could be a game changer, because it's closer to the target and doesn't require refueling. But the Saudis don't have the necessary integrated air defenses. Is Israel going to bring in Iron Dome to protect the Saudi airfields? Iron Dome is designed for lighter, Hezb'allah missiles, and as soon as you start installing it, your secrecy is gone. Bombing Iran is not a one shot deal. Without the bunker busters, Israel is going to have to hit the same spot over and over. That is not easy. It will take 3-4 days. You bomb, evaluate the hits, bomb again in the same spot.
Bombing will only delay Iran a couple of years. Is it worth it?
The bottom line is that diplomacy absolutely can't stop the Iranian nuclear project, including nuclear weapons. Diplomacy can delay the program, especially if combined with the threat of force. After we invaded Iraq, the Iranians were very scared, so they halted the project for a year. When they became convinced that we would not attack them they restarted the project and accelerated it.
The only real answer is regime change. Obama doesn't want regime change. Remember, when the protesters were in the streets of Cairo, we forced our ally Mubarak to resign, with brutal public and private pressure. But when the protesters were in the streets of Tehran, and the regime's thugs were attacking and murdering them, Obama did nothing. He could have used the occasion to tighten sanctions even more, and using the pretext of human rights he could have had European public opinion on his side.
Obama wants the Iranian regime to survive, he wants to negotiate with it, and he wants to ally with it. What a coup that would be for Mr. Obama -- he would get a second Nobel.
He is like the community organizer who goes into a rough neighborhood and wants to reach an agreement with the strongest street gang, so they will let him organize in peace. That's what Obama is doing, by bending to the Iranian demands and negotiating with Hezb'allah. Of course, this is idiotic - Hezb'allah is just a puppet of the Iranians, and only a fool would negotiate with a puppet.
Is regime change possible? The CIA could do it. We've done it before. You pay people to create labor unrest, strikes. The Iranian regime is tottering. It could be brought down. The mullahs do not trust the army. They're afraid their conscript soldiers won't fire on crowds, so they rely on Revolutionary Guards, highly paid, and on organized street thugs called the Basiji. But, you get one general to revolt and kill the political officers, make a public statement that "we must not harm the people." The Iranian people are not violent, they are not prone to riot, but a funeral leads to a demonstration, to more funerals and the protest grows. Only 55% of Iran is Persian, the rest are minorities, Arabs, Azerbaijanis -- you create problems. A truck of Iranian soldiers is blown up in the Azerbaijani region. It's not hard to do.
Iran could have a regime friendly to us. The people have experienced the mullahs; they are friendly to America, and even Israel. Under the Shah, Iran was friendly with Israel.
Obama doesn't want Iran to become an ally, or he would have acted during the Arab spring to topple the regime. They were vulnerable. The people were chanting, O ba ma, O ba ma, which means, "you are with us," in Farsi. But Obama wasn't with them.
Obama doesn't want America to have allies. He undermines them. Look what he did to Poland, our best ally in Eastern Europe. Poland went out on a limb for us on NATO missiles and Obama cut it off. He undermined Israel and the Saudis.
Anyhow, that's how I see it. If Israel had a realistic military option, they should have pulled the trigger before Obama's second term (of course, he ordered them to maintain quiet until the election was over). Don't know for sure what they were thinking. Maybe they didn't have a real option but used the threat to try to tighten sanctions and get the US to act.
It's a very bad situation -- another great mess created by our glorious leader. We're going to have a nuclear Iran.
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3) Obama's Phony Indignities
By Geoffrey P. Hunt
How rich of President Obama to whine about the income gap widening -- a fissure that has burst wide under his watch due to his growth-stunting economic programs and stifling regulatory policies. Let no one accuse Obama of being a literary dwarf ignorant of hypocrites in song and sonnet; for the upcoming State of the Union he will don Moliere's inside-out hairshirt device from the biting 17th-century comedy Tartuffe. Obama will only pretend to endure vermin-infested coarse goatshair burlap around his loins -- we know that only silk boxers have the presidential seal.
Obama the Pious will deliver another round of tedious baleful sermonizing, exhorting the virtues of enabling prosthetics that invite the dispossessed underclass -- anyone on the lower rungs of the economic ladder -- to find reasons justifying their dependence on the welfare state. To be sure, Obama's State of the Union will squander more time vilifying achievement and advocating government seizure of middle class aspirations, shrinking the economic pie even further, more than fulfilling his zero-sum projection of American opportunity.
We can also expect Obama to hastily depart the House chamber, as he jets off for another holiday vacation and golf junket, after rearranging the gold leaf spangles and lighting the adoration incense at one more lavish gala for the First Lady -- tapping taxpayers for sums that would make the Sun King, Louis XIV, blush. In the meantime the homeless in Lafayette Park across from the White House have overtaken every empty park bench.
Of course, the art of fabricating indignities is the one competency remaining for President Obama. Obama will appeal to every tear duct in the House chamber, while he reprises his own prescription for persistent economic wretchedness -- resentment, retribution, and redistribution.
Indeed, shouldn't we weep at the shame of statistical probabilities, the cause behind millions of normally distributed outcomes, including income? How heartwarming for Obama and likeminded professional victim-mongers assigning a moral scale to disparate but naturally occurring datum. The rest of us should be daily penitents to cure our callousness.
The political melodrama over income inequality was best summed up by Mark Twain thus: "There isn't a Parallel of Latitude but thinks it would have been the Equator if it had its rights". And it's so unfair that a degree of longitude at the equator is 69 miles wide while the same degree at the North Pole covers less than an inch. Oh, the indignity of geometric differentials.
A lifelong Red Sox baseball fan growing up in the Peoples' Republic of Cambridge, de Blasio had a legitimate grievance, until 2004, as the Red Sox fruitlessly labored like indentured servants in the shadow of the Helios New York Yankees for 86 years before tasting a World Series championship victory. Now owned by the billionaire capitalist hedgemony-fund manager, John Henry, New England's Olde Towne Team can no longer claim to be the Boston Post Road waifs. Will de Blasio now shift his allegiance to the hapless Chicago Cubs, foreclosed from any World Series appearance since Teddy Roosevelt was president?
And how will de Blasio defend New York's own Bronx Bombers, whose franchise value of $2.3 billion must be equally repugnant alongside leftists' whipping boys such as Exxon-Mobil and Walmart. Of course there is no shame in the Yankees' accumulated wealth not only dwarfing the combined values of the bottom five Major League Baseball teams, but exceeding nearly ten times the net assets of the bankrupt City of Detroit, whose liabilities are now approaching $10 billion.
And there is no shame for the Yankees to sport the No. 1 MLB payroll of some $220 million, while its disgraced third baseman, doper Alex Rodriguez, rakes in one year more than the entire team on the have-nots Houston Astros.
And why be distressed over Hillary Clinton, prominently seated amongst Mayor de Blasio's courtiers, who deftly transformed $1,000 of cattle futures into $100,000 virtually overnight and now commands several hundred thousands in speaking fees while her downtrodden former constituents can barely afford bacon fat and whose devoted public school union monopolists eagerly churn out another generation of destitute know-nothings.
Income differentials and economic disparities are real enough, but so what? Moral constructs invented to ascribe motive to naturally occurring features of human life over millennia usually have a dubious sociopolitical spin. This is not to dismiss forced subjugation, poverty, slavery, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and feudal-style tenancy abuses. Yet progressives who now bleed so effusively in the crusade to end income inequality cannot cite a single piece of contemporaneous evidence where the improved fortunes of the so-called 1% are the fruits of actively stealing from everybody else.
On the other hand, Obama's own Federal Reserve monetary incontinence with near zero interest rates, spiking the rich/poor gap, has inflated the stock market but impoverished millions of fixed income seniors heretofore relying on respectable and secure U.S. Treasury securities. Now prudent savers are consigned to either pitiful rates of return or forced to abandon safety for high yielding junk bonds or an equities market already at its peak.
Income inequality provoked by Democrat Party government fiat is on display just a few hours drive from upper Manhattan along Route 17, tracing the boundaries of Pennsylvania and New York. While New York environmental geologist Gov Andrew Cuomo has banned natural gas fracking, his Tompkins, Broome, and Steuben counties suffer with persistent double-digit unemployment rates. Immediately across the 42 degree meridian, Tioga and Bradford counties, in the midst of the Pennsylvania Marcellus shale formation where drilling rigs are as commonplace as telephone poles -- ironically bearing its name from a town near Syracuse NY-- are seeing an employment boom with jobless rates dropping to 6% or lower.
In the face of so many media-promoted phony indignities, isn't it astonishing one group still believes that America is the land of opportunity. In fact nearly 40% of Mayor de Blasio's inhabitants -- mired in misery-are immigrants from every nation and corner of the globe.
At least no phony hairshirt for New York's immigrants, where upward mobility today is a good as it has been for at least 100 years. But for how long? That is the real State of the Union.
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With control of the U.S. Senate up for grabs this November, a single seat may determine who has the majority. That’s why Republicans should find it disconcerting that two of their establishment lions have broken ranks and are backing Democratic candidates in competitive races.
The latest apostate is former senator John Warner, who announced this week he is backing incumbent Democratic senator Mark Warner for reelection. He is thus giving the back of his hand to former RNC chairman Ed Gillespie, a former George W. Bush adviser, who has a decent shot at winning and is no wild-eyed radical. Last year, Warner also endorsed the Georgia candidacy of Michelle Nunn, a Democrat, who is the daughter of former senator Sam Nunn, with whom Warner served in the Senate. He even attended a fundraiser on her behalf. Georgia Republicans who find themselves defending an open Senate seat in Georgia are furious since the Warner support allows Nunn to position herself as a bipartisan moderate.
Nor is Warner the only problem ex-senator the GOP has to contend with as it strives to assemble a team capable of winning a Senate majority. Former senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, who lost his Senate GOP primary in 2012 to conservative Richard Mourdock and then declined to endorse him, has also endorsed Nunn and had his political PAC send her the maximum $5,000 contribution. Nunn praised Lugar for his “collaborative approach” and pledged to “follow this legacy in the U.S. Senate.”
Somehow I doubt that Michelle Nunn will be caught giving large donations to candidates of the opposite party if she is elected to the Senate. “Collaboration” only goes so far.
Tea-party Republicans are always being urged to become better team players, and not to risk electoral defeat by challenging incumbent GOP Republicans. It’s true that in 2012 Republicans such as Todd Akin in Missouri and Mourdock in Indiana were flawed candidates and cost the GOP those Senate seats (although Akin was not the favored candidate of tea-party groups in the primary). But establishment Republicans such as Representatives Denny Rehberg in Montana and Rick Berg in North Dakota managed to somehow lose Senate races in states that were easily carried by Mitt Romney. It would be best if both tea-party and establishment Republicans paid more attention to the viability of their candidates and made some compromises. But so far it seems all of the compromising is being asked of tea-party forces and very little is expected from the GOP establishment.
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