Just another foreign policy day and by foreign I mean America's standards nd actions do not square with and are foreign to the truth but then: "what difference does it make?" (See 1 below.)
While I am on the topic of foreign policy. I just finished reading the latest issue of The Naval war College Review and it brought to mind Obama's paralysis regarding Russia's takeover of Crimea and challenge to Ukraine. Could it not set the stage for China to move on Taiwan?
I know this is an outside the box speculation. However, while Obama is president and creating vacuums it would seem to me this is the perfect time for nations, coveting certain territory and willing to engage in aggressive actions, should move. and particularly is this so while our own naval fleet numbers have been scuttled.
We are spread too thin militarily, the national mood of withdrawal accords with Obama's intent to reduce our world footprint so why should not China consider this the perfect time to take Taiwan. S Korea and Japan have no fleet or force to protect Taiwan. Our commitment to defend Taiwan was always questionable and with Obama as president it becomes another worthless Obama red lin , aka. Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Egypt.
However, China may neither have the amphibious delivery capability at this time nor the inclination to disrupt their commercial relationships but they are not building a world class fleet for employment purposes.
Contrast the fact that Obama has apparently armed our various agencies , according to John Fund, with Swat Team capability so he can defeat American Citizens with failing to protect our nation and allies from external threats. It has become evident, Obama foreign policy approach is to cite meaningless consequences, paint red lines with abandon and basically surrender.
Just some of my off the cuff thinking. Even Obama, by now, must know he is over his head and his feet are not big enough to fill the shoes of The Oval Office. (See 1a below.)
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A Black Conservative who is pointing the way and Rep. Ryan is listening and following so Liberals must demonize them both because their solutions are real whereas Government;s are failing. (See 2 below.)
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Dick
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1) Why Smear Israel and Whitewash Iran?
By Jonathan Tobin
The decision of the Obama administration to take a firm stand on Iran’s decision to send one of the participants in the 1979 seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran to serve as its ambassador to the United Nations may have surprised the Islamist regime. A year of diplomacy aimed at appeasing the Iranians and allowing them to keep their nuclear infrastructure must have convinced Tehran that there was almost nothing it could do to get a rise out of Washington. By denying the terrorist turned diplomat a visa, the president indicated that he understood there are limits to how far he can go toward accommodating the ayatollahs in an effort to get out of having to keep his campaign pledges on the nuclear issue. The dismay among some of the foreign-policy establishment about the latent hostility toward Iran that was illustrated by the anger over the appointment was palpable.
But those determined to push the dubious theory that the election of Hassan Rouhani in Iran’s faux presidential election last year indicates a shift to moderation are undaunted. The New York Times has been a notable advocate for this position on both its editorial and news pages, but it surpassed itself today with the publication of a remarkable piece by two scholars alleging that not only is the Islamist regime changing but that Iran and Israel are like two ships passing in the night as the Jewish state becomes an extremist theocracy. That its thesis is an absurd libel of Israel and a whitewash of Iran is so obvious it is barely worth the effort to refute it. In short, Israel is a pluralist democracy where the rule of law prevails despite the ongoing war being waged against its existence by most of the Arab and Muslim world. Iran is a theocratic tyranny where free expression and freedom of religion are forbidden and women, gays, and minorities are brutally oppressed. Iran is also the world’s leading state sponsor of terror and its foreign policy is aimed at propping up one of the world’s worst tyrants in Syria’s Bashar Assad as well as Hezbollah and other terrorists seeking to destabilize the Middle East.
So while the argument that the Times featured today is so risible as to merit satire rather than a lengthy response, it is worth asking why the newspaper gives space to such laughable arguments. The answer is both simple and not particularly funny. Some portions of the foreign-policy establishment in this country—of which the Times remains a leading outlet—are deeply unhappy about the resilience of the U.S.-Israel alliance even after more than five years of Obama administration efforts to downgrade these ties and desirous of détente with Iran. Such articles say more about confidence in the success of the slow-motion betrayal of President Obama’s promise to stop Iran’s nuclear program than they do about either Israel or Iran.
As for the notion that Israel is becoming more extremist and Iran more moderate, only by cherry-picking scattered facts about either nation can one possibly justify such an absurd pair of arguments. Suffice it to say that while Israel’s Orthodox population is growing and the conflict between some elements of the Haredi community and the rest of the country is troubling, there is simply no coherent analogy to be drawn between even the ultra-Orthodox parties and the Islamist leadership in Iran. While the Haredi leadership deserves criticism for the way it has discredited Judaism in the eyes of Israel’s secular majority as well its stances on education and universal military service, it is not guilty of terrorism. Moreover, despite the assumption that Israel is becoming more extreme, it must be pointed out that the political influence of the Haredim is at its lowest point in the country’s recent history as their parties have, for the first time in decades, been excluded from the government, even one led from the right by Benjamin Netanyahu. The authors assume that criticism from that government of U.S. pressure to make concessions to the Palestinians is a sign of extremism. But such sentiments merely represent realism on the part of an Israeli public—both secular and religious—that understands that the Palestinians aren’t interested in peace. Far from Israels government and people abandoning democracy as the authors charge, it is those Israelis who rationalize the anti-Semitic boycotts of the state who are seeking to overturn the verdicts of the ballot box by foreign pressure and economic warfare.
As for Iran, the authors can cite no real evidence that Rouhani’s election has changed the country. That’s because there is none. It remains a vicious tyranny and the clerics and their military followers show no sign of loosening the grip on power as the reaction to the 2009 Tehran protests illustrated.
But the willingness of the Times to give such prominent play to the authors’ ridiculous assertions does tell us a lot about how important the smearing of Israel and the whitewashing of Iran is to the success of a foreign policy aimed at détente with Tehran. While seemingly unimportant in the great scheme of things, the dustup about Iran’s U.N. appointment shows that Americans and in particular Congress has not yet been persuaded by Kerry to think well of Iran. Those who confidently predict, as do the authors of this travesty, that Israel’s alliance with the U.S. will not stand the test of time understand neither the lasting bonds between these two great democracies nor the difference between Israeli freedom and Iranian despotism.
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1a) When a bored president 'mails it in'
Like it or not, the world is a dangerous place, and getting more so. None of the portents look good. Vladimir Putin not so subtly says, in ever louder voice, that he's in charge of events now. The rest of the world should just get used to it. When Vlad roars, the rest of the world squeaks.
1a) When a bored president 'mails it in'
By Wesley Pruden
Like it or not, the world is a dangerous place, and getting more so. None of the portents look good. Vladimir Putin not so subtly says, in ever louder voice, that he's in charge of events now. The rest of the world should just get used to it. When Vlad roars, the rest of the world squeaks.
He was in louder voice than ever Thursday, reminding a televised forum in Moscow that his parliament has authorized him to use force "if necessary" in eastern Ukraine, which he called, for the first time, "New Russia."
Whether portent or not, leaflets were distributed at synagogues in the Ukrainian city of Donetsk ordering Jews over 16 to register with the Commissioner for Nationalities and pay a $50 registration fee by May 3. A leaflet is an unusual and unlikely medium to announce such a bold government decree, and it was not clear where the leaflets were authorized, and by whom. But there they definitely were, enough to chill to the bone anyone who has ever read a history book. The more some things change the more they remain as they ever were.
The roar of the master of the new Russia and the squeak of the mice in the West mocks the brave talk from Barack Obama and his men. But the grim Russian and the rest of the world have his number, just when bold and imaginative leadership in the West has vanished.
"Whatever one may think of Putin's moral posture, which is deplorable," says Paul Johnson, the eminent British historian, "he is regarded as strong, decisive and vigorous, pushing Russia's interests at all times, with considerable success. In contrast, Obama is written off as weak and irresolute, with no clear short- or long-term aims. He gets high marks for rhetoric but scores zero for action. In short, he's a windbag."
Tough stuff, and right on the mark. President Obama is what the ranchers on the plains call "all hat and no cattle." Mr. Putin continues to play him like a cheap guitar (or maybe a zither), and the president continues on his merry way, off nearly every day to raise money to elect Democrats who will applaud as he dismantles American arms, strangles the domestic economy with a growing tangle of red tape, and fritters away American influence.
John Kerry, the secretary of state, met his Russian and Ukrainian counterparts and the high commissioner of the European Union Thursday in Geneva, and they all agreed to strongly condemn "and reject" all expressions of "extremism, racism and religious intolerance, including anti-Semitism." That's nice, but nobody half-awake thinks it means very much. Mr. Putin no doubt agrees that seizing someone else's country is not nice, either, but he's not giving anything back.
The mischief in Ukraine is making everybody in eastern Europe nervous, and why wouldn't it? The Polish defense minister, visiting the Pentagon on Thursday, said the "destabilization" of Ukraine reminds the Polish people that they can only defend themselves against the Russians by sticking close to NATO, the United States, and their own army.
"The events of the recent months and the aggressive policy taken by Russia made Poles realize that things must not be taken for granted . . . we are making a significant effort to modernize our armed forces."
Chuck Hagel, the secretary of defense, made the usual noises echoing President Windbag, citing the NATO charter that "Article 5 is clear than an act of aggression against one member of NATO is an attack on all members." Speechifying like this naturally evokes the aroma of gunpowder and portents of the disaster that nobody wants. This grim moment in time is not World War III, but it's nevertheless serious, and could have been avoided if the leader of the free world, the role Mr. Obama asked for twice but clearly doesn't want and doesn't know how to play, had learned to lead from the front instead of his preference for "leading from behind."
(He may think he's Ginger Rogers, but he's not.)
He doesn't understand the Putin threat any more than he understands the threat from the Islamic Middle East.
Leadership is hard. Playing at leadership is easy. Confronting an aspiring tyrant like Vladimir Putin is hard. Devoting presidential attention to raising campaign money, working on his putting and making sure women get all the condoms and abortions they want is easy.
And that makes it easy for Vladimir Putin to rearrange the power settings in a world ripe for domination.
1b) Putin's Westward March
Revisionist powers are rising as Obama and Europe fail to respond.
Diplomacy is useful when it prevents bad outcomes. The problem with diplomacy as practiced by President Obama is that it too often is a mask to disguise bad outcomes. The latest example is this week's agreement among Ukraine, Russia, the EU and the U.S. that claims to prevent war but largely advances Vladimir Putin's strategic objectives.
The government in Kiev is supposed to make political concessions to allow more autonomy in its eastern provinces in return for a military "de-escalation." But on the very day of the accord, Mr. Putin publicly reserved the right to invade Ukraine and refused to withdraw his troops massed at the border. On Friday the militants holding police stations and public offices in eastern Ukraine refused to stand down.
Even President Obama curbed his enthusiasm for the deal negotiated by Secretary of State John Kerry, saying at a Thursday press conference that Russia still had to follow through on its commitments. But what did Mr. Putin really commit to?
Russian President Vladimir Putin Reuters
The Russian President denies that the militants have anything to do with Russia and says he's helpless to stop them. The accord says nothing about Ukraine's May 25 election, which Russia opposes and wants to subvert. His troops are still ready to invade if he pleases, and Mr. Putin made promises to the republic of Georgia before he invaded that country in 2008. For the first time on Thursday, Mr. Putin referred to Ukraine as part of "New Russia," a revanchist echo of the czarist era.
NATO Supreme Commander Philip Breedlove cut through the diplomatic haze with a public memo on Friday stating that, "What is happening in eastern Ukraine is a military operation that is well planned and organized" and "is being carried out at the direction of Russia."
The pro-Russian activists show all the earmarks of having had military training, the general wrote. Their weapons and equipment are mainly Russian army issue, which they carry with military discipline. Their use of tear gas and stun grenades in taking buildings showed training inconsistent with a spontaneously generated local militia.
Too bad Mr. Obama showed none of the same candor about these military facts. In his press conference the President never blamed Russia for the unrest in Ukraine or said Russian troops were on the ground. He never mentioned Crimea, which seems to have been banished from U.S. talking points now that Mr. Putin has annexed the peninsula. Instead Mr. Obama sounded like a pundit analyzing the possibilities of diplomacy, with more threats of further sanctions if Mr. Putin escalates.
All of this continues the pattern of Mr. Obama and Europe underestimating the Russian strongman. They pretend he is amenable to diplomacy or afraid of threats, but neither has deterred Mr. Putin from marching west. Even when Mr. Putin openly declares his goal by declaring eastern Ukraine to be part of historic Russia, Mr. Obama prefers to ignore it.
Opinion Video
Global View columnist Bret Stephens on the agreement reached Thursday between Ukraine and Russia in Geneva. Photo: The White House
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The larger problem is that Mr. Obama can't seem to admit that his assumptions about the world are being repudiated by the week. He came to office believing his own campaign rhetoric that the U.S. was unpopular mainly because of PresidentGeorge W. Bush. He would end these misunderstandings through diplomatic engagement, especially with our adversaries, who would respond in kind to our good will and moral example. Nowhere in the world has that happened.
To the contrary, Mr. Obama's second term has been marked by the advance of revisionist powers seeking to rewrite the post-Cold War global order. Iran is attempting to do this on nuclear weapons, retaining a capability just short of exploding a weapon with a goal of dominating the Middle East. China is pressing its territorial claims in the East and South China seas. And now Russia is marching west with a goal of reclaiming the influence and perhaps the territory it lost with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Mr. Obama dismisses Russia as a mere "regional" power, but more than one global threat began as a regional one. Unless he faces forceful opposition, Mr. Putin will not stop at neutralizing or digesting Ukraine. He will set his sights at discrediting NATO, perhaps with a play on the Baltic states.
Nothing that Mr. Obama and Western Europe have done so far comes close to meeting the magnitude of this new threat. Their military gestures have been token deployments of NATO jets, their economic sanctions have been weak, and their diplomacy more pleading than forceful.
Mr. Putin sees Western leaders preoccupied with domestic concerns with no appetite for a great power showdown. He sees European leaders unwilling to pay any economic price to sanction Russia. And he sees that Mr. Obama cares more about securing Russia's help to strike a nuclear detente with Iran than about keeping Ukraine out of Russia's clutches. Until that changes, Mr. Putin will march on.
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2)A Black Conservative's War on Poverty
The man who is showing Paul Ryan around poor corners of America talks about the real barriers to upward mobility and the 'poverty Pentagon.'
By Jason Riley
'I know black contractors who have gone out of business because their black workers were not prompt or had negative attitudes. I know black workers who take pride about going to work any hour they feel like it, taking the day off when they feel like it. . . . Many leaders who are black and many white liberals will object to my discussing these things in public. But the decadence in the black community . . . is already in the headlines; the only question is what we should do about it."
Recent remarks from Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin? Nope. That's Jesse Jackson in 1976.
Bob Woodson reads the quote when I ask him to respond to the backlash over Mr. Ryan's telling a radio interviewer last month that there is "this tailspin of culture in our inner cities, in particular of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work; and so there's a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with."
Robert L. Woodson Sr. is a no-nonsense black conservative who heads the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise and knows a thing or two about that culture, the nation's inner cities and Mr. Ryan.
Zina Saunders
"Paul approached me about a year ago," says Mr. Woodson, sitting recently in his Washington office. "He knows we have groups all across the country that deal with the plight of the poor. He asked me to take him on a listening tour. He said, 'I'd like to learn about the alternatives to what we're already doing, and I know you've been involved in assisting people at the local level.' "
Mr. Woodson agreed but warned that there would be a time commitment. "I said to his staff, 'I don't do drive-bys, so he's got to give me an entire day.' If you're serious, you'll put in the time. And he did. I've taken him now on 12 trips—all to high-crime, drug-infested neighborhoods. And he was not just touched but blown away by what he saw."
Mr. Woodson believes that the Ryan brouhaha could turn out to be a blessing. "Low-income people haven't been on President Obama's agenda for five years," he says. If this sparks a conversation, all the better, "but we have to have the right conversation."
Mr. Woodson attended the White House announcement in February of the president's My Brother's Keeper initiative, which is aimed at helping disadvantaged young black men. White House concerns about the president's black base of support may be behind this newfound interest in the poor, Mr. Woodson says, "but I don't care. If someone is doing something for political advantage, but it has the consequence of helping people, I don't think we should be critical."
Mr. Woodson was pleasantly surprised by what he saw and heard: "The president had the kind of people I deal with up there with him. He was introduced by a young man who was recently robbed on his way to school. I was also glad to hear him say that there must be a nongovernment approach to the problem, and he assembled private-sector funders."
But optics and rhetoric notwithstanding, Mr. Woodson is skeptical that much will come of the initiative. "My worry and my fear is that the money and resources will go to the same racial grievance groups, the same members of what I call the poverty Pentagon. They'll give it to Al Sharpton and the others to do what they've been doing for decades, to do what doesn't work—what in fact is making things worse."
Mr. Woodson, who remains fit and energetic at age 76, founded the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise in 1981 after stints at the liberal National Urban League and conservative American Enterprise Institute. He is academically trained but wears his pragmatism on his sleeve. "We go around the country like a Geiger counter, looking at high-crime neighborhoods and asking the questions the poverty industry doesn't.
"If we see that 70% of households are raising children out of wedlock, that means 30% are not. We want to know what the 30% are doing right. How are they raising kids who aren't dropping out of school or on drugs or in jail? We seek SEK.AU +0.54% them out—we call them the antibodies of the community—and put a microphone on them, and say, 'tell us how you did this.' "
Mr. Woodson says that many poor communities don't need another government program so much as relief from current policies. "For instance, a lot of people coming out of prison have a hard time obtaining occupational licenses," he says. Aspiring barbers, cabdrivers, tree-trimmers, locksmiths and the like, he notes, can face burdensome licensing requirements. Proponents of these rules like to cite public-safety concerns, but the reality is that licensure requirements exist mainly to shut out competition. In many black communities, that translates into fewer jobs and less access to quality goods and services.
Mr. Woodson sees an opportunity here for the GOP to do right by the poor without abandoning its conservative principles or pandering. He points to the successful outreach efforts of former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and former Indianapolis Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, two Republicans who worked with local minority communities to push market-driven urban redevelopment and were rewarded politically by blacks for doing so.
To illustrate the difference between his approach to community activism and a liberal's, Mr. Woodson tells me about a pastor in Detroit who wanted to build 50 new homes in a ghetto neighborhood but couldn't find financial backing or insurance. "If he had gone to someone on the left for help, they would have gotten their lawyers to sue the insurance company and the bank for redlining or something. What I did by contrast is arrange a meeting between the insurance executives and the pastor. They saw what he was trying to do, the people in the neighborhood he was employing. They saw someone developing human capital." The insurance company got on board and a bank followed. With financing in place, the homes were built, as was a new restaurant currently run by a man who did 13 years in prison.
"I'm optimistic," says Mr. Woodson, noting that his organization has trained some 2,500 grass-roots leaders in 39 states. "We have the platform. We need the investment. My challenge is to get more conservatives to understand that there are many people who arein poverty but not of it."
Mr. Woodson is irked that Republicans aren't more entrepreneurial in their outreach efforts, citing Mr. Ryan's mentor, the late Congressman Jack Kemp, as a model. Kemp, a former housing secretary for George H.W. Bush, distinguished himself as a proponent of low-tax urban "enterprise zones" and more privatization of public services.
"The other thing that annoys me," Mr. Woodson continues, "is that too many Republicans, as [economist] Walter Williams has said, abandon old friends to appease old enemies." In the 1990s after black Congressman J.C. Watts denounced Jesse Jackson as a race hustler, House Speaker Newt Gingrich apologized to Mr. Jackson and invited the reverend to join him at President Clinton's second-term inauguration. "Despite all the help we provided Newt Gingrich, he turned his back on us and invited Jesse Jackson into his booth," says Mr. Woodson. "Conservatives have to stop validating these people."
But Mr. Woodson saves his most passionate disdain for those on the black left who all but abandon the black poor except to exploit them. "Around 70 cents of every dollar designated to relieve poverty goes not to poor people but to people who serve the poor—social workers, counselors, et cetera," he says. "We've created a poverty industry, turned poor people into a commodity. And the race hustlers play a bait-and-switch game where they use the conditions of low-income blacks to justify remedies"—such as racial education preferences—"that only help middle-income blacks."
Mr. Woodson broke with the traditional civil-rights movement in the 1970s over forced busing. In the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown decision, Chief Justice Earl Warren suggested that all-black classrooms were inherently inferior, and liberals convinced themselves that ending legal segregation wasn't enough. "The left assumes that if you're not for forced integration, then you support segregation, but that's a false dichotomy," Mr. Woodson says. "I believe we should have fought for desegregation, but forced integration is a separate issue, especially in education."
A majority of black parents always opposed this social engineering and said they wanted better neighborhood schools, "but the civil-rights leadership pushed busing for the poor. Of course, none of their kids were on the bus," says Mr. Woodson. To this day, the left's obsession with the racial composition of a school trumps its concern with whether kids are learning.
A recent study from UCLA's Civil Rights Project criticized charter schools for being too racially segregated. Never mind that many of these charters outperform the surrounding neighborhood schools and that excellent all-black schools have long existed and predate Brown. Liberals remain convinced that black children must sit next to white children in order to learn. The Obama Justice Department currently is trying to shut down a Louisiana voucher program for low-income families on the grounds that it may upset the racial balance of public schools in the state.
Mr. Woodson frowns on attempts to dismiss antisocial black behavior as a product of white racism or a biased criminal justice system. "It's cynical and patronizing, and I'd rather be hated than patronized," he says.
He is also an advocate of faith-based remedies for drug and alcohol abuse. "The most effective community leaders that I've seen and worked with all over the country agree that it's transformation and redemption that changes the heart," he says. "They take you into communities and introduce you to hundreds of people who were former drug addicts and criminals, who tell you that prison couldn't change them and a psychiatrist couldn't change them but a religious or spiritual experience did. I don't understand why it works. It's irrational. But it works."
That's pretty much Bob Woodson's guiding philosophy. Do what works, and stop doing what doesn't.
Mr. Riley is a member of The Wall Street Journal editorial board and author of "Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed," which will be published by Encounter in June.
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