===
Clever Netanyahu Ad:
http://allenwestrepublic.com/
===
Savannah Classical Academy 6th grader places 2d in spelling bee contest: "Our very own G-Money (6th grade) placed 2nd overall in last night's spelling bee!
We are very proud of that young man for the courage and diligence to succeed!
He actually correctly spelled voracious... which was not noted directly in the article."
===
Rather than fight over closing it just give it back. (See 2 below.)
===
Dick
In January Israel had a technology week, with
lots of visitors from various Countries.
The total of the transactions concluded during
this week amounted to ONE BILLION US$
IN COMPARISON [Israel's population 8.2 million]
USA @ 317 millions would have to produce 38.4 billion US
CANADA @ 35 million population 4.26 "
GERMANY @ 83 million " 10.12 "
===
Josef Joffe discusses Obama and his foreign policy strategy.
Obama's "lead from behind" is because that is mostly where his head is and his failures are, in part, because of the consequences of "affirmative action."
I understand the concept of "affirmative action"was to make up for disadvantages but it also was based on promotions etc. without going through the required hoops. There are necessary passages and doorways one must go through, called experiences, that are requisites for being qualified. Promotions without doing the work is a certain road to failure. I believe Obama was allowed to skip too many hoops and we are paying the price.
A classic example is Obama's inability to define ISIS as our enemy. He is so ideologically constrained logic escapes him. How could one possibly become a doctor if they are incapable of determining what they are looking for?
ISIS is spreading, taking over more territory, frightening our so-called allies through their heinous tactics and Obama cannot bring himself to deal with what is going on because he is utterly inept.
As I wrote in my 2015 predictions memo, he will be backed into returning to the Middle East - the same Middle East he loudly celebrated he was abandoning because he wanted to show up G.W. Tragically, G.W will have the last laugh as ISIS' backs' Obama back into Iraq and elsewhere. Why? Because they will push Obama's back up against the wall and leave him no choice but to swallow the bitter pill he would like to leave for his successor.
===
Now let's hear from Tom Sowell. (See 4 below.)
===
The more Obama tries to have Bibi turned out of office the more Bibi rises in the polls. (See 5 below.)
===
Josef Joffe discusses Obama and his foreign policy strategy.
Obama's "lead from behind" is because that is mostly where his head is and his failures are, in part, because of the consequences of "affirmative action."
I understand the concept of "affirmative action"was to make up for disadvantages but it also was based on promotions etc. without going through the required hoops. There are necessary passages and doorways one must go through, called experiences, that are requisites for being qualified. Promotions without doing the work is a certain road to failure. I believe Obama was allowed to skip too many hoops and we are paying the price.
A classic example is Obama's inability to define ISIS as our enemy. He is so ideologically constrained logic escapes him. How could one possibly become a doctor if they are incapable of determining what they are looking for?
ISIS is spreading, taking over more territory, frightening our so-called allies through their heinous tactics and Obama cannot bring himself to deal with what is going on because he is utterly inept.
As I wrote in my 2015 predictions memo, he will be backed into returning to the Middle East - the same Middle East he loudly celebrated he was abandoning because he wanted to show up G.W. Tragically, G.W will have the last laugh as ISIS' backs' Obama back into Iraq and elsewhere. Why? Because they will push Obama's back up against the wall and leave him no choice but to swallow the bitter pill he would like to leave for his successor.
===
Now let's hear from Tom Sowell. (See 4 below.)
===
The more Obama tries to have Bibi turned out of office the more Bibi rises in the polls. (See 5 below.)
===
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1)
| US and Iran moving closer to nuclear deal, EU diplomats tell Israeli officials | ||
| ||
European diplomats have told Israeli officials in recent days that the United States and Iran are moving closer to an agreement that would allow the Islamic Republic to keep a large number of centrifuges in return for guaranteeing regional stability, Army Radio is reporting on Tuesday.
According to EU officials, US Secretary of State John Kerry and his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif, have discussed increasing the number of centrifuges which Iran would be permitted to keep. In exchange, the Iranians would undertake an obligation to bring their influence to bear in order to ensure quiet in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria.
European diplomats are quoted by Israeli officials as saying that the US in recent weeks has made significant concessions in its talks with Iran, so much so that it is willing to permit Tehran to operate 6,500 centrifuges while lifting sanctions that have hurt its economy this past decade.
The Europeans have told the Israelis that these concessions were offered in exchange for Iranian promises to maintain regional stability. According to Army Radio, the EU is opposed to the proposed linkage between the nuclear issue and other geopolitical matters. In fact, the Europeans suspect that Washington is operating behind Brussels’ back and that Kerry has not bothered to keep them in the loop in his talks with Zarif.
Israel is concerned that the Obama administration’s willingness to allow Iran to keep centrifuges would in effect render Tehran a “nuclear threshold state,” enabling it to assemble a nuclear bomb within months if it so chooses. Such a scenario is unacceptable to the Israelis.
This is not the first time in recent days that reports have emerged regarding American concessions to Iran in the nuclear negotiations.
This past weekend, Obama administration officials denied an Israeli television report that Washington had agreed to 80 percent of Iran’s demands.
“That’s complete nonsense,” a senior US official told The Jerusalem Post, responding to a report by Channel 10 on Friday.
The United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, China and Germany are negotiating with Iran toward a comprehensive agreement over its nuclear program, hoping to clinch a political framework by the end of March.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been working the phones with Democratic lawmakers in Washington to temper their concerns over the political nature of his speech to a joint session of Congress, scheduled for March 3. The latest deadline for a final settlement is June 30.
The urgency of the matter – and not partisan politics – is what motivated Netanyahu to violate diplomatic protocol and accept the Republican leadership’s invitation to address Congress on the need for more sanctions against Iran, Channel 10 quotes officials in Jerusalem as saying.
The White House says it will prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, and both the prime minister and the US president say that no deal at the negotiating table is better than a bad one.
The standards for a bad deal remain hotly contested between the Obama and Netanyahu administrations.
Meanwhile on Saturday, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, growing frustrated with hard-line resistance to a nuclear deal, accused opponents of effectively “cheering on” the other side in the grueling negotiations with world powers.
Rouhani, faced with rising popular concern over his unfulfilled election pledges to fix the economy, blamed hard-line interference in part for the talks’ halting progress.
“The other side applauds their own, but here in our country, it is not clear what [the critics] are doing. It is as if they are cheering on the rival team,” Rouhani he told a public gathering, quoted by the official IRNA news agency.
“And when we ask them what they are going, they answer: ‘We are criticizing and criticism is a good thing... This is not criticism, it is sabotage of national interests and favor for partisan politics,” he said.
“Criticism is not about booing, it is not about slander and character assassination. Criticism is about showing a better and clearer way so that [we can] reach our goals faster.”
Hard-line sentiment is centered in the security establishment led by the Revolutionary Guards and in the powerful Shi’ite clergy.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s ultimate political authority, has so far backed the nuclear talks but has also continued to denounce foreign “enemies” and “the Great Satan” to reassure hard-liners for whom anti-US sentiment has always been integral to the Islamic Revolution.
Michael Wilner contributed to this report.
1a) A Speech Netanyahu Must Give
Barack Obama collects hard favors from allies and repays them with neglect and derision.
By Bret Stephens
Even friends of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are second-guessing his decision to accept House Speaker John Boehner ’s invitation to address Congress next month on the subject of Iran, over loud objections from the Obama administration. The prospect of the speech, those friends say, has sparked a needless crisis between Jerusalem and Washington. And it has put Democrats to an invidious choice between their loyalty to the president and their support for the Jewish state, jeopardizing the bipartisan basis of the U.S.-Israel relationship.
Sensible concerns—except for a few things. Relations between Israel and the U.S. have been in crisis nearly from the moment President Obama stepped into office. Democratic support for Israel has been eroding for decades. It was the U.S. president, not the Israeli prime minister, who picked this fight.
Oh, and if there’s going to be a blowout in U.S.-Israel relations, is now really a worse time than later this year, when the Obama administration will have further cornered Israel with its Iran diplomacy?
Because memories are short, let’s remind ourselves of the Ur-moment in the Bibi-Barack drama. It happened on May 18, 2009, when Mr. Netanyahu, in office for just a few weeks, arrived to a White House that was demanding that he endorse Palestinian statehood and freeze settlements, even as the administration was rebuffing Israeli requests to set a deadline for the nascent nuclear diplomacy with Iran.
The result: Within a month of that meeting, Mr. Netanyahu duly endorsed Palestinian statehood in a speech at Israel’s right-wing Bar-Ilan University—roughly the equivalent of Mr. Obama going to a meeting of the Sierra Club and urging its members to get over their opposition to fracking. By the end of the year, Mr. Netanyahu further infuriated his right-wing base by agreeing to a 10-month settlement freeze, which even Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged was “unprecedented.”
What did Mr. Netanyahu get in return from Mr. Obama? While the president stuck to his refusal to set “an artificial deadline,” he did concede in a joint press conference that “we’re not going to have talks forever. We’re not going to create a situation in which talks become an excuse for inaction while Iran proceeds with developing a nuclear—and deploying a nuclear weapon.”
The promise not to “have talks forever” was made six years ago. Since then, diplomatic efforts have included the 2009 “fuel swap” proposal; the 2010 Brazil-Turkey-Iran declaration; the 2011 Russian “step-by-step proposal”; the 2012 diplomatic rounds in Istanbul, Baghdad and Moscow; and finally the 2013 “Joint Plan of Action,” a six-month interim deal that is now in its 13th month.
Now Mr. Obama is vowing to veto the bipartisan Kirk-Menendez bill that would end the charade by imposing sanctions on Iran in the event Tehran doesn’t sign an acceptable nuclear deal by the summer—that is, after the third deadline for the interim agreement has expired. The president is also demanding that Democrats rally around him in his histrionic fit over the Netanyahu speech. This is from the same administration that, as Politico’s David Rogers reminds us, never bothered to consult Mr. Boehner on its invitation to South Korean President Lee Myung-bak to address Congress in 2011.
This history is worth recalling because it underscores the unpleasant truth about America in the age of Obama. The president collects hard favors from allies and repays them with neglect and derision. He is eager to accommodate the political needs of authoritarian leaders like Iran’s Hasan Rouhani but has no use for the political needs of elected leaders like Mr. Netanyahu. He believes that it is for other statesmen to stake their political lives and risk their national future for the sake of a moral principle—at least as Mr. Obama defines that principle. As for him, the only thing sacred is his own political convenience.
This is the mentality of a peevish and callow potentate. Not the least of the reasons Mr. Netanyahu must not give in to pressure to cancel his speech is that he could expect to get nothing out of it from the administration, while humiliating Mr. Boehner in the bargain.
Mr. Netanyahu also needs to speak because Congress deserves an unvarnished account of the choice to which Mr. Obama proposes to put Israel: either accede to continued diplomacy with Iran, and therefore its de facto nuclearization; or strike Iran militarily in defiance of the U.S. and Mr. Obama’s concordat with Tehran. A congressional vote in favor of Kirk-Menendez would at least make good on Mr. Obama’s unmet promise not to use talks as “an excuse for inaction.”
Above all, Mr. Netanyahu needs to speak because Israel cannot expect indefinite support from the U.S. if it acts like a fretful and obedient client to a cavalier American patron. The margin of Israel’s security is measured not by anyone’s love but by the respect of friends and enemies alike. By giving this speech, Mr. Netanyahu is demanding that respect. Irritating the president is a small price to pay for doing so.
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2)Guantanamo Bay's Place in U.S. Strategy in the Caribbean
By Sim Tack
Last week, the Cuban government declared that for the United States and Cuba to normalize relations, the United States would have to return the territory occupied by a U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay. Washington clearly responded that returning the base is not on the table right now. This response makes sense, since quite a bit of politicking goes into the status of the base. However, the Guantanamo Bay issue highlights a notable aspect to the U.S.-Cuban negotiations — one that is rooted in the history of the U.S. ascension to superpower status as it challenged European powers in the Western Hemisphere.
U.S. Expansion in the Western Hemisphere
Cuba, the largest island in the Caribbean, has a prominent position at the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico, separating access to the gulf into two choke points: the Yucatan Channel and the Straits of Florida. It is also situated on the sea-lanes between the U.S. East Coast and the Panama Canal, the shortest route for naval traffic between the two coasts of the United States. Cuba thus has been pivotal to the U.S. strategy to safeguard economic activity in the Gulf of Mexico and naval transport routes beyond that. The evolution of U.S. naval capabilities, however, has changed the part that Cuba, and thus the base at Guantanamo, has played.
The United States began extending its ambitions into the Caribbean, challenging the classical European colonial powers and arguably starting its ascent to the rank of a global power, with theMonroe Doctrine in 1823. Named after then-President James Monroe, the doctrine sought to prevent intervention by European powers — most notably Spain and Portugal — in their former colonies as the colonies achieved independence. The doctrine largely was a hollow statement at first because the United States did not have the naval power it would need to enforce it and establish the hegemony that it sought to put in place with the doctrine. However, the United Kingdom, which at the time had considerable naval capabilities, supported the Monroe Doctrine and committed to enforcing it because it also secured British access to the markets in these former colonies as long as they were not recovered by their former rulers.
Although it was a notable shift in U.S. foreign policy toward the Western Hemisphere as a whole, the Monroe Doctrine did not affect Cuba directly. The doctrine did not seek to meddle in the affairs of existing European colonies, and the Spanish ruled Cuba and Puerto Rico until the Spanish-American War in 1898. At that point, after the Monroe Doctrine had set the stage, U.S. military capabilities were catching up with its foreign policy intent. It was during the Spanish-American War that U.S. naval power entered the global stage and eventually resulted in the United States' taking Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines from Spain.
However, Washington first needed a reason for intervention in Cuba. That opportunity came with the USS Maine explosion. The ship was deployed to Havana to protect U.S. business interests on the island. Moreover, news was spreading of atrocities committed by Spanish forces against the Cuban population. This intervention included the exact moment when U.S. forces arrived in Guantanamo Bay. In June 1898, a battalion of Marines landed at Fisherman's Point in the Bay of Guantanamo to pin down the Spanish forces in the city of Guantanamo, preventing them from reinforcing the Spanish positions on San Juan Hill as Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders led the charge there.
Several years after the U.S. victory against the Spanish, in 1903, the newly independent Cuban government signed an agreement with Washington for the perpetual lease of Guantanamo Bay as a naval base. Initially, the peace agreement with Spain had transferred sovereignty over the island to the United States, but Washington decided to leave the island under the control of the local Cuban leaders who had started the rebellion against the Spanish. The U.S. naval station at Guantanamo, the result of the first real show of U.S. expeditionary power, went on to become instrumental in the further deployment of U.S. naval power. In those days, the time that naval vessels spent at sea was limited significantly by the fuel they required: coal. Having access to forward deployed coaling stations such as the one at Guantanamo extended the U.S. Navy's ability to operate in the Caribbean.
Guantanamo's Changing Role
After World War II, during which Guantanamo also played a direct part in supporting merchant shipping convoys from the U.S. East Coast, the role of Guantanamo Bay changed considerably as a consequence of the Cuban Revolution. Throughout the revolution, Guantanamo Bay not only became a key element of U.S. resistance to the rebels led by Fidel Castro, it also became a pawn in the new bipolar world order pitting the United States against the Soviet Union. The relations between the new Cuban government and the Soviet Union made Cuba the Soviets' most forward position toward the continental United States — something made very obvious during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The naval base at Guantanamo did not necessarily play a leading role in this part of history, although the continued U.S. presence in Guantanamo Bay persisted as a major source of dispute between Washington and Havana.
After the Cold War, the base's military significance began to wane. The fall of the Soviet Union left Cuba a much less significant element in U.S. foreign policy, and the development of new technology had reduced the need for the base to support U.S. naval operations in the Caribbean. As much as geopolitics dictates history, the evolution of manmade technology can significantly alter states' physical limitations and capabilities. The use of new and more efficient fuels in naval vessels improved the range and speed of these vessels to the point where the Gulf of Mexico's security and naval movement beyond the U.S. coastline no longer required a logistical support node in Cuba.
The U.S. Navy continued using Guantanamo as a training ground, but the base's significance even in this regard evaporated. By the mid-1990s, activity at the naval base at Guantanamo was demoted to Minimum Pillar Performance (limiting the activities and presence there to only that which is necessary to maintain the existence of the facilities). The U.S. military has maintained this caretaker presence at Guantanamo, but it has done so mostly in the service of the State Department, which intends to retain Guantanamo as a bargaining chip or leverage in relations with Havana, rather than out of military need.
The United States also realized that other similar naval operating bases in Latin America lost their utility in a new geopolitical and technological reality. During World War II, the United States had established such a base in Rio de Janeiro, but after the war this base closed, having served its military purpose. Similarly, the United States managed a series of naval bases throughout former British territories in the Western Hemisphere that it obtained in return for 50 Town-class destroyers through the lend-lease agreement with London. Most of these bases also were shut down shortly after World War II or during the Cold War. The United States intends to use its forward deploying military capabilities without establishing full-blown bases, as seen in Eastern Europe, Asia and the Middle East, but even then Guantanamo falls outside of Washington's "places-not-bases" intent.
A new use for the base was discovered after 9/11, when it became host to a detention facility holding suspected terrorists. The ambiguous legal status of the base at Guantanamo Bay provided grounds for this sort of use because it is technically a base leased by the U.S. government located on foreign soil. Terrorism suspects are not subject to the same guarantees they would receive if held on sovereign U.S. soil, generating a useful dynamic in the complex issue of dealing with enemy combatants in the U.S.-jihadist war. Guantanamo served a similar purpose when it was used to hold HIV-positive refugees in the early 1990s.
The potential for Guantanamo Bay to be returned to Cuba will depend greatly on the negotiations between Washington and Havana, as well as the domestic U.S. politicking that is influenced significantly by the anti-Castro Cuban immigrant population of Florida, a swing state that is key in presidential elections. It is key, however, to see Guantanamo in its current context and not in its past role in the development and protection of U.S. power in the Caribbean and beyond. The part Guantanamo plays in U.S.-Cuba negotiations is defined by Washington's desire to play this card at will. The only constraint on Washington is the requirement to disband the detention camp at Guantanamo to accommodate Cuba's demands, though this does not mean that the United States will give up the naval base easily. Once played, the Guantanamo card will be gone and Washington's long-term leverage over Havana will be forever altered.
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3)--- The Unreality of Obama’s Realpolitik
Realism in foreign policy is the first rule, but what’s missing in Mr. Obama’s vocabulary? Words such as “balance,” “order,” “containment” and “alliance-cohesion”—the bread and butter of realism. The dearth of such ideas in this administration is striking. But the problem goes deeper. Iran is not a “normal” would-be great power, amenable to a grand bargain where I give and you give and we both cooperate as we compete.
Realists should understand the difference between a “revisionist” and a “revolutionary” power. Revisionists (“I want more”) can be accommodated; revolutionaries (“I want it all”) cannot. Revisionists want to rearrange the pieces on the chessboard, revolutionaries want to overturn the table in the name of the true faith, be it secular or divine.
Napoleon was a revolutionary. He went all the way to Moscow and Cairo to bring down princes and potentates under the banner of “democracy.” The early Soviet Union changed the banner to “communism” but behaved similarly. Hitler wanted to crush Europe’s nation-states in favor of the German “master race.” All of them had to be defeated—or, in the nuclear age, contained for decades on end.
Iran is a two-headed creature, combining both R’s. As revisionist, it seeks to unseat the U.S. in the region, targeting Lebanon and Syria with proxies like Hezbollah, or directly with its expeditionary Guard forces. It reaches for nuclear weapons to cow the U.S., Israel and the rest. As revolutionary, the regime in Tehran subverts its neighbors in the name of the one and only true God, seeking to impose Shiite supremacy from Beirut to Baghdad. Shiite Houthi forces just grabbed power in Yemen. The Shiites shall reign where Shiites live.
The point is that revolutionary powers, driven by the consuming faith of being on the right side of history, cannot be appeased. How do you compromise with Allah or, earlier, with the worldly God of communism? How, indeed, could Protestants and Catholics strike a deal in the religious mayhem of the 16th and 17th centuries? They fought each other to exhaustion.
Faith warriors have to be vanquished or contained, as in George Kennan’s immortal words at the dawn of the Cold War: “unceasing pressure” until “the breakup or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power.” It worked without war, but it took 40 years. The first sinner against Kennan’s realism was George W. Bushwhen he went to war against Saddam, removing the single most important bulwark against Iran and liberating Shiite power throughout Iraq.
Mr. Obama, what irony, is going one worse. He has been counting on diplomacy to stop the Iranian bomb, but he has reaped stalemate. Unwilling to commit serious force against Islamic State, he is allowing the Iranians to brag that they are doing America’s work in Syria and Iraq. Riyadh, Amman and Jerusalem are neither amused nor assured. The Russians, who have their “advisers” helping Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, are eagerly watching for signs of American weakness, not just in the Middle East but also in Eastern Europe.
OK, life is horrifyingly complicated in the Middle East, and sometimes the “good guys” must sup with the devil, as the West did when it linked up with Stalin against Hitler in 1941. But this dusty analogy holds a lesson: Keep your powder dry, and your troops ready, as the U.S. failed to do after V-E Day in the spring of 1945. Soviet armies stayed in Germany while Stalin subjugated Eastern Europe and proceeded to subvert Greece, Turkey, France and Italy.
The point is that Mr. Obama is confusing revolutionary Iran with a reasonable revisionist power. President Hasan Rouhani may be reasonable; his boss, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is not. For him, the “Great Satan” is indispensable as a cosmic enemy who legitimizes Islamic rule. As the U.S. tacitly collaborates with Iran on Islamic State and al-Nusra, Tehran keeps pushing its pawns forward while egging on Shiite revolutionaries all over the Middle East—damn Western sanctions, no matter how hard they bite.
To borrow from Forrest Gump : Power is as power does. Iran knows this. Aside from a few exceptions like the killing of bin Laden and the timid reinsertion of American might in Iraq, the supposed realist Mr. Obama does not.
Mr. Joffe is a fellow at the Institute of International Studies and the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford University, where he also teaches U.S. foreign policy. His latest book is “The Myth of America’s
Decline” (Liveright, 2013).
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------4)
If you want to spend your life nursing grievances, you will never run out of grievances to nurse, regardless of what color your skin is. It's clear that Barack Obama and Eric Holder have chosen to nurse their grievances and look for opportunities for "payback."
In his recent trip to India, President Obama repeated a long-standing pattern of his -- denigrating the United States to foreign audiences. He said that he had been discriminated against because of his skin color in America, a country in which there is, even now, "terrible poverty."
Make no mistake about it, there is no society of human beings in which there are no rotten people. But for a President of the United States to be smearing America in a foreign country, whose track record is far worse, is both irresponsible and immature.
Years after the last lynching of blacks took place in the Jim Crow South, India's own government was still publishing annual statistics on atrocities against the untouchables, including fatal atrocities. The June 2003 issue of National Geographic magazine had a chilling article on the continuing atrocities against untouchables in India in the 21st century.
Nothing that happened to Barack Obama when he was attending a posh private school in Hawaii, or elite academic institutions on the mainland, was in the same league with the appalling treatment of untouchables in India. And what Obama called "terrible poverty" in America would be called prosperity in India.
The history of the human race has not always been a pretty picture, regardless of what part of the world you look at, and regardless of whatever color of the rainbow the people have been.
If you want to spend your life nursing grievances, you will never run out of grievances to nurse, regardless of what color your skin is. If some people cannot be rotten to you because of your race, they will find some other reason to be rotten to you.
The question is whether you want to deal with such episodes at the time when they occur or whether you want to nurse your grievances for years, and look for opportunities for "payback" against other people for what somebody else did. Much that has been said and done by both President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder suggests that they are in payback mode.
Both have repeatedly jumped into local law enforcement issues, far from Washington, and turned them into racial issues, long before the facts came out. These two men -- neither of whom grew up in a ghetto -- have been quick to play the role of defenders of the ghetto, even when that meant defending the kinds of hoodlums who can make life a living hell for decent people in black ghettos.
Far from benefitting ghetto blacks, the vision presented by the Obama administration, and the policies growing out of that vision, have a track record of counterproductive results on both sides of the Atlantic -- that is, among low-income whites in England as well as low-income blacks in the United States.
In both countries, children from low-income immigrant families do far better in schools than the native-born, low-income children. Moreover, low-income immigrant groups rise out of poverty far more readily than low-income natives.
The January 31st issue of the distinguished British magazine The Economist reports that the children of African refugees from Somalia do far better in school than low-income British children in general. "Somali immigrants," it reports, "insist that their children turn up for extra lessons at weekends." These are "well-ordered children" and their parents understand that education "is their ticket out of poverty."
Contrast that with the Obama administration's threatening schools with federal action if they do not reduce their disciplining of black males for misbehavior.
Despite whatever political benefit or personal satisfaction that may give Barack Obama and Eric Holder, reducing the sanctions against misbehavior in school virtually guarantees that classroom disorder will make the teaching of other black students far less effective, if not impossible.
For black children whose best ticket out of poverty is education, that is a lifelong tragedy, even if it is a political bonanza to politicians who claim to be their friends and defenders.
The biggest advantage that the children of low-income immigrants have over the children of native-born, low-income families is that low-income immigrants have not been saturated for generations with the rhetoric of victimhood and hopelessness, spread by people like Obama, Holder and their counterparts overseas.
3)--- The Unreality of Obama’s Realpolitik
With the president unwilling to project U.S. might, Iran and other bad actors rush to exploit the power vacuum.
By JOSEF JOFFE
When historians look back on President Obama’s foreign policy, it likely will be defined by two shibboleths: “leading from behind” and “we don’t have a strategy yet.” Great powers lead from the front, and they don’t formulate strategy on the fly. They must have a strategy beforehand, one based on power and purpose that tells challengers what to expect. Nowhere is this truer than with the Islamic Republic of Iran, a rival power playing for the highest stakes: nuclear weapons and regional hegemony.
The retort from Mr. Obama , if he ever laid out a Middle East strategy, might go like this: “Iran is No. 1 in the region, and we need its help against Islamic State and sundry Sunni terror groups. Save for a massive assault with all its incalculable consequences, we cannot denuclearize Iran; we can only slow its march toward the bomb and guard against a rapid breakout. Rising powers must be accommodated for the sake of peace and cooperation. So let’s be good realpolitikers, especially since it’s time for a little nation-building at home.”
Realism in foreign policy is the first rule, but what’s missing in Mr. Obama’s vocabulary? Words such as “balance,” “order,” “containment” and “alliance-cohesion”—the bread and butter of realism. The dearth of such ideas in this administration is striking. But the problem goes deeper. Iran is not a “normal” would-be great power, amenable to a grand bargain where I give and you give and we both cooperate as we compete.
Realists should understand the difference between a “revisionist” and a “revolutionary” power. Revisionists (“I want more”) can be accommodated; revolutionaries (“I want it all”) cannot. Revisionists want to rearrange the pieces on the chessboard, revolutionaries want to overturn the table in the name of the true faith, be it secular or divine.
Napoleon was a revolutionary. He went all the way to Moscow and Cairo to bring down princes and potentates under the banner of “democracy.” The early Soviet Union changed the banner to “communism” but behaved similarly. Hitler wanted to crush Europe’s nation-states in favor of the German “master race.” All of them had to be defeated—or, in the nuclear age, contained for decades on end.
Iran is a two-headed creature, combining both R’s. As revisionist, it seeks to unseat the U.S. in the region, targeting Lebanon and Syria with proxies like Hezbollah, or directly with its expeditionary Guard forces. It reaches for nuclear weapons to cow the U.S., Israel and the rest. As revolutionary, the regime in Tehran subverts its neighbors in the name of the one and only true God, seeking to impose Shiite supremacy from Beirut to Baghdad. Shiite Houthi forces just grabbed power in Yemen. The Shiites shall reign where Shiites live.
The point is that revolutionary powers, driven by the consuming faith of being on the right side of history, cannot be appeased. How do you compromise with Allah or, earlier, with the worldly God of communism? How, indeed, could Protestants and Catholics strike a deal in the religious mayhem of the 16th and 17th centuries? They fought each other to exhaustion.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani PHOTO:ASSOCIATED PRESS
Faith warriors have to be vanquished or contained, as in George Kennan’s immortal words at the dawn of the Cold War: “unceasing pressure” until “the breakup or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power.” It worked without war, but it took 40 years. The first sinner against Kennan’s realism was George W. Bushwhen he went to war against Saddam, removing the single most important bulwark against Iran and liberating Shiite power throughout Iraq.
Mr. Obama, what irony, is going one worse. He has been counting on diplomacy to stop the Iranian bomb, but he has reaped stalemate. Unwilling to commit serious force against Islamic State, he is allowing the Iranians to brag that they are doing America’s work in Syria and Iraq. Riyadh, Amman and Jerusalem are neither amused nor assured. The Russians, who have their “advisers” helping Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, are eagerly watching for signs of American weakness, not just in the Middle East but also in Eastern Europe.
OK, life is horrifyingly complicated in the Middle East, and sometimes the “good guys” must sup with the devil, as the West did when it linked up with Stalin against Hitler in 1941. But this dusty analogy holds a lesson: Keep your powder dry, and your troops ready, as the U.S. failed to do after V-E Day in the spring of 1945. Soviet armies stayed in Germany while Stalin subjugated Eastern Europe and proceeded to subvert Greece, Turkey, France and Italy.
The point is that Mr. Obama is confusing revolutionary Iran with a reasonable revisionist power. President Hasan Rouhani may be reasonable; his boss, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is not. For him, the “Great Satan” is indispensable as a cosmic enemy who legitimizes Islamic rule. As the U.S. tacitly collaborates with Iran on Islamic State and al-Nusra, Tehran keeps pushing its pawns forward while egging on Shiite revolutionaries all over the Middle East—damn Western sanctions, no matter how hard they bite.
To borrow from Forrest Gump : Power is as power does. Iran knows this. Aside from a few exceptions like the killing of bin Laden and the timid reinsertion of American might in Iraq, the supposed realist Mr. Obama does not.
Mr. Joffe is a fellow at the Institute of International Studies and the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford University, where he also teaches U.S. foreign policy. His latest book is “The Myth of America’s
Decline” (Liveright, 2013).
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Obama vs. America
By Thomas Sowell
If you want to spend your life nursing grievances, you will never run out of grievances to nurse, regardless of what color your skin is. It's clear that Barack Obama and Eric Holder have chosen to nurse their grievances and look for opportunities for "payback."In his recent trip to India, President Obama repeated a long-standing pattern of his -- denigrating the United States to foreign audiences. He said that he had been discriminated against because of his skin color in America, a country in which there is, even now, "terrible poverty."
Make no mistake about it, there is no society of human beings in which there are no rotten people. But for a President of the United States to be smearing America in a foreign country, whose track record is far worse, is both irresponsible and immature.
Years after the last lynching of blacks took place in the Jim Crow South, India's own government was still publishing annual statistics on atrocities against the untouchables, including fatal atrocities. The June 2003 issue of National Geographic magazine had a chilling article on the continuing atrocities against untouchables in India in the 21st century.
Nothing that happened to Barack Obama when he was attending a posh private school in Hawaii, or elite academic institutions on the mainland, was in the same league with the appalling treatment of untouchables in India. And what Obama called "terrible poverty" in America would be called prosperity in India.
The history of the human race has not always been a pretty picture, regardless of what part of the world you look at, and regardless of whatever color of the rainbow the people have been.
If you want to spend your life nursing grievances, you will never run out of grievances to nurse, regardless of what color your skin is. If some people cannot be rotten to you because of your race, they will find some other reason to be rotten to you.
The question is whether you want to deal with such episodes at the time when they occur or whether you want to nurse your grievances for years, and look for opportunities for "payback" against other people for what somebody else did. Much that has been said and done by both President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder suggests that they are in payback mode.
Both have repeatedly jumped into local law enforcement issues, far from Washington, and turned them into racial issues, long before the facts came out. These two men -- neither of whom grew up in a ghetto -- have been quick to play the role of defenders of the ghetto, even when that meant defending the kinds of hoodlums who can make life a living hell for decent people in black ghettos.
Far from benefitting ghetto blacks, the vision presented by the Obama administration, and the policies growing out of that vision, have a track record of counterproductive results on both sides of the Atlantic -- that is, among low-income whites in England as well as low-income blacks in the United States.
In both countries, children from low-income immigrant families do far better in schools than the native-born, low-income children. Moreover, low-income immigrant groups rise out of poverty far more readily than low-income natives.
The January 31st issue of the distinguished British magazine The Economist reports that the children of African refugees from Somalia do far better in school than low-income British children in general. "Somali immigrants," it reports, "insist that their children turn up for extra lessons at weekends." These are "well-ordered children" and their parents understand that education "is their ticket out of poverty."
Contrast that with the Obama administration's threatening schools with federal action if they do not reduce their disciplining of black males for misbehavior.
Despite whatever political benefit or personal satisfaction that may give Barack Obama and Eric Holder, reducing the sanctions against misbehavior in school virtually guarantees that classroom disorder will make the teaching of other black students far less effective, if not impossible.
For black children whose best ticket out of poverty is education, that is a lifelong tragedy, even if it is a political bonanza to politicians who claim to be their friends and defenders.
The biggest advantage that the children of low-income immigrants have over the children of native-born, low-income families is that low-income immigrants have not been saturated for generations with the rhetoric of victimhood and hopelessness, spread by people like Obama, Holder and their counterparts overseas.
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Obama is clearly hoping that Netanyahu will lose the March elections and that a new, less hawkish Israeli government will be in place to back him on delaying sanctions before the March 24 deadline comes to pass. The irony is, his administration’s meddling in Israeli politics is making that increasingly less likely. Netanyahu is not out of the woods, to be sure, but when it comes to campaigning against Barack Obama, this much is certain: He’s no Mitt Romney.
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Obama’s offensive against Netanyahu backfires
The Obama administration is going all out to see that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is defeated, but the campaign of veiled threats and anonymous leaks is backfiring: Instead of sinking in the polls, Netanyahu is rising.
When Netanyahu accepted House Speaker John Boehner’s invitation to address a joint meeting of Congress in support of new sanctions on Iran, the Obama administration began a full-scale press offensive with a clear message: Netanyahu was endangering Israel by playing politics with the country’s relationship with the United States. Secretary of State John F. Kerry warned (through an anonymous aide) that “playing politics with that relationship could blunt [Kerry’s] enthusiasm for being Israel’s primary defender” and revealed that Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency had told him that new a sanctions bill would be “like throwing a grenade” into the negotiations with Iran. A senior administration official declared ominously to Haaretz that “President Obama has a year and a half left to his presidency, and that there will be a price.” A member of “Obama’s inner circle” launched an attack against Israeli ambassador Ron Dermer in the New York Times, accusing him of having “repeatedly placed Mr. Netanyahu’s political fortunes above the relationship between Israel and the United States.” The Times noted “Such officially authorized criticisms of diplomats from major allies are unusual.” The message to Israeli voters was unmistakable: If they reelect Netanyahu, Israel will pay a “price.”
While White House officials were threatening Israel, the news broke that Obama’s 2012 national field director, Jeremy Bird, was headed to Tel Aviv to manage a grass-roots campaign to oust Netanyahu. Bird would not be working to defeat Netanyahu if he thought Obama opposed it. Can you imagine Karl Rove going to London while George W. Bush was in office to help conservatives oust Prime Minister Tony Blair? It further emerged that the group behind Bird’s anti-Netanyahu effort has received State Department funding and lists the State Department as a “partner” on its Web site. Netanyahu’s Likud Party held a news conference to accuse its opponents of accepting foreign funds in violation of Israeli election laws, and Israeli newspapers published headlines on the “Obama-Labor link .”
In the context of the anonymous White House threats, having a top Obama campaign official in Israel actively working to defeat Netanyahu is naturally perceived as interference.
This campaign of intimidation and interference has begun to backfire. Obama’s popularity in Israel was already extremely low. A January 2014 poll showed that only 33 percent of Israelis approve of Obama and that only 22 percent — about one in five — trust Obama on Iran, while 64 percent do not. Asking Israelis to choose between trusting Netanyahu and trusting Obama with their security is pretty dumb.
And indeed the polls in Israel have moved in Netanyahu’s direction since the Obama attacks began. Two weeks ago, the opposition Zionist Union was leading by three seats in the Knesset. Last week, its lead had shrunk to two. Now, Likud has pulled ahead by one seat, and the Jerusalem Post reports “The poll found that the percentage of respondents who want Netanyahu to remain prime minister rose from 38% last week to 44%, tying the highest-ever result.” (The poll coincided with an attack on Israel’s northern border last Wednesday, which put security — Netanyahu’s strong suit — at the forefront of the election again.)
At least the White House could claim one victory back home: Obama officials succeeded in getting Senate Democrats to put off a vote on bipartisan legislation imposing sanctions on Iran until after March 24 — after the Israeli elections. But this was a Pyrrhic victory at best. Obama wanted to put off any vote on sanctions until this summer; now he has 13 Democrats publicly committed to move ahead with sanctions if there is no clear “framework agreement” with Iran in place by March 24 — less than two months from now.
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