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Dick
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Will the Saudi's wind up hanging themselves? Time will tell. (See 1 below.)
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What I have been saying for months - Hillary will most likely be found guilty of breaking various laws. Consequently, the FBI will recommend, after their extensive and exhaustive investigation she be indicted. Then Obama may go to his Attorney General and tell her to look beyond the FBI 's report and give Hillary a pass. If so then all hell could break loose as the head of The FBI resigns and we could be having another "Saturday Night Massacre" as happened when Nixon's Attorney General resigned.
My liberal friends, and even my wife, have challenged me. The liberals have said my vision has been clouded by my contempt for her and that she did not break any laws. My wife has said she does not believe Hillarious will be brought down because the Clinton's are too powerful.
I have stated, all along, the courts will ultimately serve as the last resort in saving our Republic, if it can be saved, from the ravages of two terms of Obama's contempt for America , his incompetence and perfidious, misguided acts.
On 9/3/2015, I wrote: " Her situation still depends upon whether Obama and his new Attorney General want the FBI to do its job because it is possible Obama does not want to press the matter at this time. Why? Because he too could be complicit since he had to have known Hillarious was not abiding by State Department protocol."
On 11/17/2015, I wrote: "After completion of FBI investigation should they find Hillarious has broken several laws and suggest she is indictable will Obama interfere so as to save her candidacy?
Would not be the first time he and his corrupt Justice Department has broken the law." (See 2 below.)
As for Hillarious' health, I was told early on and reported in a previous memo, by a very dear friend,who is politically well connected, that he thought Hillarious would not run because of significant health issues. Obviously,that proved wrong but he has insisted that the matter would resurface and that it could still prove her undoing.
We now have reports ( Multiple Sources Question Hillary Clinton's Physical Health
Read more: Multiple Sources Question Hillary Clinton's Physical Health ) surfacing verifying his earlier conviction. Time will tell.
Two other early "I told you so's" have been my rap on how dangerous PC'ism has engulfed our nation and challenged free speech and my calling attention to Naval War College Articles warning about our shrinking fleet. (See 2a and 2b below.)
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Sent to me by a dear friend and fellow memo reader who also happens to know the op ed writer and is, himself a retired Lt. Gen. (See 3 below.)
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When and if it happens there may not be enough light to hold an investigation and subsequent hearings but "What difference does it make?"
How long would any developed nation survive without electricity and cold storage etc.? (See 4 below.)
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Tobin explains the hit job NPR did on Netanyahu and suggests Netanyahu became the liberal's scapegoat for Obama's failures.(See 5 below.)
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Me
========================================================================1) Is the Saudi Monarchy on Its Last Legs?
by David P. Goldman
Last week's mass executions in Saudi Arabia suggest panic at the highest level of the monarchy. The action is without precedent, even by the grim standards of Saudi repression. In 1980 Riyadh killed 63 jihadists who had attacked the Grand Mosque of Mecca, but that was fresh after the event. Most of the 47 prisoners shot and beheaded on Jan. 2 had sat in Saudi jails for a decade. The decision to kill the prominent Shia cleric Nimr al-Nimr, the most prominent spokesman for restive Saudi Shia Muslims in Eastern Province, betrays fear of subversion with Iranian sponsorship.
Why kill them all now? It is very hard to evaluate the scale of internal threats to the Saudi monarchy, but the broader context for its concern is clear: Saudi Arabia finds itself isolated, abandoned by its longstanding American ally, at odds with China, and pressured by Russia's sudden preeminence in the region. The Saudi-backed Army of Conquest in Syria seems to be crumbling under Russian attack. The Saudi intervention in Yemen against Iran-backed Houthi rebels has gone poorly. And its Turkish ally-of-convenience is consumed by a low-level civil war. Nothing has gone right for Riyadh.
The royal family's capacity to buy popular support is eroding just as its regional security policy has fallen apart.
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Worst of all, the collapse of Saudi oil revenues threatens to exhaust the kingdom's $700 billion in financial reserves within five years, according to an October estimate by the International Monetary Fund (as I discussed here). The House of Saud relies on subsidies to buy the loyalty of the vast majority of its subjects, and its reduced spending power is the biggest threat to its rule. Last week Riyadh cut subsidies for water, electricity and gasoline. The timing of the executions may be more than coincidence: the royal family's capacity to buy popular support is eroding just as its regional security policy has fallen apart.
For decades, Riyadh has presented itself as an ally of the West and a force for stability in the region, while providing financial support for Wahhabi fundamentalism around the world.
Saudi Arabia's proxies in Syria are in trouble. Early in 2015, the Army of Conquest (Jaish al-Fateh), a coalition of al-Qaida and other Sunni Islamists backed by the Saudis, Turks and Qataris, had driven the Syrian army out of several key positions in Northwest Syria, threatening the Assad regime's core Alawite heartland. The coalition began breaking up in November, however, and the Syrian Army recently retook several villages it had lost to the Army of Conquest. One of the Army of Conquest's constituent militias, Failaq al-Sham, announced Jan. 3 that it was leaving the coalition to defend Aleppo against regime forces reinforced by Russia.
The West may not be able to keep the House of Saud in power whether it wants to or not.
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Everything seems to have gone wrong at once for Riyadh. The only consolation the monarchy has under the circumstances is that its nemesis Iran also is suffering from the collapse of oil revenues and the attrition of war. Iran beganwithdrawing its Revolutionary Guard forces from Syria inDecember, largely due to high casualties. The high cost of maintaining the war effort as Iran's finances implode also may have been a factor. Iran's Lebanese Shia proxy, Hezbollah, has suffered extremely high casualties, virtually neutralizing its whole first echelon of combat troops. And Russia has shown no interest in interfering with Israeli air strikes against Hezbollah.
The oil price collapse turns the competition between Saudi Arabia and Iran into a race to the bottom. But the monarchy's panicked response to its many setbacks of the past several months raises a difficult question.In the past, the West did what it could to prop up the Saudi royal family as a pillar of stability in the region, despite the Saudis' support for jihadi terrorism. Soon the West may not be able to keep the House of Saud in power whether it wants to or not.
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2)
2a) Revolt of the Politically Incorrect
Soon we’ll all be camped in the fields of primary politics, as that great threshing machine called the American voter methodically separates the contender wheat from the candidate chaff. Let’s not go there, though, without recording 2015 as the year that political correctness finally hit the wall.
Former top government officials who have been warning Washington about the vulnerability of the nation’s largely unprotected electric grid are raising new fears that troops from the jihadist Islamic State are poised to attack the system, leading to a power crisis that could kill millions.
Translate that formula into a film about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and what you get is “Netanyahu At War,” a two-hour documentary that aired in primetime on taxpayer-funded PBS television stations this week. That liberal-oriented PBS’s Frontline series would broadcast a hit job on the Israeli leader is hardly a surprise. PBS and its sister radio network NPR have a long history of bias against Israel. Moreover, Netanyahu is deeply unpopular among American liberals who resent his strong stand against U.S. pressure on the peace process. What’s more his willingness to publicly challenge President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal has put a bulls-eye on his back as far as administration cheerleaders are concerned. But rather than dismiss “Netanyahu at War” as just the latest piece of anti-Israel propaganda, those who care about the Jewish state need to consider it closely. That is not because it brings much insight to a consideration of Netanyahu’s life or the issues facing Israel because those are things it consistently fails to do. Rather it deserves to be studied because it provides a classic example of the misunderstandings about the Middle East conflict that pass for insight among mainstream journalists with large followings. Moreover, its highly selective historical narrative of the past 25 years tells us exactly why Israel’s positions are assailed in the liberal media.
2)
Hillary's Watergate Looms
Whatever the case, as the unthinkable becomes thinkable, several possible scenarios emerge, all with mind-boggling ramifications: 1. We learn the FBI recommends an indictment and Lynch goes forward. (What next? Trump versus Sanders? A brokered convention turns to Biden? Whoever is chosen the Democratic Party would be deeply wounded.) 2. Lynch does not go forward but word leaks out the FBI had recommended that she do. (A recipe for civil war -- or something close). 3. The FBI doesn't recommend but whistle blowers come out to say they should have. (Chaos with FBI Director Comey under attack.) 4. Nothing happens -- what Obama would call "transparency" but the rest of us might call stonewalling.
I was leaning to 4, but now something (respect for Comey? DiGenova's knowledge?) tells me it's 1 or 2, both of which mean buckle up and bucket up (on popcorn). If it's 1, Lynch will have done us all a favor. If it's 2, there will be blood on the tracks all over Washington and our television sets may explode, as Lynch goes down in infamy, but we the people (probably) come out okay. In either case, 1 or 2, we will be watching one of the greatest public exercises of karma in modern times.
One other development might be making it especially bad for Hillary. North Korea is back in the news with their recent explosion of a quondam H-bomb, reminding us that the insane NORKs are still there and also reminding us (and the FBI, we can assume) that top-secret satellite maps of North Korea appeared unauthorized on the Clinton's personal email server. That would put the average citizen in jail in a heartbeat.
2a) Revolt of the Politically Incorrect
Donald Trump and Ben Carson popped the valves on decades of pent-up PC pressure.
By Daniel Henninger
Soon we’ll all be camped in the fields of primary politics, as that great threshing machine called the American voter methodically separates the contender wheat from the candidate chaff. Let’s not go there, though, without recording 2015 as the year that political correctness finally hit the wall.
Many thought political correctness lived on in our lives now as permanently annoying background noise. In fact, it has been more like a political A-bomb, waiting for its detonator.
On Dec. 7, Donald Trump issued his call for a ban on Muslim immigration into the U.S.—“until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” It’s hard to recall a statement by a public figure that was met, instantly, with almost universal condemnation, including from most of the Republican presidential candidates.
Between that day and the end of 2015, Donald Trump’s support in the national opinion polls went up to nearly 37%, a substantial number by any measure.
Welcome to the revolt of the politically incorrect.
Opinion Journal Video
Wonder Land Columnist Dan Henninger explains the political trends underlying Donald Trump’s popularity. Photo credit: Getty Images.
Forget the controversy over Donald Trump’s Muslim ban. This unique political campaign is about more than that. Donald Trump and indeed Ben Carson popped the valves on pressure that’s been building in the U.S., piece by politically correct piece, for 25 years. Since at least the early 1990s, a lot of the public has been intimidated into keeping its mouth shut and head down about subjects in the political and social life of the country that the elites stipulated as beyond discussion or dispute. Eventually, the most important social skill in America became adeptness at euphemism. It isn’t an abortion; it’s a “terminated pregnancy.”
Some keywords in PC’s history:
Identity, gender, gender-neutral, diverse, inclusive, patriarchy, workplace harassment, multiculturalism, dead white males, sexism, racism, organic, “privileged,” hate speech, speech codes, prayer in schools, affirmative action, respecting our differences, microagressions, trigger warnings. That’s just the tip of the iceberg—which political correctness slammed into with the Trump and Carson campaigns.
Ben Carson especially made PC an explicit tenet of his campaign. In a 2014 essay for the Washington Times, Mr. Carson wrote: “Political correctness is antithetical to our founding principles of freedom of speech and freedom of expression. Its most powerful tool is intimidation. If it is not vigorously opposed, its proponents win by default, because the victims adopt a ‘go along to get along’ attitude.”
The left found Mr. Carson’s PC concerns almost quaint. But the email traffic I was seeing last summer suggested the Carson anti-PC critique was a big reason for his surge among middle-class voters. My favorite Carsonism: When asked in the Fox News debate if he’d resume waterboarding, he replied, “There is no such thing as a politically correct war.”
When Donald Trump’s mostly working-class voters repeatedly said that “he tells the truth,” this is what they were talking about—not any particular Trump outrage but the years of political correctness they felt they’d been forced to choke down in silence.
American society has never been static. A fair-minded person would concede that many of these controversial subjects involve legitimate and complex issues. Politics exists to mediate them.
Mediation? We should have been so lucky. The left never modulated its PC offensive. The 2006 Duke University lacrosse scandal, a travesty of PC trampling on individuals, should have been a red flag. Instead the Obama Education Department imposed what are essentially kangaroo courts on American campuses to enforce Title IX sexual-abuse cases.
Policies like that don’t emerge from the marketplace of ideas, much less political debate. They come from a kind of Americanized Maoism. The left goes nuts when anyone suggests political correctness has totalitarian roots. But the PC game has always been: We win, you lose, get over it, comply.
But people don’t get over it, and they never forget. For a lot of voters now, possibly a majority, their experiences with enforceable, politically correct behavior, speech and thought have bred a broad mistrust of elites.
Average people think individuals in positions of leadership are supposed to at least recognize the existence of their interests and beliefs. The institutions that didn’t do that or were complicit include the courts, Congress, senior bureaucrats, corporate managers, the press, television, movies, university administrators.
Somehow, the standard model of political comportment—represented by most of the GOP’s presidential candidates—just isn’t up to dealing with a degree of voter social alienation that isn’t particularly rational at this point. So voters turned to “outsiders”—people more like them.
The election’s two big issues remain: a weak economy and global chaos. But for many voters, the revolt against political correctness is on. Hillary Clinton, hostage to a PC-obsessed base, must mouth politically correct pabulum. Donald Trump joy-rides the wave. An opening remains for an electable candidate who can point this revolt toward what it wants—a political win, at last.
2b)
S.O.S. for a Declining American Navy
Today’s 272-ship fleet isn’t nearly enough. The U.S. needs 350 ships to meet the rising global dangers.
An F/A-18C Hornet launches from the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson. PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES
Late last week China confirmed that it is building its first aircraft carrier from scratch, adding to a fleet that includes a Russian-made carrier. The news cast U.S. military policy in a particularly unsettling light: While China’s naval power expands, America has deliberately reduced its presence on the seas. The Navy—after nearly $1 trillion of Defense Department cuts, in part mandated by the 2011 budget-sequestration deal between Congress and the Obama administration—is already down to 272 ships. That means the U.S. fleet is less than half its size at the close of the Reagan administration nearly 30 years ago (and down by 13 ships since 2009).
The Navy had intended to increase the fleet to 308 ships, including 12 that will replace the nation’s aging ballistic-missile submarine deterrent. But in a mid-December memo, Defense Secretary Ash Carter told the Navy to cut the number of ships it plans to build in favor of placing more-advanced technology aboard the existing fleet.
Secretary Carter’s plan implies that the deterrent effect of a constant U.S. presence in the world is less important than the Navy’s ability to fight and win wars with the advanced weapons he favors. That assumption is mistaken. We need both the ability to be present, which demands more ships than we have, and the related power to win a war if deterrence doesn’t work. Even the Navy’s now-endangered plan for 308 new ships was far below the approximately 350 combat ships needed to achieve this aim.
With danger rising around the world, from the Persian Gulf to the South China Sea, the increasing military and economic threats cannot be ignored. Here is what an expansion of the Navy to the 350 ships needed to safeguard national security would look like:
• Aircraft carriers. Applying power requires the anti-submarine, anti-surface warfare, surveillance and strike ability of aircraft carriers. It requires an increase from the congressionally legislated level of 11 aircraft carriers to 16, enough so that we could maintain at least one carrier strike group in the West Pacific, the Persian Gulf, and return powerful U.S. naval forces to the Mediterranean.
• Supply ships. The ability to shape events on land is linked to the ability to operate independently of it. Supply ships assure this. The U.S. currently has 29 such vessels but it needs to double the number so that it can provision a larger fleet in the West Pacific and return to the Mediterranean in strength.
• Submarines. The Pentagon’s annual report last April on Chinese military power predicts that China will have between 69 and 78 submarines by 2020. The U.S. expects to have about 70 submarines in the same year. Yet repairs, maintenance and rotational cycles mean that only about 25% can be deployed at a time and must be spread around the world.
The U.S. will likely retain its qualitative advantage, but the size and quietness of China’s submarine fleet means that America needs a total of 90 submarines to provide a healthy nuclear deterrent, shadow or hunt enemy subs, assure dominance in the West Pacific, and meet additional global challenges.
• Amphibious craft. Increased Russian naval presence in the Mediterranean and that of China and Iran as well as Islamic State’s occupation of Sirte on the Libyan coast also demand a return to the amphibious presence that the U.S. maintained during the Cold War. The possibility that China would seize and hold islands in the West Pacific as a means of extending its strategic reach also emphasizes the need for greater amphibious capability. The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps should have 45 ships for these missions, an increase of nearly 50% over the current level.
• Large surface combatants, destroyers and cruisers. These remain the U.S. fleet’s backbone. They hunt for subs and other surface ships, project power inland, and protect—and are protected by—aircraft carriers. For the foreseeable future they will be the main defense against proliferating missiles that can be launched against ships from land, air and sea. Weighing China’s ability to concentrate naval forces in its adjacent seas against the U.S.’s global commitments, a total of 100 large surface combatants—an increase from the planned 88—is the minimum required to protect each of America’s 16 carriers with five ships.
• Small combatant ships. Defense Secretary Carter wants to cut the number of the small naval combatants, called littoral combat ships (LCS), to 40 from 52. Even in its upgraded version, the LCS falls short of the ability both to defend itself and take the fight to an enemy. Instead of building 40 ill-defended combatants, the Navy needs a minimum of 30 new small combatants that possess a real frigate’s offensive and defensive ability.
• High-speed vessels. Current plans are right when they call for 11 of the low-cost, unarmed and fast twin-hulled ships that can transport small Army or Marine units along with their equipment.
The fleet described here would number 350 ships, about 240 ships fewer than the Reagan Navy, and 13% larger than the combat fleet the Navy currently seeks. Using the Congressional Budget Office’s cost estimates, this would require an annual $24 billion shipbuilding expense. That means a 45% increase of the current $16.5 billion shipbuilding budget, or an added $7.5 billion yearly to the shipbuilding portion of the Navy’s budget to reach a 350-ship fleet by 2045. China’s shipbuilding plans, as well as other global challenges, show why a larger fleet is needed sooner than 30 years from now. Achieving this would increase annual shipbuilding budgets.
Yes, this is expensive, but it’s cheaper than surrendering America’s global naval dominance—and that’s where the nation is headed, given the trend lines as China’s fleet grows. The expense can be moderated. One example is the shipbuilding economies of scale found in the 1980s: The contracts for the aircraft carriers USS George Washington and USS Abraham Lincoln were signed on the same day and the great ships were built nearly simultaneously, saving about $700 million. More savings are possible if a new president were to overhaul the top-heavy Pentagon and make sorely needed reforms of military management.
Yet the $7.5 billion difference between the Navy’s insufficient current plan and the minimum required to meet foreseeable commitments is a fraction of even the Obama administration’s defense budget. What the nation can’t afford is to retreat as menaces increase abroad.
Mr. Cropsey is director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for American Seapower. He served as a naval officer and as deputy undersecretary of the Navy in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.
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Gen. Gordon Sullivan
The Army has gotten smaller every year since 2011, while the threats have gotten greater. Simply put, America’s Army – our nation’s foundational force since 1775 – is asked to face a dangerous and uncertain world with reduced and uncertain resources. It is confronted by turmoil abroad and hindered at home by politicians unable or unwilling to agree on core American needs.
The lone bit of budgetary stability in 2015 was a two-year reprieve from having sequestration hanging over our military. This is hardly a beaming beacon of success for a government that gives more attention to petty squabbles than to our nation’s security.
Even as national security and the threat of terrorism have risen as the top concerns of the American public, some of our elected and appointed officials have developed a mindset that avoids reality. We are going to crush terrorism and all the evil in the world, apparently with the snap of fingers by a new commander in chief, rather than by rebuilding a battle-worn and underfunded military so it is capable and ready to face today’s security environment.
If the Army were a major sports franchise, 2016 would be considered a rebuilding year. But threats to our homeland, our interests and our allies are not going to wait while the Army recovers from more than a decade of war and the budgetary wounds inflicted on it by a dysfunctional political system. The real world isn’t going to wait until after the presidential election for decisions on national security priorities and how much to spend on our defense.
America’s Army is getting smaller, with the combined active, Army Guard and Army Reserve force expected to drop by 27,000 this year to a little more than 1 million soldiers. Only 30 percent of brigade combat teams are ready to fight, a deficit that won’t be fixed until 2020. The Army’s budget is flat, and so is morale in the ranks.
The undersized Army is hidden, in part, by reliance on special operations forces to carry out global missions that previously were accomplished by regular soldiers. Make no mistake: Elite Army troops—now numbering about 26,000—provide combatant commanders with crucial capabilities that proved their value in Iraq and Afghanistan and are proving it again against Islamic State militants and other threats. However, the 1,750 Special Operations soldiers in Afghanistan are not the same as having a 4,500-member brigade combat team on the ground. The 200 troops in Iraq involved in what the Pentagon now calls a “specialized expeditionary targeting force” do not eliminate the need for the Army to be prepared to redeploy a sizable force if that is what is required to blunt Islamic State advances.
Bullies of all kinds prey on the weak and timid. I wouldn’t label our under-resourced Army as weak, as it remains the world’s premier land force even now, but we are showing timidity by responding with tough talk but little action to situations where quick, decisive use of force is needed. Our inaction and hesitation feed an emerging view that the US is unlikely to do anything and if we act, will do only the minimum in terms of showing the flag without going all-in for the victory.
Tight budgets, the continued drawdown of force structure in the face of growing risks, and the inability of our political class to stop quibbling and agree on a common national security posture are undermining morale of our troops, our civilian workforce, and their families. That may be the greatest problem of all, because our Army and our nation’s security depend onthe selfless service of our soldiers.
Gordon R. Sullivan, former Army Chief of Staff, is president and CEO of the Association of the US Army.
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4)New ISIS threat: America's electric grid; blackout could kill 9 of 10
Former top government officials who have been warning Washington about the vulnerability of the nation’s largely unprotected electric grid are raising new fears that troops from the jihadist Islamic State are poised to attack the system, leading to a power crisis that could kill millions.
“Inadequate grid security, a porous U.S.-Mexico border, and fragile transmission systems make the electric grid a target for ISIS,” said Peter Pry, one of the nation’s leading experts on the grid.
Others joining Pry at a press conference later Wednesday to draw attention to the potential threat said that if just a handful of the nation’s high voltage transformers were knocked out, blackouts would occur across the country.
“By one estimate, should the power go out and stay out for over a year, nine out of 10 Americans would likely perish,” said Frank Gaffney, founder and president of the Center for Security Policy in Washington.
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5)
A
Imagine a documentary film tracing the biography of Barack Obama from the point of view of his political opponents. Such a film would psychoanalyze him, question his motives and treat his political ideology as the result of mad obsessions and irrational judgments. His motives would be questioned. The distorted narrative of the picture — which would eliminate the context of his decisions — would be carried by interviews with pundits and foes that despise him. It would, in other words, be kind of like Dinesh D’Souza’s “2016: Obama’s America,” a documentary polemic that was applauded by many conservative partisans but disdained by the arts world and the mainstream press as right-wing propaganda unworthy of a viewing or even a dispassionate analysis.
As for its treatment of Netanyahu’s personality, we must start by admitting that the film’s subject is not a particularly likable figure. Warm and fuzzy is not his normal mode of communication. If glowering, frowning pictures dominate the images of the film it is due in part to the fact that those expressions are the prime minister’s natural look. Nor does his personal story easily lend itself to the sort of hagiography that, for example, generally passes for treatment of President Obama — the person that the film correctly positions as Netanyahu’s main adversary over the course of the last seven years.
But one doesn’t have to be a fan of Netanyahu or even a political supporter to understand that the basic psychological premise of the film is absurd. To understand Netanyahu, the film tells us, you must realize that his historian father taught him that the world is out to get the Jews. Netanyahu is obsessed with anti-Semitism and the notion that Israel is surrounded by an Arab and Muslim world that wishes to destroy the Jewish state. Netanyahu is, therefore, always at war with enemies, both perceived and real, leading Israel into endless and often counter-productive fights.
While Netanyahu does have a combative personality, the problem with this formulation is pretty obvious. The fact is, as the history of the last century, if not the previous 20 attest, the world has been out to get the Jews. Enemies who want to destroy it besiege Israel. As the old expression goes, even paranoids can have enemies, and that is certainly true of the one Jewish state on the planet. Netanyahu’s view of the region is rooted in realism and those who pretend otherwise, including Obama and most of Netanyahu’s critics, are the fantasists.
While the historical distortions that frame the narrative are really too numerous to analyze in detail, almost all of them stem from that main mistake. Thus, while we hear a great deal about both Netanyahu and Obama in this film, we get precious little about the main actors that have decided the issues of war and peace far more than even those two individuals: the Palestinians.
That is the explanation for one of the key myths that the film seeks to keep alive: that Netanyahu incited the assassin who murdered Yitzhak Rabin and killed the peace that he might have brought the region. According to the film, Netanyahu rose to the leadership of the opposition to Rabin and ruthlessly drummed up opposition to the Oslo Accords, seeking to tear the nation apart just as peace was finally becoming possible. It depicts opponents of the accord as convulsed by an irrational hatred of the peace process that was given structure and form by Netanyahu’s paranoid worldview.
But what it fails to point out is that the opposition to Oslo only grew as the accords were proved a failure by the uptick in Palestinian terrorism. In the documentary, Palestinian suicide bombings are only mentioned as having begun after Rabin’s death as cynical radicals sought to help Netanyahu defeat Rabin’s successor Shimon Peres in the 1996 elections. But they had started long before the assassination, which is why Netanyahu’s claim that he would have beaten Rabin, as polls foretold at the time of the murder, was credible. The film fails to mention that Yasir Arafat, depicted here as a peacemaker, subsidized those terror operations and openly boasted to his own people that the peace process was merely a “phase” that would be followed by future wars aimed at destroying Israel.
While some of the rhetoric aimed at Rabin was over-the-top and unfair, the anger about the fact that Israel had traded land for terror rather than peace was genuine. To claim that the entire opposition, including Netanyahu, had no right to point this out in strong terms is to delegitimize public debate on a life-and-death issue in a democracy, especially a fractious one such as in Israel. The effort to blame Netanyahu for the assassination was a canard that has been consistently and correctly rejected by most Israelis who are not his partisan opponents.
The same basic error characterizes its depiction of Netanyahu’s stormy relationship with Bill Clinton. Oslo failed not because Netanyahu “slow-walked” the negotiations but because the U.S. was so dedicated to the process that they failed to hold Arafat and the Palestinian Authority accountable for terrorism and educating its people to hate Israel and the Jews. As even some Clinton staffers later admitted, this failure convinced the Palestinians they could push the U.S. and the Israelis as hard as they like and never be made to pay for terror or a refusal to make peace.
All of this adds up to a basic misconception about Netanyahu that not only smears him but also gives him far more credit than he actually deserves. For all of his influence and political success — he’s been elected prime minister four times in the last 20 years — those victories and the consequent destruction of the once dominant Labor Party and left-wing peace camp it led was not the result of Bibi’s political genius. The relegation of Labor — which seemed ready to reassume its position as the natural party of government in the 1990s — to a splinter party with little hope of ever leading the country again was entirely the work of the Palestinians.
It was the Palestinians that refused to use Oslo to build peace with Israel. Instead, they treated the pact, as Netanyahu warned they would, as a platform for continuing the conflict on more advantageous terms. The film mentions Arafat’s refusal of Ehud Barak’s offer of an independent Palestinian state including almost all of the West Bank, Gaza and a share of Jerusalem even though it treats that cynical decision as self-preservation on his part. But it credits the second intifada — a bloody terrorist war of attrition — he started in the aftermath of his refusal to frustration rather than his calculation.
The documentary doesn’t even mention Ariel Sharon’s complete withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. Every Israeli soldier, settlement, and settler was pulled out, and the result was the creation of a terror state led by Hamas that used the territory as a terrorist launching pad. That failure is key to understanding why even Israelis that don’t like Netanyahu think calls for more withdrawals from the West Bank are madness.
It also fails to mention how Arafat’s successor Mahmoud Abbas turned down an even more generous peace offer in 2008 or his refusal to negotiate seriously in the subsequent years as President Obama sought to tilt the diplomatic field in his direction. If most Israelis agree with Netanyahu now, it is not because he exploited their fears but because, unlike the producers of this film or most American liberals, they have been paying attention to the history of the last 20 years. Israelis understand that the Palestinians have made it clear that they will not recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn. Had they done so at any point, Netanyahu’s epic political comeback after his 1999 defeat would never have been possible and his current three-term run would have been cut short.
As for Netanyahu’s conflict with Obama, the film does provide a bit more context there though it bizarrely takes the president’s claim to be sympathetic to Israel at face value. Obama clearly came into office devoted to the idea of creating more “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel and has spent the last seven years demonstrating how to do it. Though Netanyahu played his part in the epic battles between the two, the terms of that conflict have always been set by the Obama administration. It has consistently sought to ambush the Israelis and to pressure them into concessions even though the Palestinians have made it clear they aren’t interested in peace. That dysfunction was accentuated by the disconnect between the two men, but it doesn’t really explain it. Even when Netanyahu sought to appease Obama — as he did by agreeing to a settlement freeze that somehow the film fails to mention— the Palestinians still refused to negotiate. But in the film as in the narrative about Israel that is the gospel of liberal critics of Israel, the Palestinians are consistently denied agency for their actions. They are the missing pieces to a puzzle that the filmmakers and the Obama foreign policy team never notice.
With the Arab Spring and the Iran nuclear issue, the divide between the two has always been framed by Obama’s fantasies about a rapprochement between the West and radical Islam and Netanyahu’s realistic understanding of forces that hate the U.S. as much as Israel. History will judge whether he was right about the nuclear accord, but so far his track record when it comes to debunking optimism has been impeccable.
While Netanyahu is a complex figure that has made his share of mistakes in office, his dominance of Israeli politics in the last generation is a function of the failure of the peace processers to understand the nature of the conflict with the Jewish state’s enemies. If he is hated by Obama and his staffers as well as by the liberal pundits who provide most of the commentary in the film, it is not because he was obdurate but because his realism exposed the foolishness of their illusions. Netanyahu may be the boogeyman of American liberals who is at fault for all of the tragedies of the modern Middle East whether it is Rabin’s death, the failure of the peace process or the undermining of the U.S.-Israel alliance. But his real sin is that he is the scapegoat for the failure of their fantasies. “Netanyahu at War” tells us little of value about the prime minister or Israel’s predicament.
But it speaks volumes about the misconceptions about the Middle East believed by both the administration and the liberal mainstream media that are of touch with reality.
