Don Kole and The Kids From Sav. Classical Obama's Contempt for our military and
Acad. Viewing His African Artifacts! his success at its decimation!
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Next year's SIRC President's Day Speaker (Feb 20, 2017), Elliot Abrams, discusses two books pertaining to the widening lack of support for Israel among American Jews . Abrams concludes the problem has more to do with what is happening in America than in Israel as relates to the distancing of American Jews from their religion, the impact of intermarriage and the relative acceptance American Jews have come to experience.
It is an interesting article, perhaps of more interest to my Jewish memo readers, but I believe there are parallels with respect to other areas pertaining to youthful attitudes regarding military preparedness, Socialism versus Capitalism, precepts embedded in our Constitution etc.. Young people have always been more idealistic and less realistic until they age and experience some hard knocks. Perhaps in today's world by the time they age and experience life they are more embittered, less objective, amenable to change and lost.
There is much one can find fault with regarding Israeli politics and their attitude toward their neighbors but security, the external threats they face has a lot to do with their more rigid attitudes and distrust of those who blame them for their responses, attitudes and policies. I have never wavered in my support of Israel as a nation entitled to the same opportunities to thrive, survive and prosper as any other country and see no reason to change this view. However, I understand the tectonic attitudinal plates regarding Israel are shifting and I pretty much agree with Abrams the fault lies less with Israel than those who see reasons to find fault and thus an excuse to distance themselves. (See 1 below.)
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Sylvia Thompson wrote this over 9 months ago. She is black and a very harsh critic of Obama. I agree with most of what she concludes and have been as outspoken. I also submit her blackness increases her intensity of contempt as well as her insight. Go Sylvia. Your voice deserves to be heard. (See 2 below.)
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Hanson writes that Europe's Muslim problem and the way it has failed serves as a clear warning to America. (See 3 below.)
I believe Britain's Col. Richard Kemp's views bear repeating. (See 3a below.)
N Korea's rocket launch fails but they will keep trying and they will eventually succeed. (See 4 below.)
Meanwhile, I listened to an interview of senior Marine officers who are charged with the Corp's military preparedness. Their message was frightening. Obama and Congress' have decimated the Corps and the pressures on understaffed Marines to perform their mission in The Middle East is increasing while the toll on their abilities, due to lack of equipment, aging equipment and equipment that is dangerous, is mounting.
Liberals and progressives always run down our military in order to buy votes through increased transfers and benefit programs. Thus, when Republicans take over they are confronted by a financial burden of catching up and are always blamed for spending too much on our military.
As Thompson points out,Obama hates the military and has been successful in downgrading our ability to defend our nation and its varied interests.
I have warned about what China is doing in The South China Seas and now they have begun the militarization of these expanded coral islands and our response is to place planes in The Philippines.
A confrontation with China is inevitable. (See 4a below.)
George Will calls for a cyber deterrence strategy. (See 4b below.)
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Trump's appeal lies, in part, with rhetoric pertaining to America getting back on track and reasserting itself. The problem is that his rhetoric is not matched by sufficient insight as to how best to proceed. Misguided bluster can be easily challenged and can prove dangerous.
That said, my dilemma is that I have no reason to trust Hillary or Bernie.
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Dick
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1)
If American Jews and Israel Are Drifting Apart, What's the Reason?
The conventional wisdom says the problem is Israel. It’s wrong.
A Jewish anti-Israel demonstrator in New York City in 2014. Andy Katz/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images.
Everyone knows that American Jews and Israel are drifting apart—and everyone is confident of the reasons why. Israel, it is said, has become increasingly nationalistic and right-wing; “the occupation” violates liberal values; and the American Jewish “establishment,” with its old familiar defense organizations and their old familiar apologetics, has lost touch with young American Jews who are put off by outdated Zionist slogans and hoary appeals for communal solidarity. In brief, the fundamental problem resides in the nature of the Israeli polity and the policies of the Israeli government, which together account for the growing misfit between Israelis and their American Jewish cousins.
This, at least, is the new conventional wisdom. It is wrong—but the precise ways in which it is wrong, and by means of which it mistakes and overlooks deeper realities, are worth examining.
Two new books by political scientists try to do just that: The Star and the Stripes: A History of the Foreign Policies of American Jews by Michael Barnett of George Washington University and Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict over Israel by Dov Waxman of Northeastern. The two books are being published almost simultaneously by Princeton University Press, presumably in the belief that the topic is not only intrinsically significant but should be of import and interest to experts and the wider public alike. And so it should.
Of the two books, Barnett’s offers the more careful analysis. But since Waxman’s more neatly captures the current wisdom—the author’s own views on Israel, as he is at pains to note, “evolved” from “uncritical support to a more critical engagement with the country”—it makes for a better starting point.
I. Goodbye Consensus, Hello Disillusionment
A British Jew who has lived in the United States for half his life, Dov Waxman in Trouble in the Tribe congratulates himself on having gained special insight into the American Jewish community and its psyche. But he also admits straight off that he is not exactly a detached observer. “My own politics surely come through at times,” he writes disarmingly—and about that he is entirely correct. Those politics will be familiar to anyone who has read (and believed) the writings of Peter Beinart.
The narrative goes like this: the “pro-Israel consensus that once united American Jews is eroding,” and “American Jewish conflict over Israel is replacing the old era of solidarity.” In fact, while “Israel used to bring American Jews together,” it is now “driving them apart.”
How so, and how new is this problem? To his credit, Waxman does note that the story he’s telling has historical antecedents. Reviewing (too briefly) the history of the American Jewish community’s relations with Israel, from the rise of the Zionist movement through Israel’s birth and its wars, he acknowledges that Zionism always presented a dilemma to American Jews, who did not consider themselves to be “in exile” from their homeland. In that respect, at least, the “old era of solidarity” to which he alludes was never quite so solid as he himself posits.
The narrative goes like this: while “Israel used to bring American Jews together,” it is now “driving them apart.”
In any case, however, Trouble in the Tribe is mostly about today’s version of the story, when the “widespread sense of disillusionment” with the Jewish state is fueled, Waxman contends, not by ignorance but, to the contrary, by a growing enlightenment. The more American Jews know about Israel, he writes, the more disabused they become of what many now realize were naive misconceptions. As groups like J Street and Jewish Voice for Peace have arisen to press their critique of the Jewish state in the court of public opinion, the community is “being torn apart” by division. Of course, the establishment has tried hard to suppress dissent and crush these groups, but the “right-wing backlash” will not succeed.
Indeed, in Waxman’s view, the establishment’s anxiety is altogether misplaced. For the “distancing” from Israel that has been widely attested in surveys is in fact a hopeful sign, and may not even constitute distancing at all. Yes, some young, liberal American Jews, confronted with an Israel “becoming increasingly illiberal and increasingly isolated in the international community,” will “turn away from Israel in despair, or even disgust.” But many others will, like Waxman himself, move instead to “critical engagement.” These American Jews actually care very deeply about Israel, and wish only to save it from itself.
Israeli leaders, writes Waxman, should therefore expect “growing pressure from the American Jewish community to change Israel’s policies, especially toward Palestinians in the occupied territories.” As the project to save Israel from itself gathers steam, “it is hard to believe that any Israeli government, including the present one, [will be] completely immune to criticism, and that an increase in this criticism, by American Jews and others, will not eventually encourage, if not compel, Israeli policymakers to alter Israel’s present course.” In the end, it may be possible to persuade or compel these recalcitrant leaders, “foremost among them Prime Minister Netanyahu,” to “recommit Israel to the goal of establishing a Palestinian state as quickly as possible.”
II. Cosmopolitan Jews and Tribal Jews
As will already be evident, Trouble in the Tribe contains more in the way of ideology than careful engagement with empirical analysis. Do American Jews really have “greater knowledge” about Israel today than did their parents or grandparents? Why would that be, and where did they acquire their balanced and penetrating insights—by reading the New York Times? Is Israel really “increasingly illiberal”? Do American Jews truly think Israel is “increasingly isolated” in the world when they can read every week about its improved relations and growing trade with India and China, its growing security relations with the Arab states of the Middle East—not to mention its steadily high popularity among the majority of the American people?
Above all, is there any evidence whatsoever that, except as an empty slogan, “opposing, and even lobbying against, the policies of Israeli governments . . . has now become for many American Jews a way of supporting Israel” (emphasis added)? Waxman makes that claim repeatedly—but then repetition seems to be a key strategy in a book that restates its main theses several times in each chapter, making a poor substitute for demonstration.
Michael Barnett’s The Star and the Stripes is longer and its scope is wider: there is more history, covering not only the experience of Jews in America but what preceded it elsewhere in the Diaspora. In his analysis of the growing distance between American Jews and Israel—of which he is guardedly skeptical—Barnett focuses on the friction between two different perspectives within the community: on the one hand, the brand of “cosmopolitanism” and/or “prophetic Judaism” embraced by the non-Orthodox majority and, on the other hand, the more traditional and “tribal” approach that historically has placed the emphasis on protecting endangered Jews and securing and enhancing Jewish welfare.
This is by now an old story. With emancipation and the achievement of civil rights in Europe, Barnett writes, the old parochialism came up against both assimilationist and nationalist tendencies in the wider society. In the United States, the Reform movement reinterpreted the traditional idea of Jewish “chosenness” to be consistent with American pluralism. Jews were “chosen” not to dwell alone and apart but rather to be “working for the betterment of humanity.”
Zionism, from this perspective, long lay under a cloud of suspicion among American Jews, not only because it might raise dangerous charges of “dual loyalty” but also because, in focusing exclusively on the plight and future safety of Jews alone, it contradicted the ethos of liberal universalism. As Barnett reports, the American Jewish community and especially its leadership came late to the Zionist cause, which remained controversial among the German-Jewish elites who led most of the major organizations right up until and to a degree even after World War II. In fact, “Israel remained on the margins of American Judaism [well into] the 1950s and 1960s,” Barnett holds. During those decades, “despite the enormity of the world wars and the Holocaust,” American Jews were busy moving “from the cities to the suburbs, . . . living their dream. The other dream of a Jewish return to Palestine had never been their dream.”
But the reality had also begun to change. By the 1960s, the Holocaust was becoming “a defining symbol of and source of identity”; after the near-disaster and ultimate triumph of the June 1967 war, Israel too became “increasingly central to [American] Jewish identity.” Indeed, the two merged: “By the mid-1970s it became nearly impossible to think about Israel without also conjuring up the Holocaust, and vice-versa.” I would note here an additional development whose significance for communal solidarity and indeed for the Zionist spirit is underplayed by Barnett: namely, the movement on behalf of Soviet Jewry, which for a time in the 1970s and especially the 1980s brought together virtually all parts of the organized American Jewish community.
In the view of leading Jewish organizations, the particular interests of Jews would be best protected not by tribalism but by creating a more just society.
And yet not so fast. In terms of Barnett’s two perspectives, these concerns about exclusively Jewish problems and threats to Jewish communities abroad did not override, or sit comfortably with, the liberal and universalist impulses that remained powerful among American Jews. The American Jewish Committee (AJC) and other leading organizations had created a synthesis that was meant to substitute for Jewish parochialism. In this conception, the particular interests of Jews would be best protected not by tribalism, i.e., by focusing exclusively on fighting anti-Semitism and rescuing endangered Jews, but by creating a more just society, in which all forms of bigotry would be countered and destroyed, and by forging a world order built on peace, justice, and law. Thus, the AJC, in an internal memo quoted by Barnett, resolved “as a matter of enlightened self-interest, to interest ourselves in situations involving other minorities, even though Jews are not primarily affected.” During the 1960s, Barnett writes, the AJC’s American Jewish Year Book “often gave more prominence to the civil-rights movement than to Israel.”
This cosmopolitan outlook was itself consonant with the “prophetic Judaism” that had long been the hallmark of the Reform movement; today, it is increasingly the religion of all non-Orthodox American Jews. Tikkun olam, “repairing the world” through action for “social justice,” is regarded by many American Jews as more important than actually observing Jewish rituals or supporting Israel. It is also necessarily in tension, sometimes more and sometimes less, with the need and the desire to protect Jews who are in danger. When Israel or some other community of Jews seems at risk—as during the 1973 Yom Kippur war, for example, or when the Soviet regime was sending “refuseniks” to Siberia for the crime of seeking to learn Hebrew and move to Israel—the tribal instinct may appear to dominate, at least for a time. Still, that impulse is itself often framed in terms of universal themes like the concern for international human rights, the right to emigrate, the right to freedom of religion, and so forth.
Today, Barnett writes, when fewer Jews seem to be in physical danger, certainly in this country, and with Israel regarded as a major Middle Eastern power, many American Jews see no need whatsoever for the tribal approach. After all, “in 1914, 76 percent of all Jews lived in illiberal lands . . . [but] now a minuscule 3.5 percent live in authoritarian countries [while] 96.5 percent live in liberal democracies.” No wonder, then, that the “prophetic” or “cosmopolitan” outlook has prevailed, or that to some extent (again, Barnett is cautious about the “accepted wisdom”) American Jews are “losing their love for Israel.” He puts it this way: “there are forces at home and in the world that are leading American Jews to return to a political theology of prophetic Judaism, and an Israel that is increasingly acting like an ethno national state is not the best outlet for such cosmopolitan longings.”
III. The Shrinking of the American Jewish Community
To sum up: both Dov Waxman in Trouble in the Tribe and Michael Barnett in The Star and the Stripes agree that criticism of Israel by American Jews is increasing, though they identify different reasons for the increase. For Waxman, the problem is mostly the rightward move of Israeli politics. For Barnett, the problem is the differing realities of Israeli and American Jews, a view he buttresses with a quotation from Steven M. Cohen and the late Charles Liebman:
Each group has in effect chosen to attribute Judaic values to its own environment. For Israelis this means Jewish people, land, and state; for American Jews it perforce includes not just Jews but the larger society of non-Jews as well.
At the very end of his book, Barnett wonders what sorts of threat to Jewish security it would take before the American Jewish perception of reality would change. Here’s his list of potential threats: “a Europe that abandoned its Jews to the new anti-Semitism, an Israel that became surrounded by radical Islamic forces that were actively attempting to destroy it, or an Israel that made the Arabs second-class citizens or attempted to cleanse the territories of non-Jews.”
Even setting aside the discordant and seemingly gratuitous final item, this list would surely strike many Israelis, and even many Diaspora Jews, as odd if not positively bizarre in its speculative forecasting of what are already present-day realities. A world presenting fewer and fewer physical threats to Jews? To Israel’s north in Syria sits Islamic State (IS), a brutal and murderous Islamist terrorist group of growing global vitality. To the east, Jordan is now burdened by roughly 1.3 million Syrian refugees, the eventual economic and political impact of whose presence cannot be measured. And somewhat farther east sits Iran, busily building its ballistic-missile program in service of the clear path to a nuclear bomb allowed by last November’s six-power agreement, while also mobilizing Hizballah and its own Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) troops just miles from Israel in Syria. To the south lies Sinai, riddled now with IS and other terrorist groups that despite efforts by the regime in Cairo are growing in size. Each week, and almost each day, brings another Palestinian terrorist attack, in a series that has reached over 200 stabbings, over 80 shootings, over 40 vehicular attacks, with dozens killed and hundreds wounded. And has not Europe, where in city after city Jews are warned not to walk in the street displaying any sign of their religion, “abandoned its Jews to the new anti-Semitism”?
Barnett postulates that any such development might change the perceptions of American Jews. That has decidedly not been the case: neither the rise of IS, nor the new “stabbing intifada” that Israelis now face, nor the dire threat of anti-Semitism in the heart of liberal and democratic Europe—nor, for that matter, the swelling tide of anti-Semitism on American university campuses, to which so many American Jewish parents entrust their own children—none of this has appeared to have much if any impact on the way most American Jews see and judge Israel in particular or the Jewish situation in general.
What if the reason for the distancing from Israel resides not in Israeli conduct but instead almost entirely in the changing nature of the American Jewish community itself?
Nor is it likely to. For the real problem with the analyses of both Waxman and Barnett is their focus on external phenomena—mainly Israel and Israeli government policy—as the source of the developments under inspection. Neither sufficiently considers the alternative: that the explanation for the criticism or distancing resides not in Israeli conduct, which is actually a minor factor, but instead almost entirely in the changing nature of the American Jewish community itself.
Consider this question: how does the relationship between Israel and the Australian, Canadian, or British Jewish community differ from that of Israel and the American Jewish community? If one seeks an answer that can be quantified, note that, even taking into account the effect of the Birthright program—which to date has sent 400,000 young American Jews on trips to Israel—it is still the case that only about 40 percent of American Jews have bothered to visit the country at all. Without Birthright, that proportion would shrink to a third. By contrast, approximately 70 percent of Canadian Jews have made the trip at least once, as have 80 percent of Australian Jews and an estimated 95 percent of British Jews. Beyond the Anglosphere, 70 percent of French Jews have visited Israel, as have 70 percent of Mexican Jews and more than half of Argentinian Jews.
In many ways the British, Australian, and Canadian Jewish communities, though much smaller than that of the United States, are internally stronger than the American Jewish community, and more Zionist as well. They also tend to cast their votes for the political party that supports Israel, having switched allegiance in recent decades to help elect Australia’s Liberal party as well as leaders like Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Stephen Harper in Canada. By comparison, very little political mobility is visible in the United States, where in 2012 an estimated 70 percent of American Jews voted to re-elect President Barack Obama despite the tensions between his Democratic administration and Israel, just as 76 percent had voted against re-electing a Republican president, George W. Bush, in 2004 despite the excellent relations between Washington and Jerusalem at the time.
Why do American Jews appear to care less about Israel and feel less solidarity with it than do Jews living elsewhere in the Anglosphere? It is sometimes argued that, because both political parties in the United States express strong support for Israel, voting patterns measure nothing. That is hard to square with the fact that the state of actual relations between the two countries, which rises and falls considerably, hardly affects the voting pattern at all.
A partial exception to these electoral habits is to be found in the Orthodox community. And here we begin to approach what may be the more persuasive explanation for the growing distance between American Jews and Israel and/or the growing criticism of the Jewish state. Just who are the American Jews? Surprisingly enough, Waxman’s book, despite its strong ideological slant, supplies the answer.
Listing the various ways one can analyze attitudes toward or levels of support for Israel in the American Jewish community, Waxman begins with the “denominational divide”—that is, Orthodox versus non-Orthodox—before discussing the “ideological and partisan divide.” As he correctly writes, religiously conservative Jews “tend to be more emotionally attached to Israel” than religiously liberal Jews. When it comes to politics, moreover, the “partisan” division makes sense: “Simply put, while Democrats have gradually become more critical of Israel, Republicans have become much more supportive.”
Waxman then turns to the “generational divide,” stating that “young American Jews are far more critical of [Israel] than their parents or grandparents. . . . Even more strikingly, young Jews are also more critical of U.S. government support for Israel,” and “young, non-Orthodox American Jews are less suspicious of the Palestinians.” Putting things together, we get this: many “well-educated, liberal, young American Jews . . . have flocked to join groups on college campuses like J Street U, Open Hillel, and, further to the left, Jewish Voice for Peace,” the last of which is a radical anti-Zionist, pro-BDS faction.
And then, really putting things together, we get to the crux of the matter:
Perhaps the biggest reason why young American Jews tend to be more dovish and more critical of Israel is because they are much more likely than older Jews to be the offspring of intermarried couples. Intermarriage undoubtedly has an impact upon the political attitudes and opinions of the children of such unions. Young American Jews whose parents are intermarried are not only more liberal than other Jews, but also significantly less attached to Israel. As such, it is hardly surprising that this rapidly growing subgroup within the American Jewish population has very different views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than other American Jews.
This should not be surprising. As Lawrence Hoffman, a scholar at Hebrew Union College and himself a prominent Reform rabbi has written: “[T]he disappearance of the sort of ethnic solidarity that prior generations enjoyed as a matter of course . . . [and] our high intermarriage rate . . . means that Jews of the next generation will increasingly be people with no childhood Jewish memories and no obvious reason to maintain Jewish friends, associations, and causes at the expense of non-Jewish ones.”
Among those “causes” will be Israel. Why should that be? Surely the points made by Hoffman suggest the answer, and the massive 2013 Pew survey of the American Jewish community confirms it. One big part of that answer, perhaps the biggest, is the intermarriage rate, now higher than 50 percent of all American Jews who have married since the year 2000—nearly six in ten, according to Pew. (Intermarriage rates among Orthodox Jews are negligible, estimated by Pew at 2 percent.) Moreover, within the group of Pew respondents who are themselves the married children of intermarriage, the intermarrying figure of nearly six-in-ten rises to over eight-in-ten.
Thus, Pew found that persons of “Jewish background”—mainly, those with only one Jewish parent—express significantly lower levels of support for Israel than do “Jews by religion.” Of the former, fully 41 percent report being “not too” or “not at all” emotionally attached to Israel, and only 13 percent have ever traveled there.
The Pew survey found that persons of “Jewish background”—mainly, those with only one Jewish parent—express significantly lower levels of support for Israel than do “Jews by religion.”
Similar findings relate to the sense of Jewish peoplehood. According to the Pew study, only 20 percent of Jews with a non-Jewish spouse say they are raising their children exclusively as Jews. When asked if they have a strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people, only 59 percent say yes—as against 92 percent of those married to Jews—and only 49 percent say they feel a special responsibility to care for Jews in need—as against 80 percent of those married to Jews.
Intermarriage is of course not the only way to distinguish levels of communal solidarity; religion itself is another. Half of those who identify themselves as Jews by religion say that “caring about Israel” is “essential” to what it means to them to be Jewish, while only 23 percent of those identifying themselves as non-practitioners believe that to be so in their case. And age is another factor: Jews sixty-five and older are far more likely to say caring about Israel is essential than those who are under thirty.
It is the latter phenomenon that has produced the conclusion that younger American Jews are distancing themselves from Israel. There are obviously data to support that conclusion, but they are meaningless unless we understand what lies behind them. Waxman thinks it is because the young are offended by “the occupation” and the policies of a Likud government, and Barnett does not differ very much from that conclusion. A deeper analysis suggests that we are dealing here with a far broader phenomenon, and one in which sheer indifference may count as much as or more than critical disagreement with Israeli policies or an active desire to disembarrass oneself of association with an “ethno national state.”
The erosion of ethnic solidarity among American Jews is in part a product, no doubt, of the unique openness of American society, the weakness of anti-Semitism, and the assimilation of Jews here—a much more rapid and more thorough process than has been the case elsewhere in Diaspora history. Just as Irish, Italian, and Polish Americans have lost most of their distinctive ethnic characteristics and are now more simply American Catholics, in the U.S. the sense of Jewish people hood as the core of “Jewishness” has largely been replaced by Judaism as a religion—if one that most American Jews do not actively practice.
And that is a problem: to cite Hoffman again, “the [mere] ethnicity of people without profound purpose is doomed.” In his judgment, and in the absence of an automatic identification with Israel, that profound purpose can be supplied only by “regularized ritual affirmations of the transcendent religious purpose justifying and demanding” religious commitments: in other words, precisely the sort of religious observance that the vast majority of American Jews avoid or eschew.
Indeed, as we have seen, not only does a growing portion of the American Jewish community not practice the religion at all, but a majority marry non-Jews, and so do an even larger majority of the children of intermarried couples. Every official and fundraiser for Jewish philanthropies or the communal federations knows this, and knows the effect it has wrought on the communal ties that historically led to concern about the fate of other Jews, including in the land of Israel.
IV. The Problem Is Here
What is to be done? Reversing the major demographic trends in the American Jewish population, for example by increasing endogamous marriage, does not seem to be in the cards. Where the Jewish state is concerned, should Israel and its American supporters rely more heavily on the Orthodox, whose sense of community and of closeness to Israel is intact? Turn outward and work more closely with evangelical Christians? Reach out to growing population groups like Hispanics and Asians? Seek to strengthen hasbarah programs whose goal is to increase support for Israel among the American public in general?
Each of these suggestions has its value, and its limitations. But the beginning of wisdom is surely to understand that the problem is here, in the United States. The American Jewish community is more distant from Israel than in past generations because it is changing, is in significant ways growing weaker, and is less inclined and indeed less able to feel and express solidarity with other Jews here and abroad.
The government of Israel and the Jewish Agency are right to be thinking about how the Jewish state can help, over the coming generations, to strengthen the community, for Israel’s sake and for ours. What should be dismissed are the unhelpful efforts to politicize these developments and transform them into weapons against Israel’s government. Are we really to believe that someone who chooses not to engage with any part of the organized Jewish community, who does not belong to a synagogue and considers himself (in the Pew study’s terminology) a “Jew of no religion,” who has never visited Israel, who has married a non-Jew who did not convert and whose children are not being raised as Jews, feels less attached to Israel than his parents or grandparents because of settlements or “the occupation”? Or that such a person would become a strong supporter of and frequent visitor to Israel if only the Labor or Meretz party were to win an election?
Are we really to believe that someone who considers himself a “Jew of no religion” would become a strong supporter of Israel if only the Labor party were to win an election?
Defending Israel and Israeli policies can be a task undertaken with gusto and commitment by American Jews. So can defending Israel while seeking to change or moderate certain policies or realities (like settlement policy, or the treatment of non-Orthodox Judaism); such is the practice in Israel itself of the Conservative and Reform movements, neither of which, despite the discriminatory treatment they receive there, has been led (in Waxman’s words) to “turn away from Israel in despair, or even disgust.” All too often, however, the default position of American Jews has been to see the defense of the Jewish state as a terrible burden that the ungrateful Israelis have placed on us and obstinately refused to lift.
I encountered one such Jew last fall at the annual session of the Brookings Institution’s Saban Forum, a conference attended by Israeli and American officials and former officials together with charitable donors, policy analysts, and journalists, the great majority of whom are Jews. During my own panel session, one audience member rose to speak with anguish about his daughter’s ordeal at her college. There was so much criticism of Israel, he lamented; the critics were harsh, and tough, and smart; the defenders had a very rough time; it was all so unpleasant. Surely, he adjured us, Israel needs to be aware of this and to change the policies that are imposing this painful experience on young American Jews.
Here was an echo of Waxman’s advice to increase the pressure on Israeli policymakers in a manner that will “eventually encourage, if not compel [them] to alter Israel’s present course.” Our unhappy parent did not pause to ask why and wherefore the college had chosen to play host to so bitter and hostile an atmosphere, or to wonder about the possible complicity of deans or professors in the affair and the relevant responsibilities of administrators. Nor did he question whether perhaps he had failed as a parent to help choose the right campus for his daughter, or reflect on his child’s or her fellow Jewish students’ lack of preparedness for these increasingly frequent scenes, or inquire as to why anti-Israel voices were so much better armed. Nor, finally, did he appear to think twice about the appropriateness of judging policies meant to protect literally embattled Israelis by the standard of how they might disturb the comfort of politically or socially embattled American students.
Perhaps the Israeli and American Jewish communities will drift farther apart, and perhaps the level of criticism will rise. Work should be done, by all means, to prevent or minimize such trends. But the problems with which we are dealing won’t be solved by casting blame on Israelis or their politics. The problems begin at home, and so do the solutions.
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2)
Sylvia Thompson is a black conservative writer whose aim is to counter the liberal, leftist spin on issues pertaining to race and culture. Ms. Thompson is a copy editor by trade currently residing in Tennessee. She grew up in Southeast Texas during the waning years of Jim Crow-era legalized segregation, and she concludes that race relations in America will never improve as long as the voices of many are stifled by intimidation from the few. She believes the nation needs resounding voices of opposition from true patriots and Bible-oriented Christians, to stem the forces that would transform this nation into something it was never intended to be.
Barack Obama is not seeking "legacy"
By Sylvia Thompson - October 26, 2015
To the many gullible souls out there who truly think that Barack Obama is "legacy building" in his all-out assault on America, I implore you to bow out of the conversation because you are not seeing clearly.
The term legacy carries positive connotations of something bequeathed that is to the receiver's benefit. Everything that Barack Obama does is calculated to destroy America, which he despises. This man no more cares about legacy than he fears being properly
prosecuted by the white political leaders whose responsibility it is to remove him from office.
I focus on white leaders, because whites are still in the majority and they fill the majority of political offices. If the majority of political operatives were of some other ethnicity, I would lodge my complaint against that group. Ethnicity is an issue only because Obama is half-black and he uses that fact to intimidate guilt-conflicted white people. Otherwise, he would have been impeached and likely in prison for treason by now.
Barack Obama's sole aim has been, since he first entered politics and continues as he winds down his presidency, the complete destruction of America as it was founded.
It is an insult to the intelligence of all Americans who must listen to elitist pundits on Fox news and elsewhere, and political drones in either party endeavor to make Obama's behavior fit a pattern of normalcy. Attributing his destructive policies to "legacy building" is either self-delusional on the part of the people who make that claim or cowardliness.
This is my take.
Obama's nuclear deal with Iran has nothing to do with legacy but rather to enable a Muslim nation to wage nuclear war with America and Israel – the two nations that he most despises. Does anyone wonder why Russians praise Vladimir Putin despite what the rest
of the world might think of him? Putin cares about his country, that's why.
Obama despises the American military because traditionally it has been a mainstay of America's strength, and our strength infuriates him.
Imposition of a polluting homosexual, anti-Christian agenda upon the military ranks destroys unit cohesion and literally terrorizes male members with the prospect of sodomy, rape. Such rapes have increased since the forcing of open homosexuality in the ranks, against the will of a majority of members I might add. Couple that with an infiltration of women, for whom all standards of strength must be reduced, and Obama attains his goal of emasculating and demoralizing the forces.
He could not care less about a legacy of making the forces more diverse. Besides, President Truman diversified the military as much as it should be when he integrated it. Obama's objective is its destruction.
Obama reopened relations with Cuba because Cuba is Communist. Legacy is not his concern here either, but rather to scuttle America's attempts to keep Communist influence out of the Americas. That Cuba has major issues with human rights does not matter. Like
his Marxist African father before him, he despises the West and all that it represents.
Obama lawlessly declares open borders and amnesty for illegal aliens, because he wants to overrun America with third-world people who bring little more than dependency with them. This tactic not only does not ensure a legacy, but rather it guarantees the eventual conversion of America itself into third-world status, if it is allowed to continue.
Bill Clinton started the travesty of increasing the numbers of third-world immigrants at the expense of culturally more suited immigrants from European and European-influenced nations, but Obama has taken the trend to lawless, destructive extremes. He is fully aware
that many of these invaders have no intention of assimilating.
It is only the outcry of a majority of Americans that holds back this hateful invasion scheme, and Donald Trump's entry onto the political scene to oppose that scheme is a saving grace for our nation.
These are but a few instances of behavior that display the loathsome character of Barack Hussein Obama. And he is allowed to roam freely through the American landscape poisoning and polluting as he goes, sure in the realization that no one will stop him because he is "black".
The day that we no longer have to hear the prattle about his "legacy building" will not be soon enough for me.
Many, many Americans are thoroughly fed up with Barack Obama and the spineless crop of political leaders who ignore his criminality. It is yet unknown whether Republicans will ever garner the backbone to become a true opposition party and hold him accountable.
Promising signs are the House conservatives' getting rid of establishment types John Boehner and Kevin McCarthy as House Speaker and Speaker hopeful, respectively, and Donald Trump's entry into the 2016 presidential race with enough money and testicular
fortitude to tell the Establishment and the Left where to shove it.
Should these positive trends not continue and the 2016 election cycle yield no movement to counter all the harm that Barack Obama has done to this nation, I think there will be massive disruption. Those folks in the National Rifle Association ads currently running on television seem very serious to me, and that is a good thing.
fortitude to tell the Establishment and the Left where to shove it.
Should these positive trends not continue and the 2016 election cycle yield no movement to counter all the harm that Barack Obama has done to this nation, I think there will be massive disruption. Those folks in the National Rifle Association ads currently running on television seem very serious to me, and that is a good thing.
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3)
Europe at the Edge of the Abyss
America can still avoid sharing Europe’s fate. But only if we take action.By Victor Davis Hanson
Because of what Europe has become, it now has few viable choices in dealing with radical Islamic terrorism. Its dilemma is a warning to Americans that we should turn away from a similar path of national suicide.
After suffering serial terrorist attacks from foreign nationals and immigrants, a normal nation-state would be expected to make extraordinary efforts to close its borders and redefine its foreign policy in order to protect its national interests. But a France or a Belgium is not quite a sovereign nation any more, and thus does not have complete control over its national destiny or foreign relations.
As part of the European Union, France and Belgium have, for all practical purposes, placed their own security in the hands of an obdurate Angela Merkel’s Germany, which is hellbent on allowing without audit millions of disenchanted young Middle Eastern males into its territory, with subsequent rights of passage into any other member of the European Union that they wish. The 21st-century “German problem” is apparently not that of an economic powerhouse and military brute warring on its neighbors, but that of an economic powerhouse that uses its wealth and arrogant sense of social superiority to bully its neighbors into accepting its bankrupt immigration policies and green ideology.
The immigration policies of France and Belgium are unfortunately also de facto those of Greece. And a petulant and poor Greece, licking its wounds over its European Union brawl with northern-European banks, either cannot or will not control entrance into its territory — Europe’s window on the Middle East. No European country can take the security measures necessary for its own national needs, without either violating or ignoring EU mandates. That the latest terrorist murders struck near the very heart of the EU in Brussels is emblematic of the Union’s dilemma.
As far as America is concerned, a fossilized EU should remind us of our original and vanishing system of federalism, in which states were once given some constitutional room to craft laws and protocols to reflect regional needs — and to ensure regional and democratic input with checks and balances on statism through their representatives in Congress. Yet the ever-growing federal government — with its increasingly anti-democratic, politically correct, and mostly unaccountable bureaucracies — threatens to do to Americans exactly what the EU has done to Europeans. We already see how the capricious erosion of federal immigration law has brought chaos to the borderlands of the American Southwest. It is a scary thing for a federal power arbitrarily to render its own inviolable laws null and void — and then watch the concrete consequences of such lawlessness fall on others, who have been deprived of recourse to constitutional protections of their own existential interests.
Europe’s immigration policy is a disaster — and for reasons that transcend the idiocy of allowing the free influx of young male Muslims from a premodern, war-torn Middle East into a postmodern, pacifist, and post-Christian Europe. Europe has not been a continent of immigrants since the Middle Ages. It lacks the ingredients necessary to assimilate, integrate, and intermarry large numbers of newcomers each year: There is no dynamic and fluid economy, no confidence in its own values, no belief that class and race are incidental, not essential, to one’s persona, no courage to assume that an immigrant made a choice to leave a worse place for a better one. And all this is in the context of a class-bound hierarchy masked and excused by boutique leftism.Naturally, then, Europeans are unable to understand why a young Libyan came to Europe in the first place, and why apparently under no circumstances does he wish to return home.
Specifically, Europeans — for a variety of 20th-century historical and cultural reasons — often are either ignorant of who they are or terrified about expressing their identities in any concrete and positive fashion. The result is that Europe cannot impose on a would-be newcomer any notion that consensual government is superior to the anarchy and theocracy of the Middle East, that having individual rights trumps being subjects of a dictator, that personal freedom is a better choice than statist tyranny, that protection of private property is a key to economic growth whereas law by fiat is not, and that independent judiciaries do not run like Sharia courts. It most certainly cannot ask of immigrants upon arrival that they either follow the laws of a society that originally made Europe attractive to them, or return home to live under a system that they apparently rejected. I omit for obvious reasons that few present-day Europeans believe that Christianity is much different from Islam, and apparently thus assume that terrorists might just as well be Christians.
Even worse is the European notion of medieval penance: Because one in the concrete present apparently wants little to do with a Moroccan second-generation ghetto dweller, he fabricates abstract leftist bromides to square the circle of hypocrisy and assuage his guilt — sort of like Hillary Clinton or Mark Zuckerberg calling for perennial open borders to justify their Wall Street–funded luxury and tony apartheid existence.
In Europe, immigrants are political tools of the Left. The rapid influx of vast numbers of unassimilated, uneducated, poor, and often illegal newcomers may violate every rule of successful immigration policy. Yet the onrush does serve the purposes of the statist, who demagogues for an instantaneous equality of result. Bloc voters, constituents of bigger government, needy recipients of state largesse, and perennial whiners about inequality are all fodder for European multicultural leftists, who always seek arguments for more of themselves.So unassimilated poor immigrants from the former Third World become easy proof that inequality and unfairness are still here and must be addressed with someone else’s money — as if France has failed because it did not make an immigrant born in Algeria a good French socialist restaurant owner in 20 years.
The same phenomenon is with us in the United States. Without open borders, the Democrats would have had to explain to Americans how and why more taxes, larger government, more subsidies, less personal freedom, racial separatism, ethnic chauvinism, and a smaller military make them more prosperous and secure. Yet importing the poor and the uneducated expands the Democratic constituency. The Democrats logically fear measured, meritocratic, and racially and religiously blind legal immigration of those who want to come to America to seek freedom from statism. If a poor Oaxacan, who crossed into the U.S. three years ago — without education, legality, or knowledge of English — does not have a good car, adequate living space, and federalized health care, then the Koch brothers, Wall Street, Fox News, or the Chamber of Commerce — fill in the blank — is to blame, and legions of progressives are available to be hired out to redress such social injustice.
The Western therapeutic mindset, which maintains that impoverished immigrants should instantly have what their hosts have always had, trumps the tragic view: that it is risky, dangerous, and sometimes unwise to leave one’s home for a completely alien world, in which sacrifice and self-reliance alone can make the gamble worthwhile — usually for a second generation not yet born.
Demography is Europe’s bane. One engine of unchecked immigration has been the need for more bodies to do the sorts of tasks that Europeans feel are no longer becoming of Europeans. Demographic implosion is an old and trite observation; but more curious is the reason why Europe is shrinking — the classic and primary symptom of a civilization in rapid decline.
Europeans are not having children for lots of reasons. A static and fossilized economy without much growth gives little hope to a 20-something European that he or she can get a good job, buy a home, have three children, and provide for those offspring lives with unlimited choices. Instead, the young European bides his time, satisfying his appetites, as a perpetual adolescent who lives in his parents’ flat, seeks to milk the system, and waits for someone to die at the tribal government bureau. After a lost decade, one hopes to hook up with some like soul in her or his late thirties. The last eight years in the U.S. have seen an acceleration of the Europeanization of America’s youth.
Socialism also insidiously takes responsibility away from the individual and transfers it to the anonymous, but well-funded, state. The ancient Greek idea that one changes one’s children’s diapers so that one day they can change his is considered Neanderthal or just crudely utilitarian. Why seek children and the honor of raising and protecting them when the state can provide all without the bother and direct expense? Why have a family or invest for the future, when the state promises a pleasant and politically correct old-age home?
Without a Second Amendment or much of a defense budget, Europeans not only divert capital to enervating social programs, but also have sacrificed any confidence in muscular self-protection, individual or collective.
Even postmodern nations remain collections of individuals. A state that will not or cannot protect its own interests is simply a reflection of millions of dead souls that do not believe in risking anything to ensure that they are safe — including their own persons and those of their family. Finally, Europe is Petronius’s Croton. It does not believe in any transcendence as reified by children or religion. If there is nothing but the here and now, then why invest one’s energy in children who live on after one dies? Like atheism, childlessness reflects the assumption that ego-driven rationalism and satisfaction of the appetites are all there is and all that there ever will be.Europe’s perfect storm is upon us. A shrinking, statist, and agnostic society that does not believe in transcendence, either familial or religious, is now in a war with near neighbors of a very different sort. In the Middle East, the fundamentalists are growing in numbers, and they most certainly do believe that their own lives are nothing in comparison to the Phoenix-like resurrection of their Caliphate and the sensual pleasures in the hereafter that will reward their martial sacrifices in the here and now. Of all the many reasons why immigrants to Europe so often dislike their generous hosts, the simplest may be because they so easily can.Even H. G. Wells could not dream up any better harvest of Eloi by Morlocks, and it would take another St. Jerome (“All were born in captivity and siege, and do not desire the liberty they never knew. Who could believe this?”) to chronicle the Western tragedy.
As a general rule, whatever Europe is now doing, we should do the opposite — for our very survival in an increasingly scary world.
3a)
Col. Richard Kemp: Israel an ‘Outpost of Strength,’ Europe on ‘Spiral Downward to Obliteration’
By Discussing the challenges democracies face in confronting unconventional warfare, a retired British Army officer on Tuesday touted the Jewish state as exemplary.
Asked about the case of the IDF soldier currently under investigation for killing a subdued Palestinian terrorist who had just committed a stabbing attack against a comrade-in-arms, Colonel Richard Kemp – once the commander of UK forces in Afghanistan — said, “All people make mistakes, and soldiers are no exception, particularly since they are under immense pressure, may suffer from a lack of sleep, physical discomfort and often great fear.” The only relevant question, he added, is how an army and a country respond to violations, when they are determined as such.
Addressing the Gatestone Institute — a New York-based think tank specializing in strategy and defense issues — Kemp told The Algemeiner that the immediate public condemnation of the soldier in question by Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon and IDF Chief of General Staff Gadi Eizenkot before all the facts of the case had even been established, was a function of their awareness of the “continual and unjust international pressure on Israel, no matter what it does.”
If the Israeli establishment had not reacted that way, said Kemp, author of the best-selling book Attack State Red, “It would have come under political assault.”
This attitude towards Israel, said Kemp, “is damaging to the West as a whole, because it constrains every army of every democracy; others do whatever they want. The perfect example of this is the war on ISIS. Though killing innocent civilians is obviously something we must avoid doing as much as we possibly can, our enemies hide among the civilian population, and sometimes we must risk the lives of civilians in order to destroy the enemy. Fear of doing this means that we will always lose.”
Kemp recounted his experience of the previous day, when he spoke at a pro-Israel event at New York University, held to counter “Israeli Apartheid Week” taking place there at the same time.
“I asked the students how many believed it was illegal to kill innocent civilians in times of war,” he said. “And I was surprised to discover their level of ignorance on that score, because all of them answered in the affirmative. In fact, it is not illegal to kill innocent civilians in times of war. It may not be nice; it may not be desirable; but it is not illegal.”
Kemp reiterated his long-standing position, based on in-depth research and numerous visits to Israel, that the IDF possesses a “unique morality” unparalleled in other militaries, where preventing civilian casualties is concerned. In addition, he said, unlike the case of other armies, “When Israel fights, it stands in isolation.”
A member of the High Level Military Group (HLMG) – comprised of top-level defense experts from Germany, Colombia, India, Spain, Australia, the US, France, the UK and Italy, which was established in early 2015 with a mandate by the Friends of Israel Initiative to examine the Gaza war – Kemp said the report it published in October will serve as a document to defend Israel in the “lawfare battle” being waged against it in the international arena. He said HLMG’s next project is to focus on “what Israel has to do to combat crazed Islamist extremists stabbing people in the streets and ramming into them with their cars.”
However, he stressed, “I don’t believe there can be a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel wants to live in peace, but what the Arabs want is its annihilation.” Kemp, a Catholic, nevertheless expressed optimism about the Jewish state’s remaining “an outpost of strength,” adding that Israel “should initiate an offensive strike on Iran, whose nuclear program it has the capability of delaying.”
This was in sharp contrast to his assessment of Europe, which is said is “on a spiral downward to being obliterated.”
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North Korea’s missile launch has failed, South’s military says
TOKYO — North Korea tried but failed to launch an intermediate-range missile Friday, the birthday of the country’s founder, Kim Il Sung, the South Korean military said.
“North Korea appears to have tried a missile launch from [the Sea of Japan] area early morning today, but it is presumed to have failed,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff said.
The missile appeared to be a type called the Musudan, also known as a BM-25, the joint chiefs said. South Korean government officials warned Thursday that it had spotted a mobile launcher carrying one or two Musudan ballistic missiles near Wonsan on North Korean’s east coast.
A U.S. defense official said that the missile launched was “detected and tracked” by U.S. Strategic Command systems. “We assess that the launch failed,” he said.
The Musudan is an intermediate-range ballistic missile capable of traveling between 1,500 and 2,500 miles – putting the U.S. territory of Guam within reach – and of carrying a 1.3 ton nuclear warhead, according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative.
North Korea has displayed the Musudan at its military parades and is believed to have supplied assembly kits for the missile to Iran, but it had never tested this model of missile before.
Jeffrey Lewis, head of the East Asia program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in California, said that the failure would “reinforce the persistent denial” about North Korea’s capabilities.
“But in fact, they will have learned a lot from this launch. Not as much as they would have learned if it had succeeded, but still something,” Lewis said.
The Musudan uses the same sort of engine as submarine-launched ballistic missile that North Korea tested last year but which also failed.
“Clearly they have a problem, but maybe next time it will work. It took them a couple of launches to get the Taepodong-2 going,” he said, referring to the ballistic missile technology that has now put two North Korean satellites into orbit.
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In a string of increasingly ferocious threats through its state media, Kim Jong Un’s regime has been vowing missile launches and nuclear attacks, often with specific threats to blow up New York, Washington and the South
At the same time, North Korea has been making a series of claims about technological advances, from building solid-fuel rocket engines to miniaturizing nuclear warheads. The regime recently claimed that it could send a nuclear-tipped missile to the United States mainland.
Although this has not been proven, American military officials and nonproliferation experts say that North Korea is clearly working toward this goal. The Musudan test could be part of this program.
At a hearing of a Senate’s armed services subcommittee this week, Brian McKeon, a senior Pentagon official, said that North Korea’s weapons and missile programs posed a growing threat to the United States and its allies in East Asia.
North Korea is “seeking to develop longer-range ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons to the United States and continues efforts to bring [a road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missile] to operational capacity.
Although an untested long-range missile was unlikely to be reliable, North Korea’s successful satellite launches showed it was mastering the technologies that would be needed, McKeon said.
Since Kim Jong Un ordered his military to conduct a fourth nuclear test in January — which North Korea claimed as a hydrogen bomb explosion, although outside experts are highly skeptical of this — there has been a steady stream of projectiles emanating from North Korea.
In February, Kim oversaw the launch of what North Korean said was a satellite launch vehicle but which was widely viewed as part of an intercontinental ballistic missile program. Since then, there have been numerous short-range missile launches and rockets fired into the Sea of Japan.
North Korea is banned by United Nations Security Council resolutions from launching ballistic missiles or carrying out nuclear tests, but it continues to do so.
The international community has responded to North Korea’s latest provocations with tough sanctions aimed at cutting off the state’s ability to procure parts and finance its weapons of mass destruction program.
This push coincided with two-month-long drills between the American and South Korean militaries, during which they are practicing their response to the collapse of North Korea. The drills, which conclude at the end of this month, include computer-simulated “decapitation strikes” on the North Korean leadership.
Amid this background of heightened tensions, North Korea has been preparing for two key events — the anniversary of Kim Il Sung’s birthday on April 15, and the first congress of the communist Workers’ Party in 36 years.
Kim Il Sung, the current leader’s grandfather and “eternal president” of North Korea, died in 1994, but his birthday continues to be celebrated as the “Day of the Sun” in a country that is held together by a pervasive personality cult. It is usually celebrated with great fanfare in Pyongyang, often with elaborate military events. Meanwhile, the country is in the grip of a “70 day campaign”to prepare for the congress, set for early next month for the first time since 1980. Analysts expect Kim Jong Un to use the event to bolster his legitimacy.
Kim, who is only 33, is not only incredibly young by Korean standards, where age is revered, but did not have the kind of long preparation and introduction his father enjoyed.
4b) America needs a strategy for cyberdeterrence
In World War II, the United States and its allies sent fleets of bombers over Germany to destroy important elements of its physical infrastructure — steel mills, ball-bearing plants, etc. Bombers were, however, unnecessary when the United States and Israel wanted to destroy some centrifuges crucial to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. They used the Stuxnet computer “worm” to accelerate or slow processes at Iran’s Natanz uranium-enrichment facility, damaging or even fragmenting centrifuges necessary for producing weapons-grade material. According to Slate columnist Fred Kaplan, by early 2010, approximately 2,000 of 8,700 “were damaged beyond repair,” and even after the Iranians later learned what was happening, another 1,000 of the then-remaining 5,000 “were taken out of commission.”
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4a) Top U.S. Commander Frustrated with Obama
Admiral Harry Harris, the top U.S. commander in the Pacific who directs U.S. patrols in the South China Sea, seems pretty frustrated with President Obama. The Navy Times:The U.S. military’s top commander in the Pacific is arguing behind closed doors for a more confrontational approach to counter and reverse China’s strategic gains in the South China Sea, appeals that have met resistance from the White House at nearly every turn.Adm. Harry Harris is proposing a muscular U.S. response to China’s island-building that may include launching aircraft and conducting military operations within 12 miles of these man-made islands, as part of an effort to stop what he has called the “Great Wall of Sand” before it extends within 140 miles from the Philippines’ capital, sources say.
Harris and his U.S. Pacific Command have been waging a persistent campaign in public and in private over the past several months to raise the profile of China’s land grab, accusing China outright in February of militarizing the South China Sea.
But the Obama administration, with just nine months left in office, is looking to work with China on a host of other issues from nuclear non-proliferation to an ambitious trade agenda, experts say, and would prefer not to rock the South China Sea boat, even going so far as to muzzle Harris and other military leaders in the run-up to a security summit.This isn’t the first we’ve heard of major disagreements between the White House and the Pentagon over U.S. Asia policy. Two weeks ago, the well-connected David Ignatius indicated that top Defense officials would like to see the U.S. take a tougher line in the South China Sea. But this Navy Times report is pretty remarkable. It’s difficult not to assume that although Harris’ office declined to comment on-the-record, someone close to the Admiral has been disclosing Defense’s frustrations off-the-record.
It’s easy to see why Defense officials would be exasperated. China is slowing but steadily taking control of one of the world’s critical shipping lanes, and the U.S. President doesn’t want to try harder to stop them because he’s focused on nuclear non-proliferation and non-binding climate agreements. Yes, the United States needs China’s cooperation on many issues. But America has, since the end of World War Two, defended freedom of the seas as a cornerstone of a peaceful world order that has largely benefited the world.
President Obama, the White House keeps saying, is focused on legacy-building in his final year. Well, a Beijing-controlled South China Sea and the embittering of America’s Asia Pacific allies and partners who asked the U.S. to intervene on their behalf would certainly be quite a legacy.
4b) America needs a strategy for cyberdeterrence
There is a consensus that aggression by one nation against another is a serious matter, but there is no comparable consensus about what constitutes aggression. Waging aggressive war was one charge against Nazi leaders at the 1946 Nuremberg war crimes trials, but 70 years later it is unclear that aggression, properly understood, must involve war, as commonly understood. Or that war, in today’s context of novel destructive capabilities, must involve “the use of armed force,” which the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court says is constitutive of an “act of aggression.”
Cyberskills can serve espionage — the surreptitious acquisition of information — which is older than nations and not an act of war. Relatively elementary cyberattacks against an enemy’s command-and-control capabilities during war were a facet of U.S. efforts in Operation Desert Storm in 1991, in the Balkans in 1999 and against insurgents — hacking their emails — during the “surge” in Iraq. In 2007, Israel’s cyberwarfare unit disrupted Syrian radar as Israeli jets destroyed an unfinished nuclear reactor in Syria. But how should we categorize cyberskills employed not to acquire information, and not to supplement military force, but to damage another nation’s physical infrastructure?
In World War II, the United States and its allies sent fleets of bombers over Germany to destroy important elements of its physical infrastructure — steel mills, ball-bearing plants, etc. Bombers were, however, unnecessary when the United States and Israel wanted to destroy some centrifuges crucial to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. They used the Stuxnet computer “worm” to accelerate or slow processes at Iran’s Natanz uranium-enrichment facility, damaging or even fragmenting centrifuges necessary for producing weapons-grade material. According to Slate columnist Fred Kaplan, by early 2010, approximately 2,000 of 8,700 “were damaged beyond repair,” and even after the Iranians later learned what was happening, another 1,000 of the then-remaining 5,000 “were taken out of commission.”
For fascinating details on the episodes mentioned above, and to understand how deeply we have drifted into legally and politically uncharted waters, read Kaplan’s new book, “Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War.” Three of its lessons are that cyberwar resembles war, much of it is very secret and everything essential to the functioning of modern society is vulnerable.
The things controlled by or through computers include not just military assets (command-and-control systems, the guidance mechanisms of smart munitions, etc.) but also hospitals, electric power grids, water works, the valves of dams and the financial transactions of banks. And, Kaplan notes, unlike nuclear weapons or the ballistic missiles to deliver them, cyberweapons do not require large-scale industrial projects or concentrations of scientists with scarce skills. All that is needed to paralyze a complex society and panic its population is “a roomful of computers and a small corps of people trained to use them.”
Clearly the United States needs a cyberdeterrent capacity — the ability to do unto adversaries anything they might try to do unto us. One problem, however, is that it can be difficult to prove the source of a cyberattack, such as that which Vladimir Putin did not acknowledge launching, but almost certainly did launch, in 2007 to punish Estonia for annoying Russia.
To appreciate how computer keystrokes can do damage comparable to a sustained air campaign using high explosives, consider what happened in 1995 in the private sector. Barings, founded in 1762, was Britain’s oldest merchant bank, having weathered the Napoleonic wars and two world wars, and its clients included Queen Elizabeth II. One of its young traders, Nick Leeson, in the bank’s Singapore office, was so skillful at navigating the derivatives markets that at one point he produced 10 percent of the bank’s profits. Inadequately supervised, he created a secret Barings account from which he made risky bets, including a huge one on Japan’s stock market rising. He did not, however, anticipate the Kobe earthquake. Japan’s stock market plunged, causing enormous losses in Leeson’s account that Barings could not cover. The bank quickly collapsed and was bought by a Dutch company for one British pound.
If one rogue trader’s recklessness, motivated by mere avarice, can quietly and quickly annihilate a venerable institution, imagine what havoc can be wrought by battalions of militarized cyberwarriors implacably implementing a nation’s destructive agenda. It is long past time for urgent public discussion of the many new meanings that can be given to Shakespeare’s “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war.”
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