The Demand For Change Is Accelerating And Few Are Focusing On The Cost and Consequences.
" America needs God more than God needs America .If we ever forget we are 'One Nation Under God',then we will be a Nation gone under."Ronald Reagan +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ More from Zito. Trying to reschedule her visit and working on Mid April. (See 1, 1a and 1b below.)
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Tobin explains the inexplicable. (See 2 below.)
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Most presidents need to get out among the people because it energizes them and puts them in touch with reality. (See 3 below.)
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Iranian oil tanker hit. (See 4 below.)
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Bibi has his faults but Gantz's seems to care more about disunity than solutions. Seems he would fit perfectly in The Democrat Party where most politicians don't give a damn about America as long as they can impeach Trump. (See 5 below.)
Everyone has advice for Israel. (See 5a and 5b below.)
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I do not agree with this posting.
I understand Trump's desire to withdraw from unwinnable wars but why rebuild your military and then resort to economic sanctions as your weapon of choice? Furthermore, keeping campaign commitments is a laudable and classy endeavor but when circumstances appear over-weighed by reneging flexibility seems the wiser course. Trump has not convinced me, though he made an effort, but I deem it was a lame effort. (See 6 and 6a below.)
But there is always the other side sent to me by a dear friend and fellow memo reader:
"Another view of this mess we have been in for too long. We cannot "fix" a situation involving centuries of tribal/ethnic hatred. No more America lives should be sacrificed on the altar of "nation-building" in the Middle East.
Also, one wonders what restrictions the Saudis will place on the soldiers we are deploying there. No Bibles? No women allowed off base? No alcohol?Etc.?
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend" is a policy with limits when the "friend" is an Islamic state like Turkey or Saudi Arabia.
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Hanging in there,despite all evidence you should change, can be a sure way to eventually hang yourself. (See 7 below.)
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I read an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal about the inability of traditional food companies to come up with changes that appeal to today's food eater's tastes.
As we grow older our taste buds lose some of their strength and this is why companies like International Flavors and Fragrances (stock symbol IFF) have done well of late.
This got me to thinking about why people throughout he world seem upset over just about everything. Change seems to be an increasing fact of life. It is as if change is always better and worth taking the risk to achieve.
Politically speaking our romance with socialism began with Wilson, grew with FDR and now, should she be nominated and then elected, Warren will seek to change everything. Obama laid the foundation for the flirtation with her radical ideas despite her questionable integrity. Sanders broke the dam but Warren has taken the ball and is running with it.
Discontent is now driving political pandering while little thought is being given to the consequences.
Neither can we deny the impact and part social media and technology have played in driving what appears to be a manic desire for change in virtually every facet of life.
Change, of course, has always been a fact of life and good that it has but we seem to have increased our appetite for the spicier. In the process of pursuing change we also seem not to have time for thoughtful reflection of the cost.
If hating America, capitalism, corporations, the wealthy, and, above all, Trump, among other objects of current hate have become acceptable I predict living will become more miserable.
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Dick
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1)
Justin MerrimanJohn Persinger, CEO of Erie Downtown Development Corporation
ERIE, Pennsylvania — Several large pieces of cobalt-blue glass panels bearing “Don’t Give Up the Ship” and a bold likeness of Commodore Perry lay broken at the top of the third-floor stairs of the old Park Place building in the city’s main square.
If ever there were a motto that exemplifies a place and her people, it would be those five words Perry had stitched on a flag, words that inspired him over 200 years ago when he bore the flag in his unlikely defeat of the British at the Battle of Lake Erie.
Given everything this town has gone through — from her heyday as the industrial powerhouse of the Great Lakes to a city bleeding people, jobs, and opportunity — finding this inspiring reminder in a building that used to produce “Carter’s Little Liver Pills” brings the city’s effort at rebuilding into focus.
John Persinger and Matt Wachter could live in any other city in the country and prosper quite nicely. Instead, the CEO and vice president of finance and development are the founding leaders of Erie Downtown Development Corporation. They, along with Tim NeCastro, CEO of Erie Insurance, the city’s largest employer, have committed themselves to not give up the ship, but to also stabilize and rebuild it.
All three are standing along a row of century-old buildings on North Park Row. The bones are good, but the buildings have all seen better days. The three men are discussing the projects they already have underway. These are projects meant to spark a cultural and culinary center, which they hope will in turn lead to a citywide metamorphosis.
“This is Perry Square. This is the heart of downtown. It's often been called the ‘beating heart,’ but we're not sure how much it beats these days because there's not a whole lot of activity,” he said of the boarded-up buildings and scant pedestrian activity.
In 2013, it took the flight attendants on Asiana Flight 214 only 90 seconds to evacuate nearly 300 people off of a plane that had crashed at San Francisco International Airport — despite their personal injuries and the flames and smoke in the cabin.
In February 2016, a high school senior named Jessica Fitzgerald saved her co-worker’s life at the pizzeria where they worked when he went into cardiac arrest right after a pizza delivery. She pulled out her cell phone, dialed 911, and started performing chest compressions.
From the moment she picked up the phone and found no pulse to the faint one detected after she started CPR, she had saved his life in those critical 90 seconds.
In a minute and a half, lives can be saved. And in that time, the headlines show us again and again, lives can also be shattered.
We have become a culture of the moment. It’s not that we live in the moment; it’s that we consume moments. And when we take in moments, stripped of context, our assumptions and prejudices fill in the blanks.
In late January of last year, it only took 90 seconds for a video of a group of white teenage boys from Covington Catholic School in Kentucky, wearing MAGA hats, to become the symbol of everything that is wrong in America. The video passed from activists to journalists to commentators to the headlines, and the moment became a story.
Blue collar voters who wont Vote Trump fear Democrats have abandoned them
By Salena Zito
It’s 10:30 a.m. and Dave Green is home for the weekend tinkering with his car. The former president of the local UAW 1112, who once led workers at the shuttered GM Lordstown plant in Ohio, was forced to relocate to Bedford, Ind., this past summer where he now works on the company’s die-cast production line.
Green, whom President Trump famously bashed on Twitter when General Motors announced it was closing the plant, is a devout Democrat and union man who does not care for the president. Like many of his peers across the Midwest, he is waiting and hoping for one of the Democratic presidential candidates to do something inspiring.
“The candidates who have the right message aren’t on the debate stage,” said Green of his former congressman Tim Ryan and Sherrod Brown, the US senator from Ohio who dropped out of the contest before the debates even started. “We need candidates to actually step up and do more than lip service, do something to help change some of the laws that are anti-worker,” he continued. “Because, quite frankly, we’ve been getting our asses handed to us for 20 years or more. And, if something doesn’t change …”
His voice trails off in frustration.
As social media, a socialist-leaning base and each successive debate molds the Democrats’ 2020 platform, climate change has emerged as the single most important issue, followed by Medicare for All, more government spending, free college, gun confiscation, reparations for the descendants of slaves, and banning fossil fuels and the jobs they create.
The most frustrating aspect of the Yom Kippur assault on a synagogue in Halle, Germany, by a neo-Nazi thug is that we’ve seen all this before.
By that I don’t mean that nearly 81 years after Kristallnacht, Germans who hate Jews are still attacking them in their places of worship.
It’s that what happened on Yom Kippur was just the latest evidence that there is a rising tide of anti-Semitism sweeping across that globe. It has been expressed in hate speech, routine random violence and intimidation on the streets of European cities, as well as efforts to demonize the State of Israel and its Jewish supporters by a bizarre alliance of leftist elites and Islamist immigrants from the Middle East. Throw in the not-insignificant efforts to revive far-right neo-Nazi groups in European countries where such elements have been marginalized since the Holocaust, and you have a toxic mix in which Jews have become an all-purpose object of hatred from a wide variety of sources.
The Halle synagogue assault, in which two people were killed outside the building after the gunman failed to get through the bolted door, shows that neo-Nazis are capable of taking the next and sadly logical step from creating a hateful environment for Jews to planned attempts at mass murder. The fact that the local German police refused the synagogue’s request for security is a shocking instance of that nation’s indifference to the reality of contemporary Jew-hatred, despite all that we’ve heard about Germans being educated about their horrifying past.
It was, after all, only five months ago that a German official shocked many people around the world by recommending that Jews stop wearing jewelry or visible symbols like kipahs when walking on the streets of his nation. While that suggestion was roundly denounced by many Jews, including Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin, as giving into hate, it was both well-intended and a recognition of reality. More than seven decades after the Holocaust, some Germans resent Jews for reminding them of their country’s sordid history of genocide. Others see them as symbols of Zionism. Still others, like the killers in this incident, seem to have lumped them in with other things they hate, like feminism and Muslim immigrants, and see Jews as part of a nefarious plot to “replace” white Europe.
A thorough examination of the ideology of neo-Nazi killers is necessary in order to understand the spread of that particularly noxious variant of vile prejudice. But the problem with this exercise is that like so much else about the debate anti-Semitism in our time, the discussion gets bogged down in political arguments and ideological axes to grind that the result is more confusion, not greater clarity.
The response from some pundits on the left—most prominently, Haaretz columnist and author Anshel Pfeffer—was to warn that those in Israel or elsewhere who chose to view this latest attack in Germany as essentially targeting just Jews are wrong. Pfeffer correctly pointed out that the only two casualties in Halle were non-Jews, even if that was not the intention. But he goes further than that and argues that neo-Nazis aren’t solely focused on hating Jews; rather, Jews are just prominent examples of the types of individuals they hate on a list of other peoples.
There is some truth in this assertion, as the otherwise incompetent Halle terrorist who broadcast his crime live on the Internet said that he was also against feminists, gays and Muslim immigrants. After failing to shoot his way into the synagogue, he attacked a nearby kebab shop, where he murdered one of the customers in cold blood.
Pfeffer argues that the point of neo-Nazi “replacement” theory is that Jews are guilty because for bringing liberal values into the world. And such extremists cast a wide net for the objects of their frustration and bile. But the point of this argument isn’t so much to accurately describe the German killers or those responsible for other atrocities, like the one at a Pittsburgh synagogue, the Walmart in El Paso or the mosques in New Zealand as it is to cast an equally wide net when attempting to find someone to blame for encouraging the murderers. According to Pfeffer’s argument, we’d do better to look to the debate about immigration in the United States and the stands on that issue by President Donald Trump than to the history of anti-Semitism.
And on that score, he’s not only wrong, but also fundamentally misconstrues the nature of anti-Semitism.
Haters of the Jewish people always seize on some excuse to justify singling out the tiny nation for oppression, prejudice and/or violence. Some hate Jews because they are rich. Some hate them because they are poor. Some hate because Jews assimilate into society and some because they stand apart. Some target Jews because they are perceived as enemies of the existing order and others because they see them as the people pulling the strings of the economic and political elites they fear and despise.
The notion that Jews are responsible for liberal values that right-wing extremists despise is mistaken because trying to pin that abhorrence on a limited set of issues—be they economic, relating to immigration, about religion or Israel or anything else—always falls short of explaining the origins and the depth of such antipathy towards Jews.
It is emotionally satisfying for some on the left to try to link neo-Nazis to Trump or to pretend that their efforts are disconnected from traditional anti-Semitism. But these are dots that don’t connect—and not just because these haters are opposed to Trump, and his making an ally of the Jews and Israel. When you drill down into neo-Nazi thinking, you don’t find a set of arguments about immigration or even Muslims, let alone feminists or the LGBT community. Much like an examination of the classic text of modern anti-Semitism—The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—all you get is the same set of inchoate catch-all conspiracy theories that have always been at the heart of anti-Semitism.
Embracing these theories isn’t merely overthinking the problem; it’s a distraction from the need to address Jew-hatred in all its current deadly forms, including anti-Zionism and hate being generated by Islamists. The emphasis post-Halle mustn’t be more of the same skewed analysis that looks to attribute all evil to political opponents. What is needed is a concerted effort to root out anti-Semitism in its many guises, and to defend Jews and their institutions from attack. Anything else would be a colossal and immoral error.
Watching the President in Minnesota last night, I can’t help but think he needs to do a lot more of these. Get him out of the White House, away from the TV, and with the crowds that love him. He feeds off their energy. He is deeply entertaining and funny on the stage. He drives the media crazy.
It would be great for him to do it. It would do good for him to do it. It gives him a way to steer a campaign narrative that is not per se impeachment related and, frankly, even distracts the media temporarily from that story.
President Trump, stuck in DC or where ever, tends to get on Twitter and vent. Venting, of late, has only fed into the impeachment narrative. These rallies, where he is clearly enjoying himself and others are enjoying him, help get him away from that and seem good for his spirits.
He needs to do more of these.
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4) Iran oil tanker hit by two missiles off
Saudi coast
By REUTERS
Two missiles caused an explosion on an Iranian oil tanker, originally said to be a terrorist attack.
DUBAI - An explosion set ablaze an Iranian oil tanker off the Saudi port city of Jeddah, Iranian state media reported on Friday, adding that experts suspected it was a "terrorist attack."
The oil leak, caused by the attack on the tanker is now under control.
The Sabiti tanker suffered heavy damage and was leaking crude about 60 miles (96 km) from Jeddah port, Iranian media had reported.
"The leak of oil has stopped and the situation is under control," IRNA said.
"Two missiles hit the Iran-owned ship near the Jeddah port city of Saudi Arabia," TV said, quoting the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC).
The U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet is aware of media reports about an Iranian tanker blast but has no further information so far, a spokesman said on Friday.
"We are aware of the reports but we don't have any further information," he said. The Bahrain-based Fifth Fleet protects shipping lanes in the Middle East.
The tanker, owned by National Iranian Oil Company, had suffered heavy damage and was leaking oil into the Red Sea some 60 miles from Jeddah, unnamed sources told Iran's Students News Agency ISNA.
"Experts believe it was a terrorist attack," a source told ISNA.
The Nour news agency, which is close to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, said the crew was safe and gave the name of stricken vessel as "Sanitized."
Tensions have been high between regional foes Iran and Saudi Arabia since an attack on the Kingdom's two oil facilities on Sept. 14 that caused fires and damage and shutting down 5.7 million barrels per day (bpd) of production - more than 5% of global oil supply.
Yemen’s Houthi group claimed responsibility for the attacks, but a U.S. official said they originated from southwestern Iran. Riyadh blamed Tehran. Iran, which supports the Houthis in Yemen’s war, has denied any involvement.
5) A solution to the impasse depends on Netanyahu and Gantz
If the law to elect the prime minister through a direct vote were still in effect, we wouldn't be witnessing the current mess, which threatens to force a third election in less than a year.
The MKs who will be sworn in the Knesset plenum this afternoon don't know how long they will be serving. Will the new Knesset hang on for its scheduled four years, finishing its work at the end of 2023? Or will it break a new record for the shortest Knesset and disperse itself moments after it opens, serving an even shorter time than the 21st Knesset?
The solution to the political impasse depends on the ability of the two candidates for prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu and Benny Gantz, to enlist a majority of at least 61 MKs to secure the confidence of the Knesset in the government it will be representing. As of now, it appears that the petty disputes between the two biggest parties, could thwart any chances of a new government.
The Basic Law: The Government determines that even if Netanyahu and Gantz fail to form a government, a group of 61 MKs can ask President Reuven Rivlin to assign a third MK the responsibility of forming a government.
But should that attempt fail, the president will have to inform the Knesset speaker that all efforts to form a new government have resulted in nothing, and there will be no choice but to hold an election within 90 days. In other words, the citizens of Israel would find themselves visiting the polls for the third time since April 2019.
This glum political reality would never have come to pass if Israel still elected its prime minister through a direct vote. The direct vote required voters to put two ballots in the box (one for prime minister, the second for their party of choice), and would not have allowed the situation we are seeing right now to happen, because there would be no question about who had been elected prime minister, and that candidate would be the only one who could form a coalition and secure the Knesset's confidence.
The law instituting a direct election for the prime minister was approved by the Knesset in 1992, despite opposition from then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. It was implemented three times (in 1996, the first time Netanyahu was elected prime minister, narrowly defeating Shimon Peres; in 1999, when Ehud Barak beat Netanyahu; and in 2001, when Ariel Sharon beat Barak). The law was canceled after Sharon formed his government because there was widespread dissatisfaction with its results.
Even if Netanyahu and Gantz manage to form a joint government, which is the best solution in every aspect, or one of them can garner the support of enough factions to ensure a Knesset majority, the 22nd Knesset won't begin its legislative activity before December, because it will only start work after the Sukkot holiday and after a government is formed.
Only then will it be possible to elect a Knesset speaker and deputy Knesset speaker, assign committee chairmanships, and start the legislative process. We can only hope that these efforts will be a success and the government – and, as a result, the Knesset – can work at full power and fulfill the many jobs they have to do, rather than getting bogged down in a third election.
5a)
Israel should focus more on Iran’s nuclear weapons than on Hezbollah’s missiles
By EITAN FISCHBERGER
A senior Israeli official recently said that Israel’s top priorities are to prevent Iran from producing a nuclear weapon and to thwart Hezbollah’s precision missile project.
Those are the biggest security challenges Israel faces but there is a huge difference between them. An Iranian nuclear attack might annihilate Israel and cause hundreds of thousands of casualties. Hezbollah’s precision missiles present a major problem, but on a much smaller scale than the nuclear one. The gap between the two issues is so vast that it requires putting each one of them in its own category.
Iran has been taking steps to breach the agreement about its nuclear program, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), signed in July 2015. If Iran actually tries to produce a nuclear weapon, then Israel must stop it, almost at any cost. Iran with a nuclear arsenal will be an existential threat to Israel.
Therefore Israel must focus on that, at the expense of other major issues, such as Hezbollah’s precision missile project. Israel should not neglect, let alone underestimate, Hezbollah’s missiles but it is much less of a danger compared with Iran’s nuclear project. Nevertheless it often seems that Israel concentrates too much on Hezbollah’s missiles, instead of zeroing in on Iran’s nuclear project.
Israel should prevent Hezbollah from producing accurate missiles in large quantities but it does not necessarily mean that Israel has to go to war over it. Such a war will cost Hezbollah dearly but that’s no comfort for Israel which would likely also pay a significant price.
In the past, Israel tolerated the fact that its sworn enemies had a formidable military, without going to war over it. This had been the case with Syria since the 1980s, until more recently, when the Syrian armed forces lost much of their strength during the civil war in their country. Hezbollah, already at kind of a low point following its many casualties in Syria and economic hardships, might become even more vulnerable in the future. That’s why Israel might be able to avoid a conflict with them.
In the worst case, if Hezbollah manages to produce and deploy its accurate missiles en mass, it doesn’t mean the group will fire them. Their purpose, together with the rest of Hezbollah’s arsenal, is to deter Israel from bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities. Yet, considering the Iranian nuclear threat, it might be worthwhile for Israel to risk attacking in Iran. Israel could still deter Hezbollah from striking or it could launch a massive surprise offensive against Hezbollah, at the same time it bombs Iran.
In the 2006 war, the IDF destroyed Hezbollah’s long range missiles before they could be used. It will be difficult, but not impossible, to do the same with Hezbollah’s accurate missiles. In addition, part of those missiles that will be launched will be intercepted by Israel’s air defense that will protect the country’s most vital infrastructure, both civilian and military. Although some of those sites would be hit, they could be fortified in advance, which would reduce the damage. There should also be alternative facilities to produce vitally needed electricity. Israel also has to be ready to repair and rebuild key infrastructure points as fast as possible.
The last war between Israel and Hezbollah was in 2006. In the ensuing 13 years, both sides have been preparing their forces for another round. Destroying Hezbollah’s accurate missiles will be a top mission for the IDF, but Hezbollah’s unguided missiles and rockets are a problem too. Hezbollah had about 30,000 rockets in 2006. Now it holds up to 150,000 rockets and missiles. During a war, Hezbollah might fire 1,500 of those projectiles per day. This kind of firepower will hurt Israel but Hezbollah can’t destroy Israel, not even a small part of it. An Iranian nuclear weapon can do that.
Currently, neither Israel nor Hezbollah wants war, but the situation could escalate at any time. Nevertheless, Israel has to be careful not to be entangled in an unnecessary war. If Israel concludes it has no choice but to attack, it has to be done in the optimal terms for Israel in the military and diplomatic levels.
The 2006 war went on for 34 days. The next one might be shorter. Israel will try to end the war quickly in order to reduce the cost to its people. Israel’s leadership will have to make decisions quite quickly, while under pressure. Yet it will pale in comparison to the scenario Israel would face during a war with Iran, when the latter has nuclear weapons that might reach Israel in a matter of minutes.
The main focus has to be on Iran and particularly on its nuclear project. Dealing with Hezbollah, and for that matter with the Iranian presence in Syria, must not taken on at the expense of neutralizing Iran’s nuclear program.
The writer is a senior fellow with the Gold Institute for International Strategy. He has been dealing and studying Israel’s national security for more than 25 years, and has served in the Israeli military and the Ministry of Defense. He has published five books in his field in the US and UK.
5b) No third election
By JPOST EDITORIAL
After the Knesset dissolved itself at the end of May and heralded in the second round of elections that took place on September 17, MKs from across the political spectrum assured the public that they had learned their lessons.
They didn’t really want a second round of elections, and many were surprised that the vote to dissolve the Knesset passed, even though they had voted in favor. “But we will not allow an unfathomable third election,” they proclaimed – the people won’t stand for it, it will cause untold damage to the country, we will get enough new mandates/they will lose enough mandates to form a stable Left/Right coalition... yada yada yada.
And we, the people, believed them… setting Abraham Lincoln’s time-worn adage on its head. Israeli politicians have demonstrated that you can fool all of the people all of the time.
Because, as predicted, the results of the second election were no more conclusive than the April 9 round. And now, only a few days into the negotiating period that President Reuven Rivlin granted to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to form a coalition, it’s already clear that unless there’s a major change of heart by one of the primary players on the field, a third election is inevitable.
The Likud refuses to separate itself from its religious-right bloc; Blue and White continues to stand by its pledge not to sit with a prime minister under indictment; and Yisrael Beytenu’s Avigdor Liberman continues to insist that he’ll only agree to a unity government between Likud and Blue and White, even if he’s not part of it.
In keeping to their stringent stances, the major parties are ignoring the will of the public. A recent Israel Hayom/Maagar Mohot Institute poll showed that 54% of Israelis support a unity government with Likud and Blue and White, either with or without smaller parties from the Left and Right. That’s without even factoring in the staggering cost of another election – the previous election cost an approximate NIS 475 million and caused NIS 2 billion damage to the economy.
As The Jerusalem Post’s Editor-in-Chief Yaakov Katz wrote before the September 17 election, 2019 will be known as the “lost year” for the State of Israel. “It is not the fault of one single individual or one political party but rather, I think, of the entire country. We have come to expect so little from our political leadership.”
The credibility of the country’s governing institutions is in free fall and the public’s willingness to endure another election is being overestimated by party leaders and members. Granted, the turnout for the second round exceeded the April 9 election, but a third round could see voters rebel in anger or apathy and stay away from the polls in droves, setting Netanyahu’s warning about Arab voters on its head.
Against that backdrop, the 22nd Knesset was sworn in on Thursday in Jerusalem. Many are wondering if, like the 21st Knesset, it will also last for less than two months and perhaps become the shortest-lived legislature in Israel’s history.
As the Post’s Lahav Harkov pointed out on Wednesday, there are only eight new members of this Knesset, as well as another nine who are returning from past stints as legislators, which means that 103 members of the 22nd Knesset will be sworn in for the second time this year.
A proud institution, the Knesset is in danger of becoming a laughing stock. But it’s no joke. Israel needs a stable government and a stable Knesset. Every attempt must be made to prevent the newly sworn-in Knesset from becoming the shortest Knesset in Israeli history.
All parties should take the responsibility upon themselves as if they alone are charged with insuring that a third election is not called for. The country has survived some nine months of paralysis, but it’s only a matter of time before the string starts to unravel out of control and the situation begins to do irreparable damage to Israel and its population.
At Thursday’s ceremony, Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein led the MKs with “I pledge allegiance to the State of Israel and to faithfully fulfill my mission in the Knesset.” And the newly sworn-in lawmakers responded: “I pledge.”
Let’s hope they take that allegiance and mission seriously and prevent a third election.
Trump announced the withdrawal of between 50 and 100 troops from northern Syria and plans for the removal of 2,000 or so American military personnel from the country. Washington asks why the president pulls our forces. Many Americans outside the Beltway wonder why we put them there in the first place.
Initially, Barack Obama announced that Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad must go. Then, when ISIS looked to fill the void left by the dictator’s possible ouster, the rationale changed to defeating the Islamic radicals who sought to defeat Assad.
The reasons for staying appear equally convoluted. Cal Thomas, for instance, worries, “Coming home is no guarantee the terrorists won’t come after us here. In fact, Iran has bragged of having their agents inside the U.S., awaiting instructions to inflict more death and destruction.” Others emphasize the danger of ISIS, rising from their ashes like a phoenix, resurging. Perhaps one of these scenarios occur but the Shiite/Sunni either/or seems a choice between horrible and terrible. A third outcome involves Assad further strengthening his hold on the country. None of the three appear at all appealing. What, exactly, is the realistic endgame, and does the presence of several dozen members of the U.S. military in northern Syria do anything to bring about this desired outcome?
“The United States has spent EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS fighting and policing in the Middle East,” Trump reasons. “Thousands of our Great Soldiers have died or been badly wounded. Millions of people have died on the other side.”
Trump campaigned, loudly, on withdrawing the American military from the various campaigns in the Islamic world that cost the U.S. greatly in terms of both lives and lucre. Why, then, did so many offer a shocked,shockedresponse this week? The bipartisan consensus foolishly assumed that, Trump’s promises be damned, the live-actionRiskgame would continue unabated.
The president further explained on Twitter why it must not: “GOING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE IN THE HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY! We went to war under a false & now disproven premise, WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION. There were NONE! Now we are slowly & carefully bringing our great soldiers & military home. Our focus is on the BIG PICTURE! THE USA IS GREATER THAN EVER BEFORE!”
Many conservatives who doubt the abilities of the U.S. government to deliver the mail fantastically trust it to transform religious fanatics and secular bad guys into New England-style town-meeting members. Liberals, though ostensibly suspicious of the use of the military, cling to a Wilsonianism that transforms soldiers into not even policemen but social workers. The lack of a realistic objective from the former group and a clear objective from the latter ensures no desirable outcome.
Our disastrous history in the region, from Lebanon to Iraq and beyond, demonstrates how little we understand it. We project our own values on various combatants only for events to highlight the folly of our previous beliefs. Prior to the Iraq War, American conservatives imagined that Iraqis would greet our invading soldiers as liberators and the country that emerged would serve as a model of democracy that would spread throughout the region. Before and even after the Islamic Revolution in neighboring Iran, many American liberals imagined the Ayatollah Khomeini as a bearded, turbaned version of themselves. Eqbal Ahmad, for instance, asked in the April 1979 issue of Mother Jones, “What kind of state might result if Khomeini or his followers take power? As someone who has talked with him at length, I believe that, when Khomeini speaks of an Islamic state for Iran, it is a Shi’ite scholar’s way of saying that he wants a good state in Iran. His concept of a good state includes democratic reforms, freedom for political prisoners, an end to the astronomical waste of huge arms purchases, and a constitutionalist government.”
The distortion of the ideological lens seems secondary to the distortion of the Western lens. The late Samuel Huntington laid this out clearly in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order several decades ago. “The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism,” he wrote. “It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed by the inferiority of their power. The problem for Islam is not the CIA or the U.S. Department of Defense.
It is the West, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the universality of their culture and believe that their superior, if declining, power imposes on them the obligation to extend that culture throughout the world. These are the basic ingredients that fuel conflict between Islam and the West.”
Yet, like Charlie Brown attempting to kick that football, the United States keeps trying, trying again with the same results. Strangely, Donald Trump earns designation as the fool for departing from this foolish course.
6a)
Trump did not betray the Kurds
by Caroline B. Glick
The near-consensus view of US President Donald Trump’s decision to remove American special forces from the Syrian border with Turkey is that Trump is enabling a Turkish invasion and double-crossing the Syrian Kurds who have fought with the Americans for five years against the Islamic State group. Trump’s move, the thinking goes, harms US credibility and undermines US power in the region and throughout the world.
There are several problems with this narrative. The first is that it assumes that until this week, the US had power and influence in Syria when in fact, by design, the US went to great lengths to limit its ability to influence events there.
The war in Syria broke out in 2011 as a popular insurrection by Syrian Sunnis against the Iranian-sponsored regime of President Bashar Assad. The Obama administration responded by declaring US support for Assad’s overthrow. But the declaration was empty. The administration sat on its thumbs as the regime’s atrocities mounted. It supported a feckless Turkish effort to raise a resistance army dominated by jihadist elements aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood.
President Barack Obama infamously issued his “red line” regarding the use of chemical weapons against civilians by Assad, which he repudiated the moment it was crossed.
As ISIS forces gathered in Iraq and Syria, Obama shrugged them off as a “JV squad.” When the JVs in ISIS took over a third of Iraqi and Syrian territory, Obama did nothing.
As Lee Smith recalled in January in The New York Post, Obama only decided to do something about ISIS in late 2014 after the group beheaded a number of American journalists and posted their decapitations on social media.
The timing was problematic for Obama.
In 2014 Obama was negotiating his nuclear deal with Iran. The deal, falsely presented as a nonproliferation pact, actually enabled Iran – the world’s greatest state sponsor of terrorism – to develop both nuclear weapons and the missile systems required to deliver them. The true purpose of the deal was not to block Iran’s nuclear aspirations but to realign US Middle East policy away from the Sunnis and Israel and toward Iran.
Given its goal of embracing Iran, the Obama administration had no interest in harming Assad, Iran’s Syrian factotum. It had no interest in blocking Iran’s ally Russia from using the war in Syria as a means to reassert Moscow’s power in the Middle East.
As both Michael Doran, a former national security adviser in the George W. Bush administration and Smith argue, when Obama was finally compelled to act against ISIS, he structured the US campaign in a manner that would align it with Iran’s interests.
Obama’s decision to work with the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) militia in northern Syria because it was the only significant armed force outside the Iranian axis that enjoyed congenial relations with both Assad and Iran.
Obama deployed around a thousand forces to Syria. Their limited numbers and radically constrained mandate made it impossible for the Americans to have a major effect on events in the country. They weren’t allowed to act against Assad or Iran. They were tasked solely with fighting ISIS. Obama instituted draconian rules of engagement that made achieving even that limited goal all but impossible.
During his tenure as Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton hoped to revise the US mandate to enable US forces to be used against Iran in Syria. Bolton’s plan was strategically sound. Trump rejected it largely because it was a recipe for widening US involvement in Syria far beyond what the American public – and Trump himself – were willing to countenance.
In other words, the claim that the US has major influence in Syria is wrong. It does not have such influence and is unwilling to pay the price of developing such influence.
This brings us to the second flaw in the narrative about Trump’s removal of US forces from the Syrian border with Turkey.
The underlying assumption of the criticism is that America has an interest in confronting Turkey to protect the Kurds.
This misconception, like the misconception regarding US power and influence in Syria, is borne of a misunderstanding of Obama’s Middle East policies. Aside from ISIS’s direct victims, the major casualty of Obama’s deliberately feckless anti-ISIS campaign was the US alliance with Turkey. Whereas the US chose to work with the Kurds because they were supportive of Assad and Iran, the Turks view the Syrian Kurdish YPG as a sister militia to the Turkish Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). The Marxist PKK has been fighting a guerilla war against Turkey for decades. The State Department designates the PKK as a terrorist organization responsible for the death of thousands of Turkish nationals. Not surprisingly then, the Turks viewed the US-Kurdish collaboration against ISIS as an anti-Turkish campaign.
Throughout the years of US-Kurdish cooperation, many have made the case that the Kurds are a better ally to the US than Turkey. The case is compelling not merely because the Kurds have fought well.
Under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey has stood against the US and its interests far more often than it has stood with it. Across a spectrum of issues, from Israel to human rights, Hamas and ISIS to Turkish aggression against Cyprus, Greece, and Israel in the Eastern Mediterranean, to upholding US economic sanctions against Iran and beyond, for nearly 20 years, Erdoğan’s Turkey has distinguished itself as a strategic threat to America’s core interests and policies and those of its closest allies in the Middle East.
Despite the compelling, ever-growing body of evidence that the time has come to reassess US-Turkish ties, the Pentagon refuses to engage the issue. The Pentagon has rejected the suggestion that the US remove its nuclear weapons from Incirlik airbase in Turkey or diminish Incirlik’s centrality to US air operations in Central Asia and the Middle East. The same is true of US dependence on Turkish naval bases.
Given the Pentagon’s position, there is no chance that the US would consider entering an armed conflict with Turkey on behalf of the Kurds.
The Kurds are a tragic people. The Kurds, who live as persecuted minorities in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, have been denied the right of self-determination for the past hundred years. But then, the Kurds have squandered every opportunity they have had to assert independence. The closest they came to achieving self-determination was in Iraq in 2017. In Iraqi Kurdistan, the Kurds have governed themselves effectively since 1992. In 2017, they overwhelmingly passed a referendum calling for Iraqi Kurdistan to secede from Iraq and form an independent state. Instead of joining forces to achieve their long-held dream, the Kurdish leaders in Iraq worked against one another. One faction, in alliance with Iran, blocked implementation of the referendum and then did nothing as Kurdish-controlled Kirkuk was overrun by Iraqi government forces.
The Kurds in Iraq are far more capable of defending themselves than the Kurds of Syria. Taking on the defense of Syria’s Kurds would commit the US to an open-ended presence in Syria and justify Turkish antagonism. America’s interests would not be advanced. They would be harmed, particularly in light of the YPG’s selling trait for Obama – its warm ties to Assad and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The hard truth is that the 50 US soldiers along the Syrian-Turkish border were a fake tripwire. Neither Trump nor the US military had any intention of sacrificing US forces to either block a Turkish invasion of Syria or foment deeper US involvement in the event of a Turkish invasion.
Apparently, in the course of his phone call with Trump on Sunday, Erdoğan called Trump’s bluff. Trump’s announcement following the call made clear that the US would not sacrifice its soldiers to stop Erdoğan’s planned invasion of the border zone.
But Trump also made clear that the US did not support the Turkish move. In subsequent statements, Trump repeatedly pledged to destroy the Turkish economy if Turkey commits atrocities against the Kurds.
If the Pentagon can be brought on board, Trump’s threats can easily be used as a means to formally diminish the long-hollow US alliance with Turkey.
Here it is critical to note that Trump did not remove US forces from Syria. They are still deployed along the border crossing between Jordan, Iraq, and Syria to block Iran from moving forces and materiel to Syria and Lebanon. They are still blocking Russian and Syrian forces from taking over the oil fields along the eastern bank of the Euphrates. Aside from defeating ISIS, these missions are the principle strategic achievements of the US forces in Syria. For now, they are being maintained. Will Turkey’s invasion enable ISIS to reassert itself in Syria and beyond? Perhaps. But here too, as Trump made clear this week, it is not America’s job to serve as the permanent jailor of ISIS. European forces are just as capable of serving as guards as Americans are. America’s role is not to stay in Syria forever. It is to beat down threats to US and world security as they emerge and then let others – Turks, Kurds, Europeans, Russians, UN peacekeepers – maintain the new, safer status quo.
The final assumption of the narrative regarding Trump’s moves in Syria is that by moving its forces away from the border ahead of the Turkish invasion, Trump harmed regional stability and America’s reputation as a trustworthy ally.
On the latter issue, Trump has spent the better part of his term in office rebuilding America’s credibility as an ally after Obama effectively abandoned the Sunnis and Israel in favor of Iran. To the extent that Trump has harmed US credibility, he didn’t do it in Syria this week by rejecting war with Turkey. He did it last month by failing to retaliate militarily against Iran’s brazen military attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil installations. Whereas the US has no commitment to protect the Kurds, the US’s central commitment in the Middle East for the past 70 years has been the protection of Saudi oil installations and maintaining the safety of maritime routes in and around the Persian Gulf.
The best move Trump can make now in light of the fake narrative of his treachery toward the Kurds is to finally retaliate against Iran. A well-conceived and limited US strike against Iranian missile and drone installations would restore America’s posture as the dominant power in the Persian Gulf and prevent the further destabilization of the Saudi regime and the backsliding of the UAE toward Iran.
As for Syria, it is impossible to know what the future holds for the Kurds, the Turks, the Iranians, Assad, or anyone else. But what is clear enough is that Trump avoided war with Turkey this week. And he began extracting America from an open-ended commitment to the Kurds it never made and never intended to fulfill.
Jews, African Americans and the Democrat Party The trap of blind loyalty. Kenneth Levin
By KENNETH LEVIN
In democracies, minority groups will often embrace one political party and cling to that attachment irrespective of changing political circumstances. This seems especially true of minorities that have experienced discrimination, marginalization, and other forms of abuse.
In America, the groups that have been most closely attached to the Democrat Party for virtually the last century are African Americans and Jews. Even consideration in the abstract of the wisdom of being predictably committed to one party would suggest likely more negative than positive consequences – for example, being taken for granted by that party while given up on and not pursued by the other – and experience has borne that out.
This would seem to be most obvious with regard to the African American experience. Consider, for example, the Democrats’ decades-long lock on control of most of America’s big cities, many with African American majorities, and the record of public education in those cities.
Little weighs as heavily on impoverished children’s potential for extricating themselves from their difficult circumstances and shaping a better future for themselves than the quality of the education they receive in their elementary and secondary schools. But the African American populations in our large urban centers have consistently been very poorly served by their schools and lag significantly behind national averages in command of basic skills.
Those in charge of the relevant cities point to lesser per student spending on their schools due to lesser tax subsidies as compared to the subsidies provided in other jurisdictions. Another argument is that the difficult family circumstances these cities’ impoverished children often face undercut the children’s ability to make full use of the educational opportunities available to them in their public schools.
Both factors are indeed at play in shaping the school experience of inner city children from low income families. But the history of charter schools over the past almost three decades undercuts claims that these factors render better educational outcomes out of reach. Charter schools are public schools that operate independently under public charter with greater autonomy but with increased performance expectations. They are open to students on the basis simply of application or, if oversubscribed, on the basis of lottery. The general history of such schools has been mixed but overall positive, and, as the Harvard School of Education reported in the summer of 2017, “…low income students, especially black and Hispanic, tend to benefit from charter schools most…” And, in inner cities, such schools are serving children with basically the same social disadvantages as their peers and are doing so with per capita budgets no greater than those of the public schools.
Not only have major cities failed to improve their schools, but their political leaders – like New York mayor Bill De Blasio, who shouted out at a campaign rally in July that he “hates” charter schools – have often worked to undercut and obstruct charter school alternatives for their constituents. They have done so even as tens of thousands of African American families, desperate for a better future for their children, have sought admission to charter schools. The politicians have taken this course to serve the interests of their backers such as teachers’ unions and others opposed to charter schools. They have chosen political expediency over the welfare of their cities’ children.
And yet one would be hard-pressed to find African American voters in these cities shifting their support away from the Democrat politicians who control their cities and their schools. Their attachment to the party is so ingrained that their cities’ politicians know they will pay no price for ignoring African American children’s interests in favor of, for example, those of union contributors.
One can come up with potential logical explanations for how the commitment to the Democrat Party, by both African Americans and American Jews, first evolved. Why it is so steadfastly embraced even when circumstances would suggest the wisdom of a more flexible approach to party preferences, an approach responsive to political changes, is the more germane question. Part of the answer is that groups that have been subjected to biased, abusive, marginalizing treatment are inclined to categorical thinking about what will make their situation better. That is, they tend to think in absolute terms about one set of choices being right and the other wrong. This inclination is driven largely by the wish to believe that making such sharp distinctions and choosing the “right” alternative will assure escape from past abuses. That wish, and the frame of mind it engenders, work against a more nuanced response to political developments.
The potency of this dynamic among American Jews, and its role in the American Jewish embrace of the Democrat Party, have been elucidated by polls of American Jews regarding anti-Semitism in America. Sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset and co-author Earl Raab, writing in the 1990’s, noted that such polls showed the overwhelming majority of American Jews believing anti-Semitism to be more rife among American conservatives than liberals, even though actual surveys of American opinion regarding Jews have not supported this assumption. The false belief, largely reflecting a wish that reality could be so simply defined, figures in American Jews’ allegiance to the Democrats, their routinely voting for Democrat candidates in numbers exceeding seventy percent.
The cost to Jews for this blind allegiance was illustrated in the Democrat leadership’s response when anti-Semitic tropes were spewed by a newly elected Democrat congresswoman, Ilhan Omar. Rather than forthrightly condemn her for her anti-Semitic comments, the Party leadership, eager to appease a Progressive wing more than tolerant of anti-Jewish voices, sponsored a meaningless condemnation of all sorts of bigotry. Its refusal to offer a simple, straightforward rebuke of the congresswoman’s anti-Semitism reflected a bowing to the sensibilities of that Progressive wing over those of their Jewish loyalists and an expectation that the cost of not appeasing the former would be greater than the cost of betraying the latter. And they were no doubt right in their calculations.
A similar calculation was reflected in the Party’s response to Israel’s decision not to allow Omar and another newly elected congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib, to enter the country. Senate minority leader Steny Hoyer, who had just returned from leading a delegation of other newly elected Democrats to Israel and assuring that nation of Democrat support, condemned Israel’s action as “outrageous.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi similarly condemned it. They suggested it was somehow an unprecedented move by a democratic ally. But the United States has repeatedly blocked figures from other democracies from entering the country, including an Israeli member of the Knesset. And, aside from anti-Semitic statements, Omar and Tlaib have endorsed the anti-Semitic BDS (boycott, divest and sanction) movement whose goal, as articulated by its founder and many of its leaders, is Israel’s annihilation. Tlaib has also advocated Israel’s destruction more directly. Is Israel really obliged to admit people who openly declare they want to see the nation destroyed?
Both Hoyer and Pelosi have been strong supporters of Israel and neither can be construed as in any way anti-Jewish. Both are well aware of the history of Israel and the falsehoods in Omar and Tlaib’s glosses on that history. That they would come to the defense of the congresswomen and not support Israel in its right to deny them entry reflected a political calculation. It reflected once again the conviction that it was politically more important to propitiate the anti-Israel circles in the so-called Progressive wing of the Party than to worry about the Jews; that confronting the former would have more negative consequences for the Party than disregarding the latter.And, again, they were no doubt right in this calculation. There has been and will be no counter-push from Jews making the point that the Party cannot automatically assume Jewish allegiance no matter what action it takes against Jewish interests. While such pushback might not change the Party’s ultimate course, it would at least force some deeper reflection, some consideration of possible cost, before Jewish interests were ignored. But no such Jewish response will likely occur.
The two episodes above may seem of limited weight when compared to, say, the issue of schools in the nation’s major cities and the Party’s betrayal of African American children. But the episodes are reflective of a much broader problem.
The American institution most associated with anti-Semitism today is American academia. On the nation’s campuses, dominated by the Left, faculties have widely joined in the bigoted demonization of Israel and its American supporters, have backed the BDS movement and have penalized Jewish students and others who seek to defend Israel. College and university administrators, while typically resisting cooperation in boycotts, have also typically done little to counter campus anti-Israel and anti-Jewish bigotry. The actors in this institutional anti-Semitism are overwhelmingly Democrat supporters, and the Party, once more prioritizing propitiating supporters over challenging anti-Semitism in its midst, has been essentially silent on the bigotry of the campuses. And once more there has been very little American Jewish pushback.
The ethos of the campuses, and the lack of Democrat response, is a threat to American Jews in other ways as well. Basic American principles, principles that have figured prominently in making the Jewish experience in America so much more benign overall than the Jewish experience elsewhere, have in recent years come under attack. That attack has been primarily from the Left, starting again largely on the campuses. What is more fundamental to American Jewish well-being than the First Amendment and freedom of speech, or than the principal embodied in Martin Luther King’s vision of a more fully realized adherence to judging people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin? Yet both are under incessant attack in the leftist-dominated academy, where a supposed “right” to protection from distressing ideas trumps freedom of speech and where group identity trumps individual identity. (Martin Luther King would likely be harassed and pushed off campuses today for his ideas just as pro-Israel speakers are.) And this illiberal ideology is spreading from our colleges and universities to other bastions of the Left. Yet the Democrat Party has responded virtually not at all to this challenge to basic freedoms and basic principles coming overwhelmingly from its supporters. And Jews have done essentially nothing to call the Party to account.
There is little evidence to suggest that the great majority of either African Americans or Jews is prepared to reassess its longstanding blind loyalty to the Democrat Party. The ongoing refusal to do so in the face of inimical Democrat policies will likely exact an ever-increasing price from both groups.
Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist and historian and author of The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People under Siege.”
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