Foreign Policy

There used to be a time when piracy was treated as an offense against the law of nations and pirates were summarily tried in Admiralty Courts and executed, often in a particularly gruesome fashion to serve as a deterrent for others. It wasn’t all Captain Jack Sparrow and Pirates of the Caribbean. That pirates were a menace and something to be dealt with is shown, in one example, in discussions in The Federalist Papers of the threat of pirate raids to the several states along the coast. Eventually, the rise of powerful 18th and 19th century navies in England and, to a lesser extent, the United States, put an end to the menace in the Mediterranean, Atlantic and Caribbean.

Today, with a new epidemic of piracy taking hold, a different regime prevails. Navies, particularly the American, are still powerful, though one might argue convincingly that there is less order provided today because there is no comparably dominant naval force and similarly concerted anti-piracy effort as two hundred years ago. Worse, there appears to be a rather perverse reversal of incentives. In a manner that reflects broader civilizational dysfunction and paralysis in the West, governments now give pirates all the benefits and protections of Western law that they can muster. If caught and convicted, they can look forward to five years in a comfortable Dutch prison, after which they are eligible to remain in the country. ”When I first spoke to my client, he said being here was like heaven,” Willem-Jan Ausma, a lawyer who represents Farah Ahmed Yusuf, 27, said. ”For the first time in his life he didn’t feel he was in danger, and he was in a modern prison with the first modern lavatory and shower that he’d ever had.” Yes, that’ll show ‘em.

The pirates understand the bizarre Western “rule of law” and try “to remain in the Netherlands, and to bring their families to join them upon release from jail….[The] Netherlands, like Britain, deems Somalia too dangerous to repatriate people to.” Moreover, the pirates had the effrontery (but also the savviness) to declare that the trial was evidence of Dutch Islamophobia. Nothing tickles the West’s elites’ fancy for wearing the hair shirt and apologizing for, well, being from the West, like a claim of Western bigotry against “The Other.”

The judge had the imagination to declare that piracy must be powerfully resisted before imposing this sentence that shows anything but powerful resistance. Needless to say, experts doubt the punitive and deterrent effects. Thus does the West’s civilizational weakness show itself, yet again. But while those elites can bask in their certitude that they are morally pure actors in such matters, others, now and in the future, have to pay the real human cost of piracy that filters money to local warlords in an area increasingly under control of Islamic radicals connected to international terror networks.

This is the predictable result when a civilized Western country, seeking to defend itself while bending over backwards to protect those against whom it must act, succumbs too far to concerns about the reaction of those who deny its very right to exist. Never pull a gun unless you are prepared to fire. Don’t engage in half-hearted military measures, as they are more likely to create further danger than either hard-hitting measures or none at all. That part, and no more, is Israel’s fault. The rest is squarely on those who provoked these events, and there are many of them.

As the usual anti-Israeli suspects (UN, Obama administration, EU, Muslim world, Hamas and other terror groups, transnational opinion elite) rush to judgment to condemn Israel for the confrontation that killed and wounded a number of people on the ship trying to run the Israeli blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza, some information is coming out about the Turkish organizers. It seems that they are an Islamic charity, which, as in this case, unfortunately too often means a terror-funding organization. Not surprisingly, Saudi money from other terror-funding organizations is involved.

More information, with videos that show the attacks on the Israeli soldiers that caused them to defend themselves. The reason for those caches of weapons found on board and for the violent, apparently premeditated confrontation is that many people on the boat are connected to jihadist groups.

I’ve been posting about sundry items about the upcoming American elections. Great Britain just had an election that saw the Conservative (Tory) Party surge to first place, but fail to gain a majority of seats in the House of Commons. Under the British parliamentary system of government, such a majority is needed to form the Cabinet of the Queen’s ministers. In Britain, the constitutional separation of legislative from executive function is different than in the U.S. and, as a formal political matter, non-existent. As a functional matter, however, there can be considerable separation between the Cabinet and the House of Commons.

This is an excellent article by the BBC that provides an overview of the election result and the possible ways to form a government. This is the first time in a long while that there has not been a majority government. Coalitions are inherently unstable, and this political instability does not come at a good time for the UK. Its economy is in difficulty after years of Labour mismanagement of increased social entitlements and worsening societal dysfunctions produced by a race-to-the-bottom moral relativism and pervasive and paralyzing multicultural political correctness. The UK’s deficit is as bad as that of the U.S., but the country has less economic resiliency in part because the state controls more of the economy (though the Obama administration appears hell-bent on “Europeanizing” our economy into similar torpor). At the same time, the Tories did not present a strongly viable alternative to Labour, preferring a vapid “me, too”-ism to ideological clarity. Cameron tried to follow the Obama playbook and promise vague “change,” but no policy meat. Merely saying, “We can re-arrange the chairs on the economic Titanic better than the other guys,” is not a way to instill confidence that the Tories ought to be given the job of doing something about the iceberg. The Liberal Democrats have turned so far left they are not the “Liberals” (in the classic European meaning of the term) of old; they’d favor figuring out a way how to hit the iceberg so that the maximum amount of damage is done to the truly productive and the wealthy.

The unusual nature of the election may be a sign of what is coming in the U.S. What worries me more is that the British economy is a sign of what is to come for the U.S. within the next couple of decades if we adopt Obamanomics.

This is a hard-hitting and accurately pessimistic look at the difficulties facing the next British prime minister (probably David Cameron), as well as many other Western leaders as they try to deal with structural economic problems.

UPDATE: Mark Steyn pulls no punches in his criticism of the focus-group driven pandering and vapid rhetoric that the “metrosexual” Cameron undertook without reaping the benefit of an electoral victory a la Tony Blair or Barack Obama. The UK Spectator’s Melanie Phillips is similarly disenchanted with Cameron and the rest of the non-entities running for P.M.: “So now all is murk. And no, the likely political paralysis is not good at all. But then, no party was offering any prospect of getting to grips properly with anything important anyway. It is the condition of British politics, and beyond that the state of British society, which is not good at all and of which this election result is an accurate reflection.”

Why didn’t the Tories run Boris Johnson, the mayor of London? That might have shown they were serious about running on ideas.

The Honduran people have resolved the attempts by the Obama administration and other leftist advocates of Latin American caudillo government to impose on them an unpopular and deposed leader, the Hugo Chavez-lite Manuel Zelaya. Hondurans participated in an apparently competitive, free, and clean election, something not usually heard in the precincts of Chavez, Castro, and others. They punished Zelaya’s party, even though his own party associates had engineered his removal, and elected a conservative candidate.

Now it remains to be seen how the “international community,” specifically the Latin American political elites will react to this exercise in democracy that saw a repudiation of Chavismo and clear defeat for the international Left. The Obama administration seems willing to accept the results of the democratic vote and move on. More moderate countries such as Canada, Costa Rica, Colombia, Mexico, Panama, and Peru are are apparently ready to follow suit. But leftist would-be political heavyweights such as Argentina and Brazil (who insisted on a return to power of the ousted Zelaya) remain adamantly opposed, their noses still out of joint from their political defeat by the people of a small, impoverished country inflicted on them through democratic means.

As Ed Morrissey notes, Mr. Obama helped create this mess by refusing to accept the legality of Zelaya’s removal. That legality under the Honduran constitution was the basis for joint agreement among the Honduran Congress, Supreme Court, and military. It was confirmed by the U.S. government’s law library, albeit some weeks after many other writers had already so concluded, conclusions that I posted about at the time. Still, the administration stuck to its discredited position in appeasement of Castro, Chavez, and other Latin leftists. Now, ”[t]hanks to that self-defeating and intellectually vapid policy, Obama has undermined actual democracy in Honduras by giving Brazil, Venezuela, and Nicaragua an opening to ignore the results of a regularly scheduled and honest election and to force Honduras to put a lawbreaker back into office against the will of its people.
If Obama had deliberately strategized a way to undermine democracy in Latin America, he could not have done any better than this.”

Par for the course for this inexperienced, naive, and ideologically blinkered administration.

First the Republicans chided President Obama’s 2009 World Apology Tour during which the President rhetorically bowed before the world audience. Then came Messrs. Chavez, Ortega, Morales, and other Leftist Latin caudillos who felt liberated enough openly to denouncethe U.S. in Obama’s presence. Then came his UN speech of largely similar orientation. Then the Iranians felt emboldened in their rhetoric towards the U.S. and their repression at home. Then Nicolas Sarkozy and the French openly worried about Obama’s softness. The Germans quickly followed Sarkozy’s lead. Then came the failure of the administration’s goofy “Reset” button strategy towards Russia and the high-handed Putin/Medvedev reaction to Obama’s about-face on American commitments to Poland and the Czech Republic. Then the Israelis dismissively turned away Obama’s demands. The British press began to criticize Obama’s signalling of foreign policy weakness. In between there were unseemly bows (symbols of deference and, in the foreign relations arena, submission) to monarchs and various diplomatic gaffes involving gifts to the British Prime Minister and the Queen. The recent Asia trip has shown Obama’s approach as a complete failure in dealing with the Chinese. They rewarded Obama’s deferential approach with lectures, and nothing else.

The administration has come across to friends and foes alike as amateurish and weak. As anyone with common sense predicted, the Obama policy of repentance and being non-Bush to project American strength through such “soft power” was a non-starter. Now add the (left-wing) German press to the chorus of doubters. Oh, and India.

Starting with an article I read in a left-leaning British newspaper some months back, there are stirrings of longing for the more solid foreign policy of the Bush administration. These two articles are further examples of that trend. Indeed, if the Spiegel article is to be believed, even the Obama administration may be getting that message.

As expected, liberals are jumping in to defend President Obama’s goofy bow to Japan’s Emperor Akihito. The defense, predictably, is “cultural sensitivity.” Ed Morrissey at Hot Air dismantles that excuse in light of the tradition, unbroken for more than two centuries of American leaders not bowing to foreign leaders. Moreover, as I pointed out yesterday, bowing to other heads of state definitely is not a tradition of international relations. Morrissey embeds this video by the University of Connecticut’s College Republicans that juxtaposes Mr. Obama’s greeting with that of many other dignitaries.

Morrissey also points out that, when President Clinton in 1994 almost bowed to Akihito, the New York Times lambasted him for almost doing something “unthinkable” and looking “obsequent.” So far, the Timeshas kept its counsel about Obama, who is after all, more than “Bubba” Clinton, one of their own class. If Obama does it, one certainly must not chide him on etiquette.

The President raised lots of eyebrows earlier this year when he bowed deeply and unexpectedly to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia at the G20 London economic gathering before kissing his hand. I wrote about the matter at the time. While the legacy media generally ignored the spectacle, conservatives had some fun at the President’s expense. Now come photos and videotape of Mr. Obama bowing deeply to the Emperor of Japan.

The gesture was so stark that even the Los Angeles Times, well, at least its blog, courtesy of Andrew Malcolm, took notice. Obama bending himself in half might be seen as just meeting the custom of the place where he is or the person whom he is greeting. George W. Bush, after all, was photographed walking with King Abdullah at the Texas ranch holding the monarch’s hand. That elicited lots of comments and mirth among journalists.

But any comparison between the two based on custom only redounds to Mr. Obama’s disadvantage. While the sight of two leaders walking hand-in-hand may seem odd to modern American eyes, much as the French bi-cheeky air kiss, or the Russian hug-and-smooch do, in many parts of the world, and in the West in the past, this is seen as a sign of a relationship of friendship and equality. Bowing deeply, on the other hand, and kissing another leader’s hand is everywhere an expression of deference. Indeed, in regards to Japanese custom, the deeper the bow, the greater the submission. Obama’s bow so reeked of an inferior’s homage to his superior, it is what used to be called “bowing and scraping.”

The Emperor did not reciprocate the bow. Neither did King Abdullah in the earlier scenario. As the pictures show, when Dick Cheney met the Emperor of Japan, he shook the latter’s hand. No bowing for Darth Cheney. It may be that this is yet another faux-pas by an inexperienced and unqualified naif, as many conservatives saw Obama during the campaign. Perhaps, especially when this happens more than once, it has a more sinister meaning for the U.S. Foreign leaders of whatever stripe pay attention to these matters of etiquette. To them, such expressions of submission are of a kind with Obama’s World Apology Tour 2009 and project an air of weakness and docility that may, no, will cause the U.S. much trouble in the future to correct. At the very least, these signals can cause the kind of miscalculation that lets a foe take a bellicose position that draws the U.S. into unwanted confrontation. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait is said to have been such a misstep based on miscues from words to the dictator by President George H.W. Bush’s ambassador in Iraq.

Given the White House’s current occupant’s penchant for gestures of supplication to foreign leaders, especially ones not popularly elected, one wonders what to expect from him when he meets the Chinese leadership. After all, their importance in helping Obama finance his record deficits far outweighs that of either King Abdullah or Emperor Akihito.

* Mark Steyn’s phrase

One recalls wistfully the days not long ago when the remark of the groundskeeper on The Simpsons about the French as cheese-eating surrender monkeys struck a humorous, but knowing, response in Americans. Those days are gone. Gone with the Bush administration and the rise of Obamaism. Gone, on the other half of the equation, with the Chirac corruptocracy and the advent of Nicholas Sarkozy. In a classic case of, “Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it,” there is a growing awareness among Europeans that the timidity of the American administration in foreign relations can have harmful consequences. Hence, various European generals in NATO recently gave open support to the McChrystal call for more U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Hence also, France’s Nicholas Sarkozy has warned against American weakness against Iran.

The French have long practiced a brash unilateralism in countries that they see as part of their sphere of influence, such as in their former African colonies. Even while the erstwhile president Jacques Chirac was undermining the Bush administration regarding Saddam Hussein’s Iraq by demanding more UN resolutions that the Iraqis had no intention of obeying and the French had no intention of enforcing, they sent their military to West African countries to intervene on one side or the other in the perpetual gang warfare that passes for political contests there. But the notion of the French taking a more robust diplomatic and military view than the Americans regarding threats to international security is wondrous. Yet that is happening under the Sarkozy approach when compared to the Obama administration’s dithering, apology tours, and retreat from security arrangements.

Another difference between our Obamanation and France is that the latter is trying to move away from multiculti liberalism that corrodes social bonds by emphasizing tribalism over assimilation. The government is launching a program to instill in immigrants, most of whom are from Muslim countries, French national pride as an antidote to the appeal of Islamic fundamentalism that preys on the culture of victimhood and separatism that is the inevitable outcome of the efforts of the multiculti sack-cloth-and-ashes crowd. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the President cannot commit himself to recognizing American exceptionalism outright. In similar vein, every American accomplishment that he notes in his speeches on foreign soil is balanced by the mention of some real or imagined American misconduct or transgression.

As for these French efforts, “They include everybody receiving lessons in the nation’s Christian history and children singing the national anthem. Using words which infuriated ethnic minority groups and Socialist opponents, immigration minister Eric Besson also said he wanted ‘foreigners to speak better French’.”

Meanwhile, in the U.S., based on personal knowledge, American middle school textbooks contain detailed descriptions of Muslim and Jewish religious practices and propose a lesson for children to “live as a Muslim for a day,” including praying towards Mecca. But even a mention of Christian religious practices and America’s heritage as a Christian nation gives American pedagogues and education bureaucrats the vapors. Those same pedagogues and bureaucrats stress years of bilingual education that has been shown to retard the learning of English by immigrants. And the President, rather than encouraging students to learn better English, tells them to focus on learning foreign languages (an idea that has independent merit, but after children learn to speak and write English better).

A brief introduction to a truly conservative leader, in once socialist-leaning New Zealand, no less. His policies have strengthened the New Zealand dollar, stabilized the economy, reduced government bureaucracy and lowered taxes. Can we get this guy instead of our incumbent? For that matter, can we get this guy as a Republican candidate?

What is one to do after this news, if one has both a ”Free Tibet” and an “Obama” bumper sticker on one’s Prius or Subaru (or Land Rover for the L.A. Westside family)? That “Free Tibet” sticker hasn’t worked very well and isn’t going to make a difference in the future. But it’s a cheap and easy way to feel good and signal one’s moral superiority over the pickup truck-driving unwashed Palinistas with the “Gun Control Means Using Both Hands” stickers on their rusty bumpers, without really having to do anything. Moreover, precisely because of its ineffectual message, it has staying power, whereas Obama will be gone in a little over three years (one dares to hope) or seven years at the latest (unless he unexpectedly goes Hugo Chavez on the country). On the other hand, in a contest between “His [mere] Holiness” and “The One,” the obvious choice is to pay homage to the latter. Decisions, decisions.

I agree with President Obama on this one to the extent that the decision not to meet now with the Dalai Lama may make negotiations easier with the Chinese, if the latter are inclined to negotiate seriously in the long run. A big “if.” How might this make such negotiations easier? Whether Obama meets with the Dalai Lama now or, as trumpeted, in a couple of months, is not going to impress the Chinese leadership as such. They have already taken Obama’s measure just as much as Putin, the other European leaders, Ahmadi-Nejad, the Castros, Chavez, and, probably, the head guys in Malawi, Mongolia, and other minor entities have. They know with whom they are dealing, and it is not the usual American leader. This is no different than when President George W. Bush very publicly awarded the Medal of Freedom to the Dalai Lama in 2007. That act of political principle didn’t change Chinese opinion of Bush. Their protestations were rather muted because, having taken Bush’s measure, they knew to expect someone who would strongly represent American world leadership.

Moreover, the Chinese know that, both in political ways (Iran, North Korea) and economic (trillion dollar deficits), the current administration is coming as a beggar with cup in hand. If anything, meeting the Dalai Lama now might have shaken up some hardening assumptions about Obama. He might then appear to be his own man as President of the U.S., rather than the “best brand in the world,” as Obama’s advisers have put it. Or “President of the World,” as some of his supporters and, in a note of sarcasm, his critics put it.

Nor is this going to make a difference with the American public that generally doesn’t know or care much about these strange-looking folks in orange and yellow robes. To the extent they are paying attention, they’ll be confirmed in their opinions about Obama, pro or con.

The real target, I think, is the Chinese people. If Obama meets with the Dalai Lama now, press coverage of the event can be used to stir up popular opposition in China. That, in turn, might make whatever flexibility Hu Jin-tao and the rest of the leadership want to demonstrate that much more difficult to achieve. Better to make the whole thing more low-key once the much-ballyhooed first meeting between the hard-bitten Chinese leadership and the post-modern American novice President is past. After all, the problem of an unfree Tibet, a politically unfree China, and the Dalai Lama are not going anywhere—and are not doing so for much longer than a couple of months.

So, that leaves as the biggest problem still, “What to do about those bumper stickers?”

Qaddafi, Ahmadi-Nejad, and Chavez blighted the UN with their speeches. With the exception of the party by Oliver Stone and other Hollywood types for Hugo Chavez, the reception by Americans of these dictators was muted, to say the least. Their experience is quite different from that of the Cuban tyrant Fidel Castro and of his sadistic one-time executioner Che Guevara during their past visits to New York. This is a very interesting article about the almost unbelievably callous indifference of enthralled liberals to Castro’s crimes against the Cuban people. The article also describes the terrorist plotting by Castro and his friends against the U.S. This is the guy so admired by Michael Moore and Oliver Stone, as well as by cadres of leftists over the last 50 years. All those transnational legal order enthusiasts and human rights lawyers whose hearts melt for the few hundred accused terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are utterly blind to the prison camp that is the rest of the island. For them, the many thousands killed by the Castro dictatorship (including by Che Guevara) and the many thousands more who were tortured in his prison camps but survived, do not count against an opportunity to bask in the glow of the dictator’s persona.

More evidence of the Cuban dictator’s many crimes that the Western intelligentsia does its best to excuse. But if the U.S. waterboards a terrorist for actionable intelligence, look out. That same intelligentsia will denounce such an affront to its sensibilities. Others will excuse Castro’s human rights violations by taking refuge behind multiculti cant or by changing the subject to some real or imagined American villainy somewhere at some time. Michael Moore has filmed another propaganda piece, this time lauding Cuba’s health care system. He must have missed this, or maybe not:

“On April 7, 1967, The Organization of American States Human Rights Commission issued a detailed report on an overlooked facet of ‘President’ Castro’s much-lauded health-care:

“On May 27, 1966, from six in the morning to nightfall political prisoners were excecuted continuously by firing squad in Havana’s La Cabana prison. One hundred and sixty-six men were executed that day and each had 5 pints of blood extracted prior to being shot.” The blood was then sold to North Vietnam fighting the U.S. Would that aspect of socialized health care qualify as a “death panel” for The New York Times?

The article recounts many other examples of the brutality of the Castro regime against its people, men, women (including pregnant women), and children. It makes for horrifying reading, on several levels.

Ousted Honduran dictator-wanna be Manuel Zelaya furtively re-entered the country and took refuge in the Brazilian embassy. It is still murky just how he got there. His previous attempts to return were foiled, and he obviously does not want to expose himself to the arrest that awaits him if he steps outside the embassy. Brazil claims that they had nothing to do with bringing him into the country.

But who did? Apparently, and not surprising, by his own confession, the troublemaking interloper is Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. President Obama has made common cause with Chavez and Nicaragua’s Sandinista government under Daniel Ortega to try to prop up Zelaya as the legitimate president of Honduras, despite the actions of the Honduran Congress and Supreme Court in kicking Zelaya out for violations of their constitution. Brazil’s government until recently has been less ostentatious in their support for Zelaya than the other regimes, including in addition the failing Argentine government under Mrs. Kirchner. What is also unsurprising is that Zelaya is claiming that he is being tortured by the CIA and that Israeli mercenaries are plotting to kill him. These seemto be standard delusions for leftists, so no doubt this will gain considerable traction with the Left around the world. For rational people, this confirms the impression one has got from Zelaya’s previous statements that he is a megalomaniacal fool. But he’s “our”, well, Obama’s, megalomaniacal fool. The U.S. is supporting him because the administration incompetently misread the political situation and saw an opportunity to ingratiate themselves with Chavez in the vain hope of leveraging American influence in some undetermined manner some time in the future.

It looks, indeed, as if Brazil may be tiring of Zelaya’s stay at their embassy if conditions are as dire as described here. Zelaya claims that they have been reduced to eating hard biscuits, a tale difficult to confirm. From the article it sounds as if his earlier bravado that the current government had better resign has been scaled down to pleas for discussions and appeals to the new president’s conscience. Unfortunately for him, time is on the side of the current government, which is moving forward with the scheduled election in November, in which the current president will not be a candidate. Even the Obama administration’s foolish and empty threat not to recognize a new government elected in that constitutionally-mandated election will not change the dynamics. All Zelaya’s return has done is trigger the violence that the new government’s actions so far had successfully avoided. That is hardly likely to strengthen Zelaya’s position with the civil authorities, the military, or the people, as it confirms the image of Zelaya as a Chavez-like danger.

Now comes the non-partisan Congressional Research Service and concludes that, lacking an impeachment process, the Hondurans acted in accordance with their constitution in removing Zelaya. For that, the Obama administration, the OAS, and the UN are trying to isolate and punish Honduras. The administration denies visas to Honduran officials, while granting them to military officers of the murderous Burmese regime. They cut off foreign aid, while making all kinds of economic aid promises to Iran and North Korea. The only problematic action by the Hondurans, according to the CRS was in having the military evict Zelaya from the country. Instead, they should have arrested him and tried him for treason or other crimes and stripped him of his citizenship, in accordance with Honduran law.

Maybe they should have. But they threw him out of the country to avoid exactly the violence and social turmoil that Zelaya is seeking to precipitate by his furtive re-entry into the country. Even now, the new government has said that they will grant an amnesty to Zelaya for his political crimes (though not for other ordinary crimes, such as for corruption of which he is suspected), but Zelaya insists on a return to power that the new president, Roberto Micheletti, has rejected as non-negotiable. And they are investigating the propriety of their decision to expel him from Honduras. That is far more respect for democratic rule of law than one sees in Chavez and others of his ilk, such as in Zelaya’s attempt to circumvent the Honduran constitution’s penalties for trying to avoid presidential term limits. It is clear, and was to the Honduran civil authorities when they deposed Zelaya, who is the threat to the stability and democracy of the country. Once again, the U.S. has backed the wrong (politically and morally) horse in Latin America.

I recently posted about the appearance of Venezuela’s clown-in-chief, Hugo Chavez, at the United Nations, a man much admired by Oliver Stone and numerous Hollywood celebritards. Chavez comes across as a clown, but one around whom a horror film plot would be developed. The reason for his, ahh, eccentricities might be his self-proclaimed daily diet of coca leaves. Indeed, Chavez invites people to look at him for the effects of this diet. Si, Senor Lider Maximo.

In Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope, the character Obi-Wan Kenobi describes the spaceport Mos Eisley as a “wretched hive of scum and villainy.” The cantina that provides a backdrop to a crucial scene in the film wonderfully illustrates that assessment.

I was struck by that scene as I watched the goings-on at the United Nations over the last few days. But, then, I am often struck by that scene when I read about the UN. It is quite difficult to parody the UN, for reasons of both the sheer and unabashed hypocrisy it shamelessly displays and the stunning corruption that overwhelms one’s ability to take its measure. Better just to let the reader judge:

Exhibit 1:

This is just the first part of his hour-and-a-half offering. Here’s a brief account for those who just want a precis of the lowlights. One cannot make this stuff up. He claims President Obama as one of his own, and later hopes that Obama will serve as president of the U.S. forever (or at least as long as he remains alive), much like Qaddafi himself proposes to do. That sentiment immediately endears Qaddafi to the 20% of the U.S. population that identifies itself as liberal, plus an indeterminate number of moderates (indeterminate because, by definition, moderates have commitment issues). As a side note, Qaddafi’s Libya presides over the General Assembly of this kleptocracy, and is on the Human Rights Commission of the UN, a group that Obama so proudly hailed when he declared that the U.S. was rejoining it. President Bush had withdrawn the U.S. from that agency because of its long history of serving as little more than a forum for the foulest regimes to bash Israel and the U.S.

Exhibit 2:

Here’s a brief summary of his presentation, though one that leaves out the extent of his anti-Jewish paranoia.

Exhibit 3:

Like Qaddafi, this eventual dictator-for-life, too, embraces Obama as a kindred spirit. The article fails to mention his lengthy encomiums to the new Oliver Stone film that treats Latin American leftist dictators much more respectfully than Stone treated George W. Bush. I know, that’s not news. But it does underscore the continuing fascination that the sycophantic, I mean sympathetic, Hollywood celebrity horde has with leftist thugs. To show what a piece of work Chavez is, even Congressman Charles Rangel had enough when Chavez came to New York in 2006 and insulted President Bush. I rather suspect that Rangel was in the minority among our liberal friends, the same ones who now decry the lack of civility whenever an American dares criticize President Obama.

Time to stop, without going into the examples of the Cuban, North Korean, Turkmen, Bolivian, Zimbabwean, Ecuadorian, Nicaraguan, Congolese, Belorusk, etc., etc., headmen, as they are either too minor on the world stage or made no appearance this year. But they are still part of the unsavory assembly that is the U.N., one that provides them a forum for their verbal execrations.

The Obama administration’s decision to cancel the Bush commitment to build a missile defense system to protect the U.S. against attack by Iranian missiles has stirred a hornet’s nest. The Polish and Czech governments had expended considerable domestic political capital in agreeing to host the systems, including the very sophisticated radar essential to the system. The Russians strenuously objected, claiming the system was an attempt to overwhelm Russian missile power through a massive first strike and a defense against a Russian counterstrike. Never mind that the system is not powerful enough to withstand massive retaliation, but is designed to shoot down a few missiles. Never mind also that the Russians are spending money on missile defense. The Russians’ real objection is to the integration of those countries with the West that makes the Russian goal of re-establishing the Soviet-era sphere of influence more difficult. That was also part of the geopolitical reason the Bush administration moved forward with that plan. Remember Donald Rumsfeld’s derisive reference to “Old (Western) Europe” and his embrace of “New (Eastern) Europe”?

The administration has painted this as merely a technical matter, emphasizing that they are moving ahead to develop other forms of anti-missile defense that will protect Europe and Israel from mid-range Iranian missiles that the regime is building in a collaborative effort with North Korea. Obama claims that there is no need to protect the U.S. East Coast from Iranian ICBMs because Iran doesn’t have any and is not as far along in developing them as the Bush administration thought. That’s not very comforting, given that American intelligence apparently again has underestimated the advanced state of the Iranian nuclear program, and that Iran is actively working on an ICBM, most likely with its North Korean partners-in-rocketry. It doesn’t need a lot to launch an Electro-Magnetic Pulse weapon that can do serious damage. Incidentally, the West Coast does have a missile shield against rogue nuclear missiles.

Maybe Obama’s claims to be developing technically better weapons are valid; I certainly dont’ know. But I am suspicious, given the Democrats’ decades-long objection to the whole concept of missile defense and the administration’s cut in funding for missile defense. Moreover, there may already be anti-missile defenses for short and medium range missiles in Israel and Europe. Most baffling, if Iran will have those ICBMs in, say, five years (as seems to be the more optimistic perception), why not build the defensive system now? I rather doubt that Obama is moving backwards now, with all the political cost that entails, only to incur greater political cost and uncertainty to build the system in five years. It makes more sense to osuppose that he intends not to have such a system.

Obama has also claimed that this is a purely technical decision, while his advisers are hoping that the move will spur concessions from the Russians. The Russians, in turn, quite unremarkably do not see this as either a technical decision or a quid pro quo tactic. They see it as the “correction of an American mistake.” They see themselves as having won a struggle with the Americans and are probably crediting their belligerent statements against Poland, their natural gas shutoff/energy blackmail against Ukraine and Western Europe, and their military action in the Caucasus. The Putin/Medvedev combo has said that they “expect” other corrections of American mistakes by the Obama administration.

Other countries, too, see this as part of the Obama approach of a U.S. that is humble, corrects its perceived injustices to the world, and uses its military muscle only in the service of transnational institutions controlled by American opponents. It believes that this is the way for American influence to be reestablished. Other countries see it as American weakness and are acting accordingly.

Charles Crawford is a former British ambassador to Poland. He has written an excellent and, to me, persuasive analysis of the international politics of the administration’s decision to cancel the Eastern European missile shield. I especially found his explanation of the Russian angle and his conclusion insightful. The U.S., on the one hand, and Russia and China, on the other, have fundamentally different and ultimately conflicting world views. They are playing different games, while the administration thinks they are playing the same game with the same rules and predictable actions.

“Which is why when the going gets tough, Russia will never do more than the bare minimum to give the Americans real help against obnoxious states and extremists and terrorists. Much better for Moscow to keep the prospect of such help dangling like a carrot indefinitely, so that Russia can negotiate from greater strength far down the road as and when its power has grown and America’s has diminished.”

As to his conclusion, I choose a combination of the two, an outcome that is scary enough in terms of what it will cost the U.S. in the future to undo the damage, if that even can be done by ordinary political means.

As anticipated, American allies, such as Poland and the Czech Republic, who are again feeling the political rug pulled out from under them by the fickle U.S., are drawing their own conclusions. It certainly will be no surprise that dealings with those countries in the future will be more problematic. (This link contains some especially caustic reactions unfavorable to the U.S.) They may be well-advised to seek their own accommodations with the Russians, as American geopolitical gains since Reagan are thrown away. Even the Western Europeans at some point may need to face the possibility that the U.S. won’t help them, either, and face up to the prospect that their free riding on American defense dollars to prop up their welfare states is over. If that is the case, that is one good thing to come from Obama’s multi-pronged quest to blunt and soften American power.

Another prong in that quest is Obama’s determination to reduce the American stockpile of nuclear weapons towards an eventual (and, one hopes, not unilateral) nuclear disarmament. The anti-missile decision is a part of that strategy. Needless to say, America’s opponents whose stockpiles are either more outdated or smaller, or both, like that plan, though the French (!) are balking at the strategy. One really has to question whether Iran and North Korea, or even India and China would be awed by the Obama plan into renouncing their nuclear weapons, or whether that would merely be an invitation of another sort to them. It all seems like some International Relations seminar of the type Obama took to satisfy his undergraduate major. It would be interesting to have his undergraduate papers on the topic released.

In another accommodation to the Age of Obama and the new geopolitical realities of the coming post-American era, Turkey wisely is moving to acquire its own anti-missile system.

Other observers see the projection of American weakness as an invitation to nuclear proliferation as countries question the value and strength of the American “nuclear umbrella” in the current administration. Rich Lowry at NRO decries Obama’s decision as a “masterstroke of weakness.” Pointing to Obama’s remarks in April about the courageousness of the Poles and Czechs of hosting the missiles, Lowry doubts that the intelligence about Iranian long-range missiles could have changed so drastically in a few months as to support the American turn-about. Mark Steyn turns his customary caustic word skills against the decision:

“But you’ve got to figure that by now the world’s strongmen are getting the measure of the new Washington. Diplomacy used to be, as Canada’s Lester Pearson liked to say, the art of letting the other fellow have your way. Today, it’s more of a discreet cover for letting the other fellow have his way with you. The Europeans ‘negotiate’ with Iran over its nukes for years, and, in the end, Iran gets the nukes, and Europe gets to feel good about itself for having sat across the table talking to no good purpose for the best part of a decade. In Moscow, there was a palpable triumphalism in the news that the Russians had succeeded in letting the Obama fellow have their way. ‘This is a recognition by the Americans of the rightness of our arguments about the reality of the threat or, rather, the lack of one,’ said Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the Duma’s international affairs committee. ‘Finally the Americans have agreed with us.’

“There’ll be a lot more of that in the years ahead.”

I’m afraid Steyn’s right.

Israel’s former U.N. ambassador evaluates the Iranian nuclear threat and the West’s continuing non-response. He sees trouble ahead. Each time the U.S. draws a line in the sand, Iran ignores it, and the U.S. erases the line. The latest is the abandonment of the clear warning to Iran that the lack of progress by September 23 would result in serious consequences to Iran. The Iranians know that they have nothing to fear from the U.S.’s posturing and the West’s empty words. They know that the Russians and Chinese will protect them, and the West has no stomach for anything else. The Iranians are free to continue their regional expansionism as well as their economic, military, and diplomatic forays into the U.S.’s backyard in Latin America. One almost suspects that the Iranians are setting up shop in Venezuela, Paraguay, Nicaragua, and other parts of Latin America to achieve a (temporary) Grand Bargain with the U.S. that the U.S. will abandon the Middle East to Iran and Iran will leave the U.S.’s backyard.

The West’s failure to stop Iran through the long-ongoing talk-a-thon and after the West’s blustering means that Western, especially American, credibility is shot. Why should anyone in Tehran, Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, or even Havana, Manila, Warsaw, and Caracas pay attention to loud American talk,when it is obvious that the U.S. is carrying an awfully small stick? How much credence would any Arab politician place in the American offer to them of a “defense umbrella” against a nuclear Iran, given both the American predilection to leave its allies sitting high and dry and the American government’s irresistible impulse to meddle in the domestic institutions of those countries the Left in the U.S. sees as being pro-American?

The Obama administration is continuing its shunning of the Honduran government that threw out would-be Chavecisto strongman Zelaya per orders of the Honduran Congress and Supreme Court for actions that violated the Honduran constitution. Obama wants the strongman brought back, just as Chavez was returned to power in Venezuela after a temporary ouster. The interim Honduran government has promised free and full elections as previously scheduled under their constitution for November. President Obama’s team is now threatening that they won’t recognize even such a new, democratically-elected government. I suppose only the return of Zelaya as president-for-life will satisfy our “democrats” in the White House.

I have been astonished at that position because it seems so absurdly anti-democratic and non-productive. I have wondered who would be making such, frankly stupid, decisions. It must be someone with a deep ideological commitment that favors Latin American leftist strongmen and disparages constitutional democracy. Carbolic Smokeball may have uncovered the source of that advice, an individual who is no longer with us.

Now, it might be questioned why I throw in satire with serious news about the Obama administration. The reason is that the administration is becoming more and more a caricature of itself. The line between fact and fiction, reality and parody has become quite blurred. That conclusion goes to the point of another post, which challenged the notion that the reason comedians aren’t joking about Obama is that he does not do anything risible.

The confluence of events described in several recent news items struck me as evidence of the fecklessness of American foreign and national security policy. First is the administration’s decision this week to renew its plan for talks “without preconditions” with the Iranian dictators. Who the supplicant is, and who the emir, is rather clear, as the Iranians have already set preconditions that Obama apparently has accepted, namely, the Iranian nuclear program being “off the table” for discussion. With that Iranian precondition set, the administration on its part still agreed to the talks. It then got very excited about the Iranian foreign minister allowing that, if the other talks are productive, the “nuclear issue” could be addressed, as well, at an appropriate future time.

Now what could that mean? The administration takes it as a possible discussion of controlling the Iranian nuclear weapons program. The Iranians, however, see the future differently, anticipating the defeat of the U.S. and the feckless West in general. I see that statement (which follows one where the Iranians specifically mentioned nuclear non-proliferation) as an attempt to draw the U.S. into discussions of non-proliferation over other countries’ nuclear programs.

My sense is that the Iranians are playing for time to complete their program, and then demand nuclear non-proliferation for Israel and the Arab countries. Israel has nuclear weapons. The Iranians will tie their own weapons program (after they have enough enriched uranium and have sufficiently tested their weapons capabilities, especially the miniaturization of such weapons) to elimination of Israel’s program. They know that the Obama administration is essentially hostile to Israel. BTW, Israel knows this, too, and the widely-rumored secret trip by Israeli P.M. Netanyahu to talks with Vladimir Putin is evidence of that country preparing for a post-American era.

The Iranians also don’t want the Arab states and Egypt to acquire nuclear weapons technology, as those countries are sure to do, given their existential concerns about Iranian regional ambitions. The above-linked article discusses calls for greater Turkish-Iranian cooperation. Turkey and Iran have all manner of historical, cultural, and religious differences and a long political rivalry (the potential exception being their mutual concerns about their respective restive Kurdish minorities). While talk to some extent is cheap, for the Turks to be talking in this cooperative tone with A-jad is evidence of Turkish recognition of the new geo-political realities emerging in the Middle East from Iran’s neutering of the West diplomatically. One reason I am opposed to such talks is that Iran will continue to expose the West’s impotence impotence. That reason is one response to those who say how can talks hurt.

The second such event is that the administration announced Friday night that it was opening bilateral talks with North Korea, presumably outside the six-nation multilateral framework that had governed such talks until then. The Norks want the bilateral direct talks, so, of course, the U.S. agrees. Since the U.S. can’t make the Norks do anything, the U.S. needs China’s help. And China has no reason to help because a collapse of the North Korean regime will bring a flood of refuges into China. So it is in China’s interest to let the Norks lead the U.S. by the nose. Therefore, there was no real purpose to the six-nation talks. But there is no purpose to the bilateral talks, either. However, shifting tactics in this way gives the North Koreans another propaganda victory. Oh, I forgot to mention that the North Koreans recently announced they were proceeding with their nuclear weapons development. Oh, and the UAE recently seized a North Korean vessel with prohibited arms hidden in mislabeled crates and bound for Iran.

That brings up the connection between Iran and Venezuela, the latter led by the thuggish Hugo Chavez. Obama and Chavez see eye-to-eye on many things, such as the throttling of Honduras’s constitutional government. The Democratic District Attorney of Manhattan, Robert Morgenthau, warns of the connections between Iran and Venezuela in the illicit arms and missile trade and worse. He is concerned about the tens of thousands of tons of unmined uranium in the possession of Venezuela, which could be useful to Iran’s nuclear program, or for some collaborative effort that eventually could get Venezuela a nuclear device of Iranian design. Given Venezuela’s well-documented support for terrorists through arms deals and financial arrangements that support the cocaine trade, nuclear weapons in Chavez’s hands are a nightmare for a number of reasons.

In addition, Morgenthau points out the pervasive presence of Iranian advisers in Venezuela. I have posted about this before, as well as about the influx of Iranian advisers in other countries controlled by anti-American thugs, such as Ecuador, Bolivia, and Nicaragua. I have also posted before about the threat to the Honduran government posed by Chavez. It is he who has been most adamant in trying to force Honduras to take back Zelaya, the former president of Honduras who was kicked out on orders of the Congress and the Supreme Court of Honduras when he violated a provision of the Honduran constitution in an attempt to prepare a Chavez-style takeover of the government by scrapping presidential term limits. The governments other than Chavez’s on which Zelaya has mainly relied to get back into power? The Obama administration and Sandinista Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua.

Morgenthau’s article should be a wake-up call, if any further is needed, about the designs of Iran and Venezuela as threats to regional peace and to the safety and security of the U.S. and its allies. No amount of talking by Obama is going to change that, and his administration’s kid-glove treatment and professions of respect and non-involvement will be understood (or perhaps, one hopes, misunderstood) as signs of weakness. As Morgenthau points out, these dealings have laid a groundwork that will begin to ripen soon. We are in for trouble, and we have in charge of our security an administration that ideologically just seems unwilling and unable to rouse itself to the danger.

That brings up the third event. After ostentatiously receiving a visit from Russian naval units, Chavez has announced loudly that he has just returned from Russia with a deal under which he will get Russian missiles. Those missiles don’t threaten the U.S. But they can destabilize the region, especially Venezuela’s neighbor Colombia. Chavez has ambitions to turn Venezuela into the dominant regional power. To that end, he needs to neutralize Colombia. He has long meddled in Colombia’s affairs through his support of the FARC, Colombia’s narco-terrorist Marxist rebels, a relationship that became embarrassingly (for a brief moment) public when Colombian special forces a year or so ago rescued captives of the FARC, killed some leaders, and captured computers that showed the FARC-Chavez connection.

The pieces of this mosaic are falling into place, and the picture is not pretty. Venezuela and Iran call themselves the “axis of unity.” But it is George W. Bush’s term that is more descriptive. With Saddam Hussein gone, Venezuela is fast replacing Iraq as the third member (along with North Korea and Iran) of the terrorist-supporting “axis of evil.”

Michael Totten has an extraordinary interview with Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt. Talk about a political survivor (Jumblatt) in the dangerous political order and bizarre constitutional arrangements of Lebanon. Lebanon is a front-line player in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Israeli-Syrian stand-off, and the Iranian attempts to advance their regional domination. I don’t know that Jumblatt is any more trustworthy or admirable than any other Lebanese pol, but he is certainly an expert on the local conditions.

Totten’s article is a wonderful exploration of the sectarian jumble and clannish tribalism that is Lebanese politics. It’s a country that threatens to fall apart at any moment, with a central government and army that, for better or worse, are hardly worthy of the name. Jumblatt is another of a collection of warlords whose intricate political dance, always under the watchful choreographic direction of the Syrians, is a fact of survival. Any misstep not only threatens Lebanon, but the rest of the Middle East. The only possible exception to the warlord designation is Lebanese Hizb’Ullah under Nasrallah, the Iranian proxy in the area. Predictably, these ideological types are the most dangerous of the lot and the biggest threat to regional stability.

Conservative columnist George Will has published a column that, fundamentally, gives up on the war in Afghanistan. The column has produced a storm of controversy among conservatives, with some in favor but most attacking Will. From some of the reaction, one would think that Will is the conservative version of Medea Benjamin of Code Pink. I think that Will raises some valid points but that his solution is a non-solution.

Will points to the backwardness of Afghanistan to argue that the basic premise for nation-building and for successful counterinsurgency is the ability to provide security. Right now, the Americans and their NATO allies can do neither, despite the presence of more than 100,000 troops. Americans are tiring of the war, while the body count goes up. Yet success there would require presence for more than a decade and a far more massive commitment of troops.

Will urges that “forces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy: America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent Special Forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters.”

I have some thoughts about Afghanistan. One of the themes commonly heard is that Afghanistan is ungovernable within and unconquerable from without. Therefore, it is said, our effort is bound to fail, as was the Soviets’. Those sentiments have some support in the current facts on the ground. First, Afghanistan is notoriously backward in many parts and its terrain difficult to traverse, as Michael Yon has so well illustrated. This may put modern militaries at a disadvantage if they seek to rely on traditional modes of movement and occupation.

Second, with few exceptions, the NATO forces are, as Mark Steyn has satirized, bound by rules of engagement that make them close to useless. The German forces are so hemmed in by restrictions, it isn’t clear that things wouldn’t be better if they just got out of the way. It certainly doesn’t add to the militaries’ respect for each other, a respect that is necessary if there is going to be a coordinated process toward a uniform goal.

But I differ with the assertion that, judging by history, Afghanistan cannot be militarily controlled. We are not the Soviets, whose theory of massed brutal warfare was blunted by the Afghanis’ willingness to absorb huge losses. Afghani families are large; Russian families not. If an Afghani son is killed in a family of six children, the personal tragedy to the family, culturally already accustomed to the constant presence of death and privation, is less than to the Russian family where he may well be the only child. Over time, the Soviet method of warfare ironically favored the prey more than the predator.

We are not the Soviets, and our own theory of warfare is more conscious of protecting life, ours and theirs. Sometimes perhaps too much so. Thus we have different, and more sophisticated ways, of controlling a population, usually through political and economic tactics. The old “Win their hearts and minds” policy, in contrast to the Russian “When you’ve got ‘em by the ba**s, their hearts and minds will follow” doctrine.

Moreover, the lesson of history is decidedly mixed. Alexander, the Persian kings, and the Mogul Emperors all controlled at least large parts of Afghanistan for considerable periods. In the 19th and 20th centuries, British imperial policy combined military and political efforts to establish some semblance of influence over swaths of Afghanistan. True, the British shunned direct occupation, thereby avoiding the military and economic sacrifices that would have entailed. But they did so also to create a buffer zone and avoid having a direct border between British India and the Russian Empire. They created and maintained an Afghani buffer state, or buffer fiefdoms. It was a hard-headed, non-prettified realpolitik of doing business with unsavory characters in pursuit of the more important geopolitical goal. It isn’t clear that we have the stomach for that today. But it can be done. To the extent Britain relied on military forces, they made extensive use of local allies and auxiliaries. That is generally a smart imperial policy.

As to governance, it is always the case that the population, especially in countries with no democratic tradition, will lean towards the strong horse that is most likely to provide security to live their lives. The Americans have a reputation, nurtured by anti-war movements since Vietnam, of unreliability and lack of staying power. That, in turn, creates a self-reinforcing cycle of skepticism, lack of local support, disappointment, lack of progress, collapse of American domestic support, and failure. Cultures who are not accustomed to spectacles of open debate over such issues misread these protests. The enemy is only too glad to assist in promoting those mistaken views of a superpower whose aura of invicibility is a mirage.

Will is correct, then, in having serious doubts about the success of our mission militarily and politically. I don’t know what the fine details for success are in Afghanistan. The military and political experts are in the proper pay grade for that; I’m not. But Will’s “solution” isn’t one. Lobbing cruise missiles from offshore is not a long-term strategy. Using special forces launched from naval units for the periodic hit-and-run is disastrous. Such forces need information and support that is not easily provided on an ongoing basis from ships or foreign bases. Maintaining the occasional base or retaining Bagram as a mission center would be impossible without military control and local political support, both unlikely in an Afghanistan largely controlled by the Taliban.

By the way, the trial balloons floated by candidate Obama’s team that we could deal with moderate elements of the Taliban is unlikely, as well. Better to boost the corrupt warlords whose alliance is only a matter of getting the price right. As the Iran experience should show by now, even the “moderate” true believers still wish our destruction and are themselves hemmed in by the political reality of militant hate for Western secular humanism in which they operate.

There is a wonderful book by Lt. Col. John Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife. He is a counterinsurgency expert. He argues that, based on the experience of the British in Malaya and the French in Algeria, the key to fighting insurgencies (usually a long-term project) is to blend into, and gain the trust of, the population, to operate in smaller mobile units rather than as a major visible occupation army, to retain command flexibility to respond quickly to changing conditions, and to rely on trained local units. The goal here is to provide enough security to buy time to let the appropriate political forces mature and gain the upper hand. The end solution is a political victory that deprives the insurgents of popular support. Similar tactics worked for the U.S. in the Philippines and their absence plagued the American effort in Vietnam.

If Nagl is correct, and history seems to bear him out, the way not to be successful is Will’s way. This last point is one also made by John Noonan of The Weekly Standard.

Let’s see: The Supreme Leader takes the position that the government must not seek to punish for past conduct those with whom they disagree. His “official,” prodded by factions within the increasingly fractured governing elite, wants to throw the full force of the (political) law at such people who by their actions tarnished the image of the country.

Obama/Holder? No, Khamene’i/Ahmadi-Nejad. For now. But we await CIA investigations and prosecutions and, perhaps, more.

Noteworthy that what is happening in Iran is exactly what Plato predicted as the downfall of any oligarchy and democracy: Not direct class warfare, but intra-class rivalry and factions, leading ultimately to tyranny. Iran seems to be skipping the democracy stage and moving quickly from oligarchy to tyranny. A-jad is increasingly and obviously the front man for the IRGC. He feels himself powerful enough now to challenge the nominal supreme leader of the mullahs and the country. Some suspected back in June that, unlike the common wisdom that Khamene’i was controlling A-jad, in reality A-jad (and the IRGC) were the puppet masters and, increasingly, Khamene’i the puppet. It’ll be interesting to see whether the less reactionary and evil factions within the ruling clique will gird for one last struggle with the incipient military fascism and whether they have enough to reverse the tide. If not, it could be a rough couple of decades or so before, inevitably, (a by-then nuclear) Iranian regime is drowned in a new quasi-democratic wave.

An interesting article about the connection between the former Honduran president Zelaya, the Colombian terrorist organization FARC, and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. The new Honduran government several times has made claims about Zelaya’s connections with Chavez and with drug trafficking. The information the columnist claims she has seen has come from Colombian intelligence. The connections between Chavez and the FARC first became incontrovertible when, a couple of years ago, the Colombians attacked the FARC, rescued some hostages, killed the terrorists’ leader, and captured computers. The computers showed the connection between the FARC and Chavez. This additional evidence simply confirms that relationship. It also confirms Chavez’s Honduran machinations. One continues to wonder why the Obama administration is so eager to reinstate Zelaya over the opposition of Honduras’s people, its civil institutions, and its military, just so Obama can appease Chavez and steal some of his thunder.

One can understand why Chavez wants to get a piece of the cocaine trade. It’s corrupt money for him and his minions. It allows him to destabilize other countries with the help of the narco-gangs, which, in turn, causes problems for the U.S. An enhanced flow of cocaine also helps him in his plan to undermine the U.S. But, as the author asks, why would Obama go along with Chavez’s plan. That’s not Realpolitik;that Sur-realpolitik.

For a really bracing dose of pessimism, one can always rely on the Asia Times’s Spengler (David Goldman, who also blogs at the Catholic website First Things). Spengler makes John Derbyshire at National Review and the Washington Post’sCharles Krauthammer sound pollyannaish. I had not looked at his articles in some time, but he does not disappoint.

His article addresses the really profound disaster that is the Obama foreign policy. One small sample:

“In Obama’s imagination, a Sunni Arab coalition - empowered by Washington’s turn against Israel - would encircle Iran and dissuade it from acquiring nuclear weapons, while an entirely separate Shi’ite coalition with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization would suppress the radical Sunni Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This was the worst-designed scheme concocted by a Western strategist since Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery attacked the bridges at Arnhem in 1944, and it has blown up in Obama’s face.”

I have always scoffed at doom-mongering skeptics who insist that the 21st century will not be he American century, and that the U.S.’s greatest days are past. The first six months of the Obama administration’s policies have sorely tested my optimism about continued American greatness. And there are years of this to go. Given the current lack of competitors with equal material resources (China is still basically a third world country, and still needs to mind its historic preoccupation with governing its teeming masses; Russia’s economy is, to put it mildly, profoundly weak; Germany and Japan are suicidally pacifist, childless, and risk-averse), I believe the U.S. is likely to retain its position for the next generation or two, at least. However, I am concerned about the non-material dimension, that is, the will to act, and the perception in the world of the U.S. as irresolute. That will only increase the challenges to the U.S., and I worry what price will have to be paid, post-Obama, to re-establish respect for the U.S. among the international collection of assorted thugs in charge of most countries and not well-inclined toward peaceful co-existence with their neighbors or the U.S.

General Douglas MacArthur this guy is not. Zelaya bluffs and blusters about returning to Honduras and threatens the Congress, President, Supreme Court, and military. Finally, with great fanfare and well-protected in a crowd of reporters and cameramen, he—lifts the border chain and cautiously enters a few feet into Honduras before retreating to his car in the friendlier environment of his leftist buddy Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua. He thinks that satisfies his promise to return to Honduras after he was kicked out for trying to subvert the constitution. Again, MacArthur he is not.

Articles involving unnamed sources must always be taken with some skepticism. But it is telling that the harsh reality of life under the Iranian regime makes the story eminently plausible. To the Western mind, the fraudulent marriage and subsequent rape of female prisoners to circumvent a stricture against executing virgins seems barbarous. But coming out of a culture that, conscious of the material and social advances around it, nevertheless makes women appear in public dressed as the evil witch from Disney’s Snow White among other attempts to maintain a stunted medieval public social sphere, such accounts are not readily dismissed as fantasy. Iran may not currently be as socially repressed and religiously fundamentalist as Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan, but the differences at times are merely of degree, not kind. It is also clear from this article that the religious taboos are more form, less substance, whatever that may say about those who are truly in charge.

This is an interesting perspective from an Iraqi journalist in a Baghdad paper: Thanks to the U.S.; to the Arabs, not so much.

The perhaps most respected Iranian cleric, Ali Montazeri, has issued a fatwa against the legitimacy of the regime. This cannot be good news for Khamene’i and Ahmadi-Nejad, as their support among the clerics continues to erode. On the other hand, this may just signal further the fact that the regime has become just a military dictatorship with a few clerics as window-dressing.

Michael Yon, back in Afghanistan, writes a sobering article about the Sisyphean task facing the West as it tries to bring progress and some semblance of modernity to parts of Afghanistan, while fighting the Taliban and the worldview that movement represents. His report reminds me of the Afghanistan loosely referenced in the Rudyard Kipling classic, “The Man Who Would Be King,” the movie version of which starred Sean Connery and Michael Caine. Not much seems to have changed in the almost 150 years since the time of the events the Kipling story covers. When a country is hopelessly behind the times judged by the standards of Nepalese Ghurkas, you know it is a society resistant to the material and societal blandishments of modernity. This is not an area likely to be conducive to the same-sex marriage movement in the next, oh, millennium or so.

With that in mind, how long before Americans, with their well-documented attention span of toddlers, are weary of the drip of military casualties (certain to increase as Obama tries what is likely to be one last effort at defeating the Taliban) in a place that promises less likelihood of political and military success than Iraq? Of course, we could have troops there for 100 years, the very idea that Obama derided McCain for (and mis-stated what McCain had said) in regards to Iraq. But would Americans support that kind of a long fight when there are more important things like Michael Jackson Memorial Services to be celebrated.

Unlike certain elements of the Obama administration, the Arabs are not reconciled (or resigned) to an Iranian nuclear bomb. However, it appears that the Saudis are comfortable with an Israeli attack on the Iranians, so comfortable in fact that there is a report that the Saudis have given Israel permission to fly over Saudi territory to reach Iran. That fly-over permission may make this training less critical.

And Egypt has no objection to Israel sailing one of its (nuclear-armed) submarines through the Suez Canal, an exercise that sends a clear message to Iran about Israel’s second-strike nuclear attack capability.

Joe Biden seems to give a green light to Israel, as well. But it is unclear whether that is the administration speaking or some of Joe’s own imagination.

As Chavez threatens military action against Honduras, and his fellow Latin American leftists, the Presidents of Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and (of course) Cuba, demand the forced return of the deposed Chavez-wannabe Zelaya against the wishes of the country’s constitutional government, the Obama administration continues its track record of foreign policy mistakes. I posted about the administration’s strange deference to Iran’s government in contrast with its willingness to meddle in Honduran affairs. This article from National Review reviews the evidence of a Chavez-led and Obama-enabled subversion of Honduras that the civil and military institutions of that country eventually resisted. In other places, people have asked why Obama so insists on abetting anti-American dictators, when, to do so, he has to contradict principles and policies he claims to follow, such as the hallowed principle of non-intervention in other countries’ affairs. The only unifying thread is the observation made by one commentator that, deep down, Obama is ashamed of what the U.S. stands for, echoing the sentiment so undiplomatically (but forthrightly) expressed by his wife during the campaign and reflected in the Obama World Apology Tour. Thus, he hides behind and bends to anyone who is seen in his circle as challenging American power and place in the world.

Admirably, so far at least, tiny and impoverished Honduras is doing what the bumbling nominal superpower to its north, the United States, is afraid to do, namely, stand up to Chavez’s imperialist subversion of other countries (as his previous military and financial support of Colombia’s FARC rebels) and to the anti-American and Iran-connected Leftist ring of thugs who subvert their own countries’ political institutions and their citizens’ civil rights.

While Obama, Chavez, and the rest of their ideological compadres call the Honduran action a coup, but fail to characterize the Iranian “election” as a coup or even as fraudulent, some Iranian politicians and mullahs are more robust.

Cartoonist Michael Ramirez has it down.

So, let me get this straight. When Iranians are putting their lives on the line against a thuggish regime that has made a mockery of the rule of law and of elections, the Obama administration dithers. Wouldn’t want to offend the government that constantly refers to the U.S. as the Great Satan and even now blames the CIA and Basij “impostors” for the death of that young woman, Neda, caught on the video. Certainly one would not want to call that a “coup,” as quite a number of commentators have analyzed it.

But, lo and behold, that same Obama and his officials are very quick to call what happened in Honduras a coup. Indeed, unlike the example of Iran, where the administration did not want “to meddle,” they had no such reticence about meddling in Honduran politics. There, the incumbent president, a leftist ally of Obama buddy Hugo Chavez, could not run for re-election due to constitutional term limits. South American citizens, with their experience with caudillo governments that run rigged elections and serve decade after decade, have a reason to be suspicious of multiple terms, so term limits are a protective device.

The Honduran president, Zelaya, following the lead of his mentor Hugo Chavez, then tried to get the constitution changed by popular referendum to allow him to run again. Problem is that the Honduran constitution does not permit amendment by popular referendum called by the president. Instead, it has to come from the Congress.  But the Congress, worried that Zelaya was becoming a Chavez stooge, refused. The country’s Supreme Court ordered Zelaya not to undertake the referendum. When Zelaya persisted in pursuing the referendum against the constitutional order, Congress told the military not to assist in the referendum. The army chief warned Zelaya not to proceed and told him that the military would obey Congress. Zelaya fired him, whereupon the heads of the military resigned. The Supreme Court ordered Zelaya to reinstate the general. When Zelaya refused the Supreme Court’s order and also persisted in pushing for the referendum, the army (acting on the order of the Congress) deposed him. This appears to be permitted under Article 239 of the Honduran constitution.

The military did not seize control. Rather, Congress elected an interim president (from Zelaya’s own party), as the constitution requires, and kept the election date set for November. Zelaya has no support among the political institutions of Honduras, apparently. Yet Obama wants this man restored, presumably to make it easier for Chavez, who has demonstrated his support for Iranian agents and Hizb’Ullah-connected figures, to influence Honduras. Iranian influence has already spread into Latin America through Chavez, Castro, and Ortega in Nicaragua. Now it is to spread into Honduras, a country even closer to Mexico, a likely Iranian target for destabilization.

Meanwhile, Obama’s buddy Chavez has threatened military action against Honduras to restore his puppet to power. Not a word against that from Obama, of course. It is rich that Chavez, who himself led an unsuccessful actual military coup against the Venezuelan government before he became president, rails against this civilian change as a coup, language duly adopted by the White House. Further, some members of the Organization of American States want that group to expel Honduras. At the same time, they want the real gulag-enforcing thugocracy of Cuba duly admitted as an honored member, another matter where Chavez and Obama see eye-to-eye.

Yet another example of Obama’s keen intellect at work and proof again of the historian Bernard Lewis’s aphorism that “America is harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.”

More analysis that the Iranian political upheaval really has little to do with good pro-democracy protesters and a faction of supportive mullahs against the bad hard-line mullahs and various thuggish elements among the security forces. I have written before about how little sense it makes for Khamene’i to go all in to guarantee up-front (as these results were pre-determined based on how quickly they came out with an official version) a win for Ahmadi-Nejad. If the power really was in the clerical Council, they could easily have controlled Mousavi, who would not have challenged the basic internal and foreign policies of the government. His “reform” credentials had to pass muster with the mullahs. He only became more outspoken as events began to unfold and the outcome briefly hung in the balance. It appears that now he is backing down, which likely is an omen of things to come.

This article provides a plausible solution to the puzzle of Khamene’i’s support for A-jad. As I have written in previous posts, the whole matter may be a military coup that was ongoing over some time, as the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps took the final steps to consolidate power, a process ongoing for years and hastened under the A-jad presidency. The mullahs, under that analysis, are merely window dressing for those who, after suitable purges, will be in control of the country in a neo-fascistic corporate state. The IRGC and their patrons (or tools) Khamene’i and Ahmadi-Nejad could not allow even the appearance of momentum for a “reform” movement, which would imply division or factions among the ruling clique. And, as has been written since Plato’s Republic, a guardian class and rule by an absolute philosopher king can permit no intra-class rivalry—or even the appearance thereof. Such weakness is the cause of instability in society, which presents a threat to the ruling class.  When the “philosopher king” also sees himself as divinely-ordained, any challenge to his control becomes not only a political issue, but one of apostasy. In a religion such as Islam that is, in its founding and history, a “political” religion, such apostasy poses concrete threats to the legitimacy of the ruler. That would explain the remarks of another mullah that the arrested protesters must be dealt with cruelly and their leaders executed.

Professor Fouad Ajami analyzes the administration’s miscalculations about Iran caused by the President’s grand vision of—himself. Once again, Obama’s psychology of messianism is on display. The reaction to the Lebanese elections (and now to the protests in Iran), the semi-apologetic trips to Cairo and Ankara, and the dogged insistence that talks without preconditions and relations without reaction will continue with Iran, all are part of an unflinching belief in the power of healing that effuses from Obama’s words and presence. How often did we hear from him and his minions during the campaign that his election would change America’s relations with foreigners for the better? People with more down-to-earth appraisals of his inexperience and naivete (or arrogance) demurred. They remembered that politicians in other countries, too, must play to domestic concerns and have agendas that go beyond relations with any particular occupant of the White House. Moreover, many of the world’s countries are headed by people who have survived systems much more politically thuggish than modern-day Chicago, and certainly more so than the University of Chicago Law School, the boards of some non-profit grant foundations, and city bureaucracies dealt with while operating as a “community organizer.” Such people chew up opponents with a much firmer grasp on political realities than the President.

As Ajami notes in regard to Obama’s pilgrimage to the Middle East,

“There were countless people puzzled by the presumption of the entire exercise, an outsider walking into sacred matters of their faith. In Saudi Arabia, and in the Arabic commentaries of other lands, there was unease that so complicated an ideological and cultural terrain could be approached with such ease and haste.”

When Obama attempted to practice Realpolitik, it, too, blew up. His equivalence between the policies of Ahmadi-Nejad and Mousavi was, essentially, well-taken as far as it applied to relations with the U.S. But it was delivered publicly, in a bad way, and at an inopportune moment. It signified unbending support for the Iranian regime, any Iranian regime, and signaled U.S. weakness, once again. Not even the events of the past few weeks would budge Obama from his tilting at Iranian windmills over a nuclear program that will not be abandoned as a result of “negotiations” with Obama any more than it was abandoned in years of negotiations led by the EU, or any more than the North Koreans have abandoned or will abandon their programs after yet another of the mind-numbing expressions of concern from the U.N. or empty warnings of unspecified consequences from Obama himself. In the world of national rivalries in general, and in Middle Eastern culture in particular, such poses exude obsequiousness and are construed as weakness.

Although it is a day old and events in Iran move quickly, this posting from Allahpundit at Hot Air has a collection of links and great (and sometimes graphic) videos that show the ongoing turmoil. Unfortunately, in the absence of the highly unlikely chance that the regime backs down, matters are likely to get worse than the videos show.

This is a useful, if skimpy and somewhat santized, overview of the personalities involved in the intra-regime power struggle at the core of these disturbances. Note that Timeis a bit generous with Mousavi and Rafsanjani. As to the former, they omit his role as a co-founder and leader of the Islamic Republican Party, which, in turn, created Iranian Hizb’Ullah. That group formed Ansar-e-Hizb’Ullah, a radical group with connections to the Basij militias, and also Lebanese Hizb’Ullah. As to the latter, they omit his notorious corruption. Still it’s a good quick and dirty score card.

Here is Hot Air’s link to the Weekly Standard and an article by Reuel Marc Gerecht, who raises similar questions about Khamene’i’s motivations for intervening and considers the same reasons I did, that Khamene’i had little choice so as to avoid a coup by the Iranian Republican Guard Corps in support of Ahmadi-Nejad.

I have been receiving information about the happenings in Iran from an unnamed source. This source lives in the U.S., but still has family in Iran, and thus wants no identity revealed. The Iranian government may no longer be sending assassination squads to deal with expatriate dissidents as they did under Khomeini, but they still scour communications, especially the internet for anti-Iranian opinions. I have used information the source has provided me, and I want to post some of this person’s analysis, as I find it very convincing. My disclaimer might make posting this person’s analysis sound overly dramatic with intrigue. But it is just a precaution to protect the source’s family and also any sources that person has in Iran.

I received one analysis of the situation a couple of days ago, and while a lot of it was speculation at the time, other reports and subsequent events bear out this very interesting examination.

I have wondered previously (as have many others) why the Iranian regime, specifically Supreme Leader Khamene’i, blundered so massively in their blatant vote manipulation in favor of Ahmadi-Nejad. Most analyses focus on Khamene’i being taken by surprise by the outcome of an election among previously-vetted and approved candidates who did not much differ in substance and by the popular reaction against the expected favorite, Ahmadi-Nejad. Instead of his usual cautiousness and appearance of impartiality among contending politicians that has allowed him to survive unchallenged as leader, and which he could have used to control even a victorious Mousavi, Khamene’i quickly threw caution to the wind and came out heavily for Ahmadi-Nejad.

I am far from an Iran expert, just an interested observer, and it is an understatement to say that the realities of the Iranian power structure are murky in the best of times, never mind in the middle of a fluid power struggle. But things as reported by the general media aren’t adding up. I have found a different theory quite intriguing, namely, speculation that Khamene’i is not at all the puppet master and that, between him and Ahmadi-Nejad, it is the latter who is more in control. Yet A-jad was a relatively obscure politician, though he was mayor of Tehran, until his election to the Presidency. It seems unlikely, then, that he alone holds the main levers of national power.

But if Khamene’i is not the man behind the curtain, who is? The key players, barely visible so far to outsiders, may be the commanders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. This article in The New Republic argues that a vote-manipulation alliance between Khamene’i and the IRGC already happened in the critical second round of the 2005 election that installed A-jad. Now, goes the thinking, Khamene’i may be forced to turn to the Guard’s military components (they have their own air force, intelligence services, and military academy) to restore order. The Guard’s paramilitary adjunct, the Basij militias, have already been active in that regard. Rumors now are that the Guard is moving into cities, particularly Tehran, in force to deal with the protesters. If Khamene’i calls on the Guard, his status as Supreme Leader will be perpetually damaged, and the Guard will demand greater political influence in the government, potentially leading to a military dictatorship with Islamic trappings, as Pakistan has often had.

I find another, still more convincing, article that goes even further than the New Republic’s writer. This article in the New York Times argues that the Guard already controls wide swaths of the economy and the political apparatus at the local and provincial levels. A-jad himself is a former Guard and closely associated with the commanders. But why would Khamene’i associate himself with the Guard? The writers assert that Khamene’i is not particularly religious and is more concerned with political survival (as is the Guard elite). Khamene’i has been regarded as a religious lightweight, and his current predicament has produced reaction in favor of the protesters among many clerics, including a prominent long-time reformer (Grand Ayatollah Montazeri) and former Presidents Rafsanjani and Khatami.

One would expect these fissures among the clerics, if they in fact have occurred, to spell serious trouble for the regime. Authoritarian regimes fall when they are pushed out, usually by force, or they have a failure of will reflected in paralysis as cracks develop within the ruling group. But what if, as the article argues, the clerics have for many years been losing legitimacy among the people due to the perception and reality of material and spiritual corruption. One reason people voted for a nobody like A-jad was the revulsion against his corrupt opponent, Rafsanjani. While the latter was then and is currently touted as a reformer in the West, his own past apparently is less savory. As an aside, he is the one who said that Iran should not fear a nuclear exchange with Israel, in that Israel would be wiped out but millions of Iranians would survive. What a “reformer!”

If the Guard is really calling the tune, then it is their man, A-jad, more than Khamene’i and the clerics, who is calling the shots. The latter are more civilian figureheads than political force. And Khamene’i’s political opportunism allows him to distance himself from his fellow clerics, with whom he has little affinity. As the article explains, the correctly-perceived danger to the regime is the type of “soft” revolution that overthrew several regimes in the former Soviet bloc, and which appears to be developing momentum now. If that is correct, the clerics do not have the power to stop it, which is why many seem to be shifting rhetorically in favor of the protesters. This, they hope, will allow them to rebuild some of the popular legitimacy lost since the Khomeinist revolution. By doing that, they oppose the Guard, however, and are forcing a show-down with secular forces that use the Islamic Republic moniker as a cover. As I’ve noted in another post, some defenders of Islamic Republics have charged that Iran already has lost that quality and is merely an authoritarian regime coincidentally headed by some clerics.

Michael Totten, who has done a great job collecting information and blogging on developments in Iran, has evidence that supports the views I’ve expressed. The Guard is definitely springing into action, as are its adjuncts, the Basiji, and more radical extraordinary elements from Iranian (Ansar) Hizb’Ullah and its foreign proxies from Lebanese Hizb’Ullah. There are even increasing reports (or rumors) of non-Hizb’Ullah Arabic speakers, suspected to be Palestinian Hamas, attacking the protesters. If that is true, it represents a stunning action by the regime. To import foreigners to attack your own people is bad enough. To Iranians, to import their old (looked-down-upon) rivals, the Arabs, is many times worse. To have a Shia regime rely on Sunni fighters is incomprehensible. It would bespeak also of a desperation that doesn’t make sense, since the Guard should be able to handle the protests. The sheer cultural affront of such a move means that one has to take these reports with some skepticism.

The commander of a Kurdish armed opposition force also sees this as a coup by the Guard, abetted by Khamene’i. Though it is difficult to know, and information coming out of Iran from protesters shows violence, reaction by the government has been relatively (and the emphasis is on relatively) restrained. At some point, they must estimate that the demonstrations are not going to exhaust themselves. At that point, some catalyst will trigger a more massive reaction. According to various reports, there are ominous signs of impending escalation.

H/T Allahpundit @ Hot Air

Here is a splendid review of what has been happening in Iran that goes well beyond the general media’s reporting, as well as an overview of Iranian government’s resources to quell the protests.

My opinion of the uselessness, and indeed the danger, of the U.N. is confirmed in dreary repetition. The organization long ago descended into self-parody, with its selection of countries such as Sudan and Libya to head the U.N.’s human rights commission, while members such as Cuba and others declared that the U.S. was the big violator of human rights in the world. The Security Council’s obsessiveness about Israeli “evil” and their blindness to Hamas and Hizb’Ullah is another long-running farce of hypocrisy. And the fecklessness of the organization was demonstrated vividly with its serious of resolutions with varying numbers of adverbs and strengths of adjectives as it addressed Saddam Hussein’s provocations and thuggery over many years. Then, when George W. Bush actually enforced those resolutions, the members, still busy with their arms dealings with Saddam and the Oil-for-Palaces Food corruption, were horrified.

So, I thought it a wonderfully defining example of W’s sense of wry humor when he appointed John Bolton ambassador to the U.N. Bolton is an example of the Jeanne Kirkpatrick-Daniel Patrick Moynihan type of U.S. ambassador, one who is not ashamed of defending the U.S., but perhaps one prone to less diplomatic salve than the other two. Needless to say, the Democrats were aghast, a bonus. I am a fan of Bolton the amassador, if not necessarily Bolton the person. Here is an interview of Bolton by Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution that I previously posted.

I recently came across this witty examination of Bolton and the U.N. by Mark Steyn in the U.K. Spectator, written in the inimitable Steyn style. He provides a small collection of Boltonisms for the reader’s edification. How we could use Bolton now, instead of the current Obama-appointed internationalist seat-warmer, as the U.N. ties itself into a pretzel as it inches along on its decision whether to move forward in investigating whether it should discuss the possible consideration of adopting a resolution with one, two, or three adverbs and adjectives, to be followed on further consideration of the possibility of sanctions that would keep North Korea from obtaining 60-inch plasma televisions sets.

Professor Victor Davis Hanson sees a world turned upside down in foreign relations, with the U.S. taking on a foreign policy to the left of Europe. He does exhibit a curious satisfaction (which I share) that U.S. allies are getting a dose of what they claimed for years they wanted the U.S. to be.

Michael Totten has further updates on the turmoil in Iran. He correctly describes a regime that is an enemy to the rest of the civilized world and to its own people. While the mullahs long maintained a carefully-constructed facade of popular legitimacy, the mask is off now, with the rumored detentions of opposition politicians and even a major cleric. Looks like George W. Bush again has been proved right about the “axis of evil”: Iran, Syria, North Korea.

Again, it is not entirely clear who is now behind the government’s actions, but the government is clearly taking this seriously now. As Totten notes with the quote from Lenin, and as every kid who has had to deal with the playground bully knows, totalitarians will not yield unless they are confronted by strength. This goes double for Middle Eastern culture, where the strong horse may be hated, but is respected. It is human nature to shrink from confrontation, but a breaking point appears to have been reached. There is a message here for Obama and his negotiations without preconditions, but it has eluded him and his administration, though, in fairness, some liberal supporters of his have changed their own views about negotiations with Iran.

As I noted yesterday, authoritarian regimes do not quit unless they are pushed. That isn’t going to happen as happened with the Shah, Pinochet, and various other autocrats. The only other way they collapse is if there is internal dissent that causes some portion of the regime (often those with guns) to stay above the fray or to join the opposition and thus cause an internal crack-up. That’s what many are hoping, building on the rumor that the army has said that they will stay out of this and not fire on their fellow citizens.

The problem with that is that the mullahs aren’t really relying on the army, a collection of conscripts. They are relying on the Revolutionary Guards and, even more so, various die-hard militias, such as Basiji. Rumors that Venezuela’s Chavez has sent groups of trained riot police and state security personnel to Iran and that the regime has enlisted Lebanese Hizb’Ullah forces may well be just rumors put out by the opposition to galvanize support. On the other hand, it suggests something about Iran’s connections (which Totten describes, as well) to the most unsavory groups, which connection W had right and Obama has got wrong. As in the Third Reich, totalitarians never rely on an institution such as the army that has its own power center and its own traditions and outlook. In fact, such an institution is distrusted and must be controlled. Hence, there were always Nazi political operatives attached to Wehrmacht units to keep officers from plotting and to ensure loyalty to the political leadership. (The Soviets did the same thing.) Instead, the Nazis relied on the Gestapo, the S.A. and, later, units of the S.S., to control the population. So it is no surprise that the mullahs would rely on a special guard (analogous to the S.S.) and a populist thuggish militia (akin to the S.A.) to control the citizenry. Even the regular police cannot be trusted.

I would expect the regime to crack down hard; any sign of weakness will be death to the regime. They may channel protests into “peaceful” venting, but will go after the leaders and react harshly to anything non-peaceful and non-approved. If the regime survives, as now is still likely, because reports of rallies for Ahmadi-Nejad suggest that he still has considerable and energized support, one may see reforms adopted after calm has been restored. Reforms will be gradual and mainly cosmetic. If Khamene’i is in charge, the reforms will concern certain domestic issues that have grated on the people. I wouldn’t expect much change in international politics or nuclear weapons programs. I think that Khamene’i is sufficiently flexible, and the regime’s survival is top-most on his list. If A-jad is in charge, one would expect to see similar reforms, except I am not sure A-jad’s skill as a politician can trump the grip his ideological vision has on him.

For the Obama administration, this actually presents both a great opportunity and a danger. If they are seen as being on the side of the opposition by denouncing the regime, this can give them considerable positive influence should Khamene’i and A-jad fall. Obama’s strategy of engagement will have a real chance of success. On the other hand, if they denounce the regime and it survives, there is little likelihood that they will look kindly on Obama. But then, they don’t look kindly on the U.S. and Obama now. They are not going to cooperate with the U.S. in any case. If Obama does not denounce the regime and it falls, the new government is unlikely to move strongly in a pro-U.S. direction, as the people will not support such a response to tepid U.S. backing.

So, it would seem that Obama should act decisively and loudly in support of the opposition, but without explicit support for Mousavi. Mousavi personally is not worth loud support. Moreover, such support would allow the mullahs to demonize him and challenge his legitimacy more, as it would be seen as American interference in Iranian politics. But support for fair elections and the democratic challengers in general, along with forceful condemnation of the regime’s tactics, is appropriate and useful. George W. Bush clearly would have done that early and often. But why has Obama obviously taken a wait-and-see approach with studied silence or non-committal bland statements? What does he have to lose? Mainly a recognition that he has been wrong and everyone else correct about the nature of the mullahocracy. Psychologically, he cannot bring himself to admit this fundamental mistake and have his supporters recognize him as an ordinary and fallible politician whose perceptions of the world and America’s enemies are dangerously naive. He is doubling down and hoping for the best with the Iranian regime.

Here is a breakdown of the Iranian vote by provinces. The chart makes it clear that the mullahs botched the vote fraud. To have A-jad beat Mousavi (an Azeri) in the Northwest is inexplicable. Hasn’t Khamene’i heard that “less is more” or old Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.’s admonition that he will be d–ned if he is going to buy one more legislator than he needs?

In between graduations of kids from high school and college, moving another son out of his college dorm for the summer, and attending the 8-year old’s annualdance recital, I’ve been trying to keep up on the Iranian elections. I am somewhat bewildered at the whole thing.

On the one hand, the handwringing in Washington over the “blow to democracy” is contrived. Despite their obfuscations and refusal to give a clear answer, Obama, Biden, Clinton, et al., cannot be so naive or ignorant as to consider Iran a democracy. The whole electoral exercise was set up by the Supreme Council and, more precisely, Ali Khamenei, the leader, as an elaborate performance. All of the candidates were approved beforehand by the real powerholders as sufficiently Islamic and committed to the policies of the mullahocracy. There wasn’t a lot of difference between them. After all, whether you consider the existence of Israel a “blight” or an “affront,” and whether the goal of wiping Israel off the map is number two or number four on your platform, hardly is worth the political and emotional investment in Mousavi the “reformer” that some in the West have made.

On the other hand, I don’t understand why Khamenei and his cohorts have flubbed this election so thoroughly with their blatant disregard of their own rules and their actions that fairly scream voting fraud. Even Jimmy Carter with his fondness for anti-American thugs would have been hard pressed to certify this election as untainted and fair. If there really is little substantive difference between Ahmadi-Nejad and Mousavi, why not let the supposedly charisma-challenged Mousavi win? As one commenter pointed out, there are certain red lines that none of the candidates would cross because they represent fundamental truths in Iranian politics and Khamenei’s outlook: the destruction of Israel, the relentless battle to weaken the U.S., and the nuclear weapons program (which can help in the first two).

Khamenei and the council were able to control A-jad, as well as previous “reformers.” With the support of the Revolutionary Guards, they should have been able easily to control Mousavi. They could have adopted some vague and weak domestic reforms and then continued along the previous path. Indeed, with a “reformer” as President, the Iranians probably could have bought themselves more time and cover internationally for their weapons programs and their overseas adventurism (see Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua). Moussavi would have been particularly eager to prove his hard-line foreign policy bona fides. A-jad, were he capable of such intellectual and political flexibility, is in a better position for a Nixon-goes-to-China type initiative, especially as he cannot run again.

Instead, the mullahs went down a road that, even if temporarily successful, may deeply undermine the regime in the long run. Some commentators speculate that this is a coup of sorts. But by whom? And why? The New Yorker lays the responsibility on the most obvious suspect, Khamenei. On the other hand, Allahpundit at Hot Air raises the interesting possibility that A-jad, the former puppet, is behind this and has essentially forced Khamenei, the puppet master, to accept the result. But how would A-jad cut those strings, and why would Khamenei play along? Was it fear that allowing Mousavi to become the vehicle for an opening of the process despite the mullahs’ control over the levers of government would take on a force of its own? It often happens that a radical change in direction begins with installation of a caretaker “moderate” face, someone not commonly associated with that change, but on whom the mantle falls. If the “revolution” takes hold, that person is soon replaced by people more obviously and directly connected to the change. Often these are returned exiles or others who were imprisoned or who otherwise suffered persecution under the previous regime and thus can prove their moral authenticity. That possibility, more than Mousavi himself, would present a terminal challenge to Khamene’i, A-jad, the mullahocracy, and the very concept of the “Islamic Republic of Iran” (though some defenders of Islamic regimes claim that Iran some time ago became just another authoritarian regime, but one coincidentally headed by some clerics).

Since such new regimes often try radically to distance themselves from what distinguished l’ancien regime, a new Iranian regime might well be self-consciously and rigorously secular to separate itself from the religious authoritarianism of the mullahs. That is the inverse of what happened when the Polish Communists were ousted and a strongly religiously-influenced polity was fostered under Lech Walesa; that was also the case when the secular modernism of the Shah of Iran was jettisoned under the Khomeinist revolution. Khamenei (or A-jad) saw that handwriting on the wall and acted preemptively.

Meanwhile, those (such as spokesmen for the administration) who believe that Obama’s speeches and politics have caused Iranians to oppose A-jad should beware of this poll of Iranians. To the extent one may give credence to any political poll of people governed by an authoritarian regime, this shows sentiment toward Americans that has only got worse since last year.

Odds are that the mullahs and A-jad, with their allies in the Revolutionary Guards and among the rural population and the urban workers, will prevail. Authoritarian governments usually do. One hopes otherwise, and perhaps this is one of the exceptions. But I don’t see anyone pushing Khamene’i and the rest out in the way the Carter administration helped push out the Shah. If the regime prevails, one of two results is likely, based on similar events in other settings. Either the regime’s success will so demoralize the opposition that no cohesive challenge to the mullahs will be mounted for many years to come. Or, those in power will have made implacable enemies among broad segments of the population, who sooner rather than later will find voices among disaffected elements of the ruling group. The regime will be sitting on a powder keg and even a superficially innocuous event can light the fuse. We will then have the answer to the questions asked for years, “How can a cultured and sophisticated people like the Iranians tolerate this repressive regime for so long?”

Meanwhile one can go to Michael Totten’s website for excellent reports and updates, such as here, here, and here.

Law Professors Jack Goldsmith and Eric Posner take a satisfyingly critical look at European hypocrisy in accusing the U.S. of disregarding international law to suit its advantage. Europeans act in their self-interest as much as others do, they just shout their devotion to international law more loudly while Americans are more openly skeptical. The professors provide a partial, but no means exhaustive list of European practices that depart from European rhetoric and scolding.

From an interview on Al Jazeera (!) comes this assessment of Arab culture and backwardness. The author blames the Arabs’ problems on, not the Europeans, not the Americans, not even the Israelis, but—wait for it—the Arabs.

“The Arab rulers are a reflection of the people. The Arab rulers did not come down from Mars or from the sun. They emerged from among the people, and share the same beliefs. If you placed any Arab citizen in power… I challenge any Arab citizen, who may become a ruler, to do anything beyond what the current Arab leaders are doing. There is no difference between the Arab rulers and the Arab peoples. All those who are called ‘Arabs’ are one and the same.”

Indeed, he blames the Arabs for their psychology of defeat and of blaming everyone but themselves:

“The reality of the Arabs is one of defeat, hitting rock bottom… We are defeated, politically and militarily… and economically, socially, and even psychologically. We have a discourse of conspiracy, and we blame everything on others.”

Who is this author? Some Zionist? Robert Spencer? Worse, Mark Steyn? No, an Algerian author, Anwar Malek. This guy better worry about a fatwa from some imam in the hinterlands of the Dar al-Islam.

The recent controversy about the CIA interrogation program and the release of various Office of Legal Counsel memoranda about that program continue the Obama administration’s collective American national guilt tour. I will have more to say about those memos and the interrogations, now that I have read all of those that have been released. What I find extremely disturbing is the dangerous assumption of the President that figuratively and, perhaps literally, prostrating himself (which the White House initially tried to lie about) before assorted international thugs, will buy the United States goodwill and, by extension, security. Even were that a plausible strategy, he has rather thoroughly defeated the goal of security by disclosing national security secrets that make other intelligence services even warier than they already are to co-operate with the Americans.

After his first 100 days in office, it is becoming easier to get a complete picture of the man as President of the United States. And it is not reassuring. Never has any President so fully and thoroughly presented a negative image of his country. He has travelled abroad to peddle the message that he fundamentally disagrees with his predecessor’s belief in American exceptionalism. One suspects that the closest that Mr. and Mrs. Obama come to a belief in American exceptionalism is in the destructive sense that he has imbibed in deep draughts from the fountain of the Jeremiah Wright’s jeremiads in the church the Obamas attended for twenty years.

Instead, Obama sees the U.S. as just another country that has unfairly disregarded the wishes of other countries and that, at most, can now ask for their collaboration and approvalbefore doing anything that might benefit the U.S. Obama’s foreign policy naivete (at best) is showing. Other countries will take notice and accommodate themselves to the new realities. There will be no vacuum in international affairs. If Obama intends for the U.S. to play the Western Atlantic extension of the EUnuchs, someone else will step up to take the leading role. China is taking impressive steps in that direction, but more immediately, this will result in regional instability, as well as the continued growth of non-state actors, such as terrorists and pirates. Stability is provided when a political entity is willing and able to establish an order that is stable but acceptable to its component parts, a pax Romana, pax Britannica, or, until January 20, 2009, a pax Americana.

As Dorothy Rabinowitz of The Wall Street Journal opines,

“He had gone to Europe not as the voice of his nation, but as a missionary with a message of atonement for its errors. Which were, as he perceived them — arrogance, dismissiveness, Guantanamo, deficiencies in its attitudes toward the Muslim world, and the presidency of Harry Truman and his decision to drop the atomic bomb, which ended World War II.

“No sitting American president had ever delivered indictments of this kind while abroad, or for that matter at home, or been so ostentatiously modest about the character and accomplishment of the nation he led. He was mediator, an agent of change, a judge, apportioning blame — and he was above the battle.”

When put in that context of abject apologies, even the more reasonable, though overdone, concession that the reprehensible American appetite for illegal drugs contributes to the Mexican government’s difficulties with the narco-gangster cartels, triggers responses among many from eye-rolling to revulsion.

Here are some links to other articles that comment on what appears to be the answer if Charlie Gibson ever asks someone to define the “Obama Doctrine”:

Thoughtful article by Jonah Goldberg about how Obama in a few weeks is giving back decades of hard-won American gain of influence to undermine Left-wing relics (Castro, Chavez, Ortega) in various countries.

Obama sat by while Sandinista thug Daniel Ortega, among several others, hectored the President and denounced the U.S., and all Obama could reply was that he was glad that Ortega didn’t blame him for things that occurred when he was young. As if the issue is about Obama, the person, rather than his job as President of the U.S. Ortega is the thug who came to power after the overthrow of the Somoza regime in Nicaragua. After planning to set himself up for life in the model of his mentor, Fidel Castro, he eventually was ousted in an election made possible by the Reagan administration’s determination to undermine his regime and pressure him into permitting such elections (over the protests and efforts of the Democratic Party in Congress and of Jimmy Carter, all of whom had the same affection for left-wing thugs then that they have now). He was re-elected recently. We shall see if this becomes one of those replays of a one person-one vote-one time elections. If I were Ortega, I’d feel pretty good about my chances at a lifetime sinecure like my friends Fidel and Raul Castro and Hugo Chavez, now that Obama is in. Note that other leaders didn’t speak that way with Bush. We’ll see how much further American meekness goes in dealing with leaders who respect strength and self-confidence.

At the same conference, literary critic and history buff Hugo Chavez gave Obama a “classic” book of leftist nonsense that blamed all of Latin America’s troubles on centuries of European and American exploitation. The book was in Spanish (another language that Obama, a critic of American children’s failure to learn many foreign languages, doesn’t speak), so Chavez didn’t expect Obama actually to read it. Rather, it was an opportunity for the Venezuelan thug to gain domestic legitimacy by hob-nobbing with the U.S. leader. The book is so bad that the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa and others labeled The Manual of the Perfect Latin American Idiot.

Charles Krauthammer delivers an acid response to Obama’s American arrogance theme.

A more light-hearted bit of sarcasm, with Obama as mom’s new boyfriend trying to charm her suspicious offspring.

There is a sense among the career striped-pants set at the State Department, as well as among many academics and Obama administration officials, that it is always beneficial to talk to one’s adversaries, without preconditions, if necessary. At the very least, no harm can come of such palavering. This article explains why that is not necessarily the case. The case study is the Iranian nuclear program, and the totally different conceptions of the nature of negotiations that the Western side has contrasted with the Iranians. The West sees this as engagement that is the likeliest path to a resolution. The Iranians see negotiations as a way to mask their plan to deceive the West and buy time for themselves to reach the point of no return for their nuclear program.

“On June 14, 2008, for example, Abdollah Ramezanzadeh, Mr. Khatami’s spokesman, debated advisers to current Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the University of Gila in northern Iran. Mr. Ramezanzadeh criticized Mr. Ahmadinejad for his defiant rhetoric, and counseled him to accept the Khatami approach: ‘We should prove to the entire world that we want power plants for electricity. Afterwards, we can proceed with other activities,’ Mr. Ramezanzadeh said. The purpose of dialogue, he argued further, was not to compromise, but to build confidence and avoid sanctions. ‘We had an overt policy, which was one of negotiation and confidence building, and a covert policy, which was continuation of the activities,’ he said.”

The result?

“When Mr. Obama declared on April 5 that ‘All countries can access peaceful nuclear energy,’ the state-run daily newspaper Resalat responded with a front page headline, ‘The United States capitulates to the nuclear goals of Iran.’ With Washington embracing dialogue without accountability and Tehran embracing diplomacy without sincerity, it appears the Iranian government is right.”

A hard-hitting column from Caroline Glick in The Jerusalem Post about the retreat of the U.S. from its role as a dominant power to one of control under various trans-national organizations. The new rules of engagement with dictatorial regimes hostile to the U.S., collective arrangements to tie the U.S. down, and reduction of U.S. military power will inaugurate a post-American world, according to Glick. This is hardly welcome news to America’s allies. Though Israel will be hard-pressed, other countries, such as Japan and South Korea, will see the handwriting on the wall. India, whose Prime Minister had very high praise for George W. Bush, is concerned. Even the Europeans ultimately will be less than pleased, as they need to ask whether the U.S. is a reliable ally.

Glick exposes the problem:

“Somewhere between apologizing for American history - both distant and recent; genuflecting before the unelected, bigoted king of Saudi Arabia; announcing that he will slash the US’s nuclear arsenal, scrap much of America’s missile defense programs and emasculate the US Navy; leaving Japan to face North Korea and China alone; telling the Czechs, Poles and their fellow former Soviet colonies, “Don’t worry, be happy,” as he leaves them to Moscow’s tender mercies; humiliating Iraq’s leaders while kowtowing to Iran; preparing for an open confrontation with Israel; and thanking Islam for its great contribution to American history, President Obama made clear to the world’s aggressors that America will not be confronting them for the foreseeable future. “

The answer lies in having America’s allies reach out to each other for overt or covert alliances to circumvent the U.S. If the U.S. seeks a diminished role, that is what it will get, until the Obama administration’s strategy blows up, preferably only figuratively.

“The good news is that no doubt sooner rather than later, Obama’s similarly disastrous bid to denude the US of its military power under the naive assumption that it will be able to use its new stature as a morally pure strategic weakling to win its enemies over to its side will fail spectacularly and America’s foreign policy will revert to strategic rationality.

But to survive the current period of American strategic madness, Israel and the US’s other unwanted allies must build alliances with one another - covertly if need be - to contain their adversaries in the absence of America. If they do so successfully, then the damage to global security induced by Obama’s emasculation of his country will be limited. If on the other hand, they fail, then America’s eventual return to its senses will likely come too late for its allies - if not for America itself. “

Finally, the ridiculous claim voiced by Hillary, among others, that 90% of the guns used by Mexican drug cartels are smuggled across the border from the U.S., especially from gun dealers, is being exposed for the fraud it is. Though beloved of the media, and eagerly parroted by them, this claim was always nonsense. I have posted about that before. These are military weapons, and the black market from the Mexican military’s deserters and gun smuggling across Mexico’s southern border from various countries such as Venezuela and points farther afield, are much more lucrative and productive sources.

When I think of a Persian carpet, I think of an exquisitely woven soft, yet strong tapestry of intricate design. And then there is this. Art under a personality cult. I don’t know whether there is a Mrs. Hugo Chavez. But if there is, can you imagine her let-down after Hugo tells her, “Mi corazon, I brought you back a carpet from Iran”? Then he shows up with something that makes Elvis on black velvet look sophisticated. On the other hand, speaking of personality cult art, perhaps Americans need to be careful about pointing fingers at anyone in that regard.

But Chavez is a helpful kind of guy. He has offered to take Guantanamo detainees off Obama’s hands….I bet he has! On top of that, he has some other policies he’d like to coordinate with the Obama administration:

“Capitalism needs to go down. It has to end. And we must take a transitional road to a new model that we call socialism.”

I think that’s also called the fiscal year 2010 budget.

It should be great fun to watch as the administration, correctly perceived by many to be lukewarm at best towards Israel, has to deal with the wily Binyamin Netanyahu and his even more hawkish foreign minister. Netanyahu did not like Bill Clinton (an assessment reciprocated by the latter) or Clinton’s policies. He is hardly like;y to be more enthusiastic about the greater anti-Israel tendencies of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the assorted members of the striped-pants brigade at the State Department. And Netanyahu knows that, ultimately, the American political reality is that, if push came to shove on Israel’s security needs, the President would have to side with Israel.

All the while the administration will be squeezed on the other side by the Iranian mullahs for whom Mr. Obama has considerable personal sympathy but who so far have played hard-to-get despite the President’s love messages. The Iranians will do as they please, Obama or no Obama. They are far too advanced technologically to abandon their nuclear program. The liberals’ favorite weapon, the mouth, has not stopped the Iranians. They are also far too emboldened diplomatically in their efforts to bring the battle closer to the U.S. (Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua to name the most recent Iranian diplomatic initiatives) to do the U.S. any favors unaccompanied by open American groveling.

As he cozies up to the Iranians in the hope that they can provide him with cover to abandon Afghanistan and Iraq, Mr. Obama may be surprised that events will outflank him. The growing Iranian threat may well hasten the rapprochement between most Arab countries and Israel. To those countries Iran is a much more threatening presence than the Israeli-Zionist horse that can be flogged periodically for domestic consumption, but that, as everyone knows, has no designs on its neighbors’ territories. Moreover, they know that, unless threatened, Israel has no interest in subverting their regimes. Iran, on the other hand, presents a clear threat, from subversion to hegemonic opportunism. As the view of the U.S. as the “strong horse” of the Bush administration yields to the perception of American conciliation and softness, the Arabs and Egyptians might find it more profitable in many ways to make common cause with Israel against the Iranian threat. That’s not good news for the Palestinians. The other Arabs never gave much of a darn about them anyway, but they were useful pawns as long as it made sense for the Arabs to bluster about the false threat of Israel. The Palestinians don’t count for much if the real threat is Iran. In fact, to the extent that Iranian proxies are in control of Palestinian territory, expect the Arabs to turn an even more studiously blind eye towards their fate. Remember the sound of crickets chirping in the Arab capitals when Israel dismantled Hamas recently. If Hamas and Hizb’Ullah can be neutralized or at least contained, that, in turn, helps Israel.

Netanyahu, who lost the prime ministership last time in part because he became seen as too accommodating to the Palestinians, is unlikely to repeat that mistake. Anyway, his coalition partners likely will prevent such straying. But he is crafty enough to make deals with Arab regimes should the opportunity arise. And the U.S. will be less relevant to shape these events.

Another tale of the usual from the most despicable organization on the face of the planet whose known members are given permission to enter the U.S. Unfortunately, the current U.S. administration is unlikely to defend the interests of the U.S. and the values of classic Western liberal republics against this den of thugs. Where are old-style Democrats like Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeanne Kirkpatrick or Republicans like John Bolton really to defend the U.S. Instead, we get Susan Rice. When an institution changes to the point it becomes antithetical to its principles and its reason for existence, it is time to abandon it and start over with something more deserving of its stature. Whether that institution is marriage corrupted by faddish political correctness or an international assembly corrupted by enemies of freedom.

To say that I have no respect or use for the United Nations would be an understatement. There were many issues on which I heartily disagreed with John McCain. But he got at two things right, to go on the offensive in Iraq and to abandon the U.N. and develop an alternate “League of Democracies.” The latter was not his original idea, but he was willing as a national politician to push it.

The U.N. is a thoroughly corrupt bureaucracy, whose inbred circle of functionaries unites only in their admiration for thuggish regimes and financial self-dealing and in their disdain for Western-style self-government and personal liberty. Does anyone remember the colossal rip-off that was the “oil-for-food” program, under which Saddam Hussein built palaces and acquired weapons while his U.N. enablers padded their bank accounts. Iraq’s oil treasure was stolen, while food and medicine were denied to the ordinary people. It is, truly and surely, a “kleptocracy,” a rule by thieves.

These are the wastrels with the lavish life styles from countries whose people are barely at subsistence level. These are the deviants whose troops and diplomats are routinely engaged in sexual perversions. I suppose if it is “routine” it is, for them at least, no longer a perversion, but standard operating procedure. These are the oleagenous thugs who chair “human rights” panels and hypocritically denounce Israel and other Western countries for imaginary wrongs, all the while celebrating unsavory, genocidal, racist and/or totalitarian regimes like Sudan, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, and on and on. If someone exploded a neutron bomb in the bowels of the U.N., this would serve humanity more than the occasional show trial at the Hague of some has-been dictator whose misdeeds are replicated a hundred-fold by these U.N. ”diplomats” and the creatures that are the heads of the governments they represent. Come to think of it, the U.N. building is so ugly, make  it an atom bomb instead.

So, the head creature of the U.N. has some nerve to go before a committee of the U.S. Congress and call the U.S. a “deadbeat nation.” This is the same U.S. that funds almost a quarter of the U.N.’s cost and is the only non-rapacious and reliable military force for the U.N. This idiot was, indeed, quite satisfied with the word that, he lets us know, he had so carefully chosen. Perhaps he figured it was safe to make that accusation with the new internationalist administration in Washington. After all, he wouldn’t have to face such vigorous defenders of American interest as Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick from the Reagan years or, more recently, John Bolton. Instead, he would be dealing with Susan Rice, whose background and statements would reasonably lead him to believe that he had an ideological soul-mate in her.

Further evidence about the endangered and deteriorating state of Mexico. I have posted about this before. Even the L.A. Times had some excellent reporting on it. It has been a matter of concern for the U.S. government for several years, with intelligence agencies warning of the systemic dangers posed by the festering wound caused by the influence of the drug cartels. This danger has spread across the border to the U.S., but the administration is occupied with adopting massive wealth transfers and the political economy of corporate statism. The drug wars are escalating, not just between the cartels jockeying for position, but between the cartels and the military. With other institutions, such as local police and civilian officials at all levels of government, infiltrated and corrupted by the cartels, the military may be the last line in Mexico between an orderly, stable, and reasonably democratic society and a narco-state divided into spheres of influence of various criminal gangs. The author suggests that at least some of the cartels may instead be aiming for another goal, control of Mexico’s oil and gas production.

I disagree with one point he makes, and a commenter bears this out. Large shipments of automatic weapons (never mind RPGs) are not going across the border courtesy of the average licensed gun dealer. Those kinds of weapons can only go to (relatively) few licensed private persons, so they would not be stocked in large quantities by gun shops. These are specialized gun smugglers at work. The author is correct, though, to show the incompetence of the government in securing the border. This article from the Los Angeles Times gets the weapons issue right.

President Obama is getting thumbs-down reviews for his meeting with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. It has become a tradition for American Presidents to underscore the special trans-Atlantic relationship between the U.S. and the U.K. by giving the British Prime Minister the “royal” treatment.

One manifestation of that special relationship may be a weekend stay at Camp David. Didn’t happen.

Another tradition is a joint press conference of the leaders with members of the press from both countries. Didn’t happen.

Then there is the traditional exchange of gifts. Here is what Brown gave Obama, much of which had historical significance:

“Mr Brown’s gifts included an ornamental desk pen holder made from the oak timbers of Victorian anti-slaver HMS Gannet, once named HMS President.

Mr Obama was so delighted he has already put it in pride of place in the Oval Office on the Resolute desk which was carved from timbers of Gannet’s sister ship, HMS Resolute.

Another treasure given to the U.S. President was the framed commission for HMS Resolute, a vessel that came to symbolise Anglo-US peace when it was saved from ice packs by Americans and given to Queen Victoria.

Finally, Mr Brown gave a first edition set of the seven-volume classic biography of Churchill by Sir Martin Gilbert.”

Here is what Obama gave Brown:

A gift of 25 DVDs of classic American films.

It isn’t clear if those DVDs came through Blockbuster or Netflix. Obama already disrespected the British by returning a bust of Winston Churchill that had been given to the American people after 9/11 by Tony Blair and placed in the Oval Office by George Bush. Now this.

Mark Steyn concludes that this whole embarrassing affair is the result of Obama’s personal narcissism. Many Englishmen and, apparently, the Brown government see the matter as a diplomatic slight. Even some of Brown’s political opponents are annoyed by the treatment he received. Brown prefers to remain tight-lipped.

The British press sees the lack of the joint press conference as an example, alternately, of Obama’s high-handedness towards the press and of his cowardice in refusing to facequestioning by reporters much less inclined to fawn over Obama than their American counterparts do. British reporters are even said to have reminisced about how George W. Bush acted at such events. And this comes from a President who is so beloved overseas and here that he will single-handed and immediately heal the rift in the relationship between the U.S. and other countries caused by the evil Bush and restore American leadership. One English columnist even sees the conspiratorial and malign influence of “Lady Macbeth,” Michelle Obama.

I see it as a combination of Obama’s bumbling and inexperience and of his self-important personality that is more interested in the grand campaign-style speechifying than in the minutiae of governing and the arcane protocols of diplomatic etiquette.

This article raises serious questions about the continued deterrent value of the American nuclear forces. They are becoming antiquated, and the U.S. is in danger of losing power in relation to the developing and modernizing forces of other countries. Such a multipolar world threatens more instability. The administration will receive a Nuclear Posture Review towards the end of this year, a comprehensive review of strategy and weapons development. This is a critical stage.

“On December 2, 2008, the bi-partisan Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism released its report declaring, ‘The Commission believes that unless the world community acts decisively and with great urgency, it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013.’”

Nor is a terrorist attack the only problem. Apparently, Iran has been testing rockets and detonating them in flight. Some think that Iran is planning a strategically devastating effect of an air burst over the U.S. All it takes is a single nuclear device, for which Iran probably has enough material. By destroying power grids and the electronic components of vehicles and computers, such an electro-magnetic pulse attack has the potential to put the U.S. into pre-industrial age conditions for some unknown period of time. This may be just doomsday mongering, but part of the job of defense planners is to think the unthinkable.

However bad our economic statistics are, the situation in the stagnant European welfare states and in the countries that not long ago escaped the spirit-depressing communist systems is worse and more ripe for “extra-parliamentary” actions. The Weekly Standards Andrew Stuttaford provides some insights. He blames the lack of a democratic connection between the various people of Europe and the elitist EU bureaucracy in Brussels:

“Adding further poison to the mix is the catastrophic effect of EU membership on the relationship between Europeans and their political class. The idea that the governing should listen to the governed underpins any successful democracy. It does not underpin the EU–as those naughty no-voting Irish are just the latest to discover. National politicians, neutered by a confederation where most important decisions are taken within an opaque and remote political structure that is subject to but the barest pretense of democratic control, now function as little more than messenger boys or enforcers for the real bosses in Brussels.”

Stuttaford concludes that this lack of democratic accountability and the economic stagnation may create a combustible political mix:

“This raises rather awkward questions as to what Europe’s ballot boxes are actually for, questions that may turn very ugly indeed when the bread has gone stale, the circuses have shut down, and recovery remains elusive. Fortified perhaps both by images of disturbances elsewhere and the knowledge of the spinelessness that is a not-so-guilty not-so-secret of so many European governments, the peoples of the EU might well conclude that the street is a better way to force through change than the voting booth. Throw in the organizing capabilities of the Internet, relatively high levels of unemployment amongst the articulate and well-educated, and the rallying impact of a populist cause, and it’s easy to see what will come if the slump lingers on.”

More evidence about the rot in the Mexican state. At the eleventh hour, the government is finally getting serious about the danger it is facing. Could drug gang violence become a similar problem in the U.S.?

Predictably, the predictably liberal Tim Rutten at the predictably liberal L.A. Times predictably blames the United States for not adopting predictably liberal nostrums. He blames the failure of the U.S. to legalize marijuana, and its failure to ban “military-style assault weapons,” for Mexico’s woes. He then blames Mexican society’s income inequality and societal corruption on the drug cartels, instead of the reverse. In his way of thinking, then, Americans ultimately are to blame for Mexico’s income inequality and societal corruption.

Let’s see now. Mexico has an uninterrupted history until well into the 20th century of what the French political writer Alexis de Toqueville observed more than 150 years ago, that Mexico is the victim alternately of anarchy and military despotism. That period ended with seven decades of one-party quasi-Peronist rule under the PRI that further enriched a small politically-connected elite and impoverished the country. That experience yet again proves that corporatist control of the economy by an interconnected class of political, business, and labor mandarins (the New Deal model now emulated on large scale in the U.S.) produces economic stagnation for the masses. The income inequality and corruption of civil society in Mexico is historic and indigenous, not due to self-loathing liberals’ bete-noire, the United States.

Next, let’s take a look at the drug issue. While there is certainly a case for legalization of marijuana, that isn’t the only contraband involved. Perhaps there even should be general legalization of drugs. If that were the case, one may assume, however, that the resulting regulations will be at least as burdensome as currently for cigarettes and alcohol. Why wouldn’t the production and smuggling on which the gangs thrive continue to be lucrative? After all, a growing problem with cigarettes are sales of untaxed products that cost less than their heavily-taxed legal counterparts.

As to the guns, it has been pointed out, “With fearsome arsenals of rocket-propelled grenades, bazookas and automatic weapons, cartels are often better armed than the police and even the soldiers they fight.” While many of those weapons come from the U.S., many do not. And those weapons that are mentioned are not Mr. Rutten’s “military-style assault weapons” that are available in the U.S. Unmodified AK-47s and other automatic weapons are not the semi-automatic weapons to which Mr. Rutten presumably is referring. So even if the semi-automatic weapons ban in the U.S. that Mr. Rutten falsely sees as the cure to Mexico’s problems were adopted, it wouldn’t affect the trade in RPGs, bazookas, and automatic weapons. One is tempted to conclude that Mr. Rutten is not sure about what “military-style assault weapons” and semi-automatic pistols are. Either that, or he is intentionally playing on public ignorance.

Why, by the way, does Rutten believe that with the drugs it is culture that has the demand that’s the problem, rather than the culture that provides the supply? Yet, with the guns the problem is the culture that provides the supply, not the culture that has the demand. Is it that, either way, the “bad” culture is the U.S.? As a historical parallel for the drug trade, the West, specifically the British, are blamed for supplying opium to the Chinese, but the Chinese are blameless for their demand for the drug. Closer to home, the White man is blamed for supplying alcohol to the Indians, whereas the Indians are blameless for their demand for something the rest of the world had consumed for centuries. One senses a pattern.

A few months ago, I posted about the drug cartel wars in Mexico that threatening the country’s stability. This is now getting increased media attention (not from the bi-coastal Times papers, however)  as the danger of Mexico becoming a failed narco-state rises. Even if there is not full-fledged social collapse and political disintegration, but “merely” an endemic scope of “tolerable” violence, the danger to the U.S. is significant. Increased migration across the border, further violence on the U.S. side from these drug gang rivalries that are already making Phoenix, Arizona, the kidnapping capital of the world, and national security risks as the gangs that use increasingly sophisticated methods of protecting their turf and smugglers find it increasingly profitable and easy to transport people and contraband across the border.

When a National Intelligence Estimate prepared by our super-duper apolitical spooks proclaimed a couple of years ago that Iran had stopped its uranium enrichment efforts and was years away from having enough fissionable material for a nuclear bomb, the reaction was explosive. George W. Bush was clearly irritated but could only go along with what it said. The Israelis were dumbfounded. They rejected the findings, and there is considerable suspicion that this paper caused the Israelis to begin to prepare for the possibility that they would have to act to deal with Iran’s nuclear threat. In that vein, the election of Obama and his naive faith in talking Iran out of its program cannot have assuaged Israeli concerns. That international disgrace of a “watchdog,” the International Atomic Energy Agency hailed the report because it effectively tied down the U.S. and made it a non-player as far as acting vigorously to block Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The IAEA and the West hoped that further discussions combined with an inspection regime that has just worked so well with other countries (North Korea) would keep Iran in check.

That same IAEA has confessed that Iran probably has enough low-enriched uranium to produce enriched material for a bomb. One arms controller expressed shock, “It’s alarming that the actual production was underreported by a third.” You don’t say. But that has been the history of these programs—underreporting. Our own great CIA does no better. They weren’t prepared for the Russian A-bomb or H-bomb tests, the Chinese A-bomb test, or the Indian or Pakistani tests. When Saddam Hussein’s stockpiles of uranium were discovered after the first gulf war, everyone was shocked about the scope and extent of development of the Iraqi program. No one had any idea. Whenever the North Koreans act, it is always a surprise to these people. And, of course, no one had any idea how advanced the Libyans were until they gave up.

There has been so much noise made about the “missing” WMDs that every intelligence service in the world (and many Iraqi officials) believed Iraq to have in 2003. Opponents of George W. Bush claimed that he acted hastily or cooked the evidence. In fact, while Bush himself was somewhat skeptical, the reality is that American intelligence had never overestimated other countries’ nuclear development, but regularly underestimated those dangers. So Bush might have been forgiven for believing that, if the intelligence services were sure about the existence of such a program, likely it was worse and further along than what was disclosed.

The bottom line is that Iran is building a nuclear bomb while the West deludes itself that its “talking” with Iran is accomplishing anything at all. The IAEA, meanwhile, intentionally or incompetently has no idea whether Iran is secretly enriching this uranium to make fissionable material. Meanwhile, the new Israeli government likely wii be headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, the one neither Obama nor Ahmadi-Nejad wanted. Though past evidence shows that he is more cautious and less blunt in office than on the campaign trail, Netanyahu will be no shrinking violet when it comes to Iran—or the U.S.

Claudia Rosett, a columnist for Forbes and The Wall Street Journal, presents the formula for success for the Iranians (or anyone else so inclined) to acquire nuclear weapons. After all, as the article boldly proclaims, “the big bomb is no longer just a longed-for luxury, but a totalitarian must-have.”

As expected, the administration is signaling that it is cutting back on missile defense programs. Other than the U.S., there are four players here: Russia, Iran, North Korea and Europe. Europe will see American retrenchment as a lack of resolve on the part of the U.S. in standing up to Russia. After years of official Bush-bashing by European regimes and unofficial, partisan rhetoric by them to stir up anti-American feelings among the populace, I take a certain delight in their discomfort at having to deal with the pacifist and accommodationist impulses of Obama, the man that Europeans so rapturously thought embodied an American they could like. This follows European anger at the protectionist elements of the “stimulus package,” as if they could not have known, had they listened to Obama’s campaign rhetoric that he and the Leftist in Congress would introduce such measures. Word to the Europeans: Be careful what you ask for, you might just get it. Having been reminded of nascent Russian imperial ambitions by the recent shut-off of natural gas to Europe over a Russian-Ukrainian “price dispute” concocted by the Russians, Europeans are understandably uneasy. I say, let them stew in their juices.

I am not necessarily opposed to Obama’s maneuvers here. But I find the process odd. He’s singnaling to the Russians and the Iranians that he will give up these systems. Then he proposes to use that as a bargaining chip? How much is that chip worth when you’ve already told the other side you plan to go slow or abandon the effort, anyway? As far as letting the Russians share in the technology to lessen the “threat” to them, that has been the American position since President Reagan. The Russians don’t care about that; they know that the system is not aimed at them, because the sheer number of missiles they have would overwhelm the defense shield. They are seeking to reestablish suzerainty over the old Soviet bloc. One suspects that the Obama administration’s blunders will accelerate that effort.

And why would the Iranians care at all? The point of their nuclear and missile program is only secondarily to threaten Europe. The major purpose is to establish Iran as a regional power and threaten, in order, Israel and the Sunni states to Iran’s west and south (Saudi Arabia, etc.). Finally, Iran may indeed have ulterior motives to threaten the U.S. (and Europe) indirectly by delivering nuclear materials to terrorists for “dirty bombs.” But that requires neither missiles nor highly refined nuclear materials.

Nor is any of this going to deter the North Koreans. They are aiming to threaten South Korea and, secondarily the U.S., into shoring up the Kim Jong-Il regime’s terror state. Given American willingness to be bamboozled by the North Koreans again and again, they will continue developing a missile they hope will reach the U.S. West Coast. They have been able to get what they want from the U.S. by saber-rattling and phony “concessions” they retract with impunity. The anti-missile systems the Bush administration deployed to protect the West Coast need to be strengthened and improved, but Obama is signaling that he doesn’t want to spend money on that until they are improved. That, of course, can’t be done unless there are sustained and vigorous efforts to improve the system, and around we go.

Contrary to accepted lore, there are democratic elections that are less faithful to the raw popular vote than the 2000 Bush-Gore contest. The inconclusive results of the Israeli election are a case in point. Note the distribution of the vote among numerous splinter parties. When I discuss the American system in my class, I joke that Israel has three parties for every two voters.

Participatory political systems have numerous political factions jockeying for influence. So, by the way, have more authoritarian systems, but there the politics are more opaque and the factions more discreet. I define a faction in the traditional practical sense, that is, a group that is focused on a particular issue or defining ideology, or that consists of followers of a particular charismatic politician. A political party, by contrast, survives the death or retirement of any particular politician and has a more programmatic outlook spanning a number of issues. It may have a broad ideology that guides it. However, that ideology—though real—is often hazy, and adherence to it is prone to be sacrificed as a matter of political convenience toward the goal of winning elections. Israel has some recognizable parties, such as Labor and Likud. I am not sure that Kadima is anything more than a temporary marriage of convenience. From what I have read, I would describe it as seeing itself as a militantly moderate group (yes, the paradox is intended). A sort of Clintonian or Blairite “third way” realizing itself in a political party. Another example is the British Liberal Democratic Party. The problem with moderates is that they have no ideology, so that their position on issues often is, or at least appears to be, ad hoc and opportunistic. In the long term, such parties have to find some ideological anchor, or run the risk of falling apart as one-time adherents are attracted to a group whose positions appear more principled and thus have more resonance with the public. The rest of the Israeli body politic consists of, essentially, factions.

In the U.S., there are minor parties that seem like factions. The enthusiastically ideological Libertarians come to mind. The Reform Party of the 1990s is another example, but for a different reason, namely, its dependence on the participation of its quirky patron, Ross Perot. But those “parties” typically have been electoral mirages because the two main parties have generally been so adept at co-opting factions within themselves. Factional coalition building takes place during the long run-up to the nominating election or convention, as candidates favored by various factions within the party by turn struggle to best each other and then reach out to the other factions within the party by wooing their defeated champions. If the nominee of the party is unsuccessful in cementing the party’s traditional coalition of factions, it risks having the adherents of the unpacified faction defect to the other party, sit out the election, or, in unusual cases, form a “third party” of usually temporary duration. Those third parties typically don’t gain election, but they can deprive the (otherwise) majority party of victory. Whatever the circumstances, once the election is done in the U.S., a winner is declared (except maybe in Minnesota), and usually one with a majority vote.

In Israel and similar systems, the horse-trading and coalition-building occurs after the election. This provides factions the opportunity to compete independently outside the umbrella of a broadly programmatic party. It also may increase voter interest by more promoting more narrowly-focused and openly ideological appeals. Yet it also increases the likelihood of post-election political instability and deadlock. That’s what we’re seeing in Israel now. It would not be surprising to see the second-place finishers end up forming the government with like-minded coalition partners. It also would not be surprising to see the “victors” in short order leading a minority government and the potential for new elections in the not-too-distant future.

As far as Livni’s call to Netanyahu to form a grand coalition of the two largest parties, it will be interesting to see his response. My sense is that he’ll refuse. Livni is not particularly exciting. As a moderate, she has little ideological heft. Chances are good that further economic, military, and diplomatic challenges lie ahead for Israel. Livni’s instincts on these matters are to shrink from decisive steps (judging by her actions as foreign minister). I’ve listened to Netanyahu since he was ambassador to the U.S. Netanyahu has an ego difficult to contain within a country the size of Israel. And he has been very patient (uncharacteristically so, I would have said at the time) since he lost the Prime Minister position ten years ago. So I don’t see him as wanting to share power in a way that curtails his influence but gives him part of the blame if things go wrong. He has time to let Kadima collapse. On the other hand, he might agree if he fears a successful challenge to his leadership of Likud.

Iraqis recently went to the polls, yet again. Although turn-out was not what it was in previous elections, it stacks up well against turn-out in the U.S. Perhaps the novelty has worn off a bit, which, paradoxically one might say, is the result of the citizenry internalizing a democratic world-view. Clearly good news is that the relatively moderate parties appear to have come out ahead. There are certain countries in the Middle East where the prospect for democracy, however imperfect its manifestation, is more encouraging than in others. This is inversely related to the militancy of the Islam that predominates there.

While North Africa has long been less militant in its Islam than other parts of the Middle East, there unfortunately is little prospect of its two most significant countries, Egypt and Algeria, soon becoming at least a good approximation of functioning democracies. Algeria is in a struggle between secular authoritarian government and Islamist dissenters. The growth of militant Islamic groups in a country as comparatively moderate traditionally as Algeria is a reflection of the degree of the regime’s authoritarianism. The same holds true for Egypt. When Mubarak goes, it is not likely that the lid he has kept on the simmering dissent is going to result in a soft letting off of the pressure. So, the most likely candidates for nascent democracy are more minor players Morocco (which already is a quasi-constitutional monarchy) and Tunisia (which does have a fairly democratic system). Libya, post-Khaddafi, probably will be similar to Libya with Khaddafi, though there is hope. Ironically, Libya has not had the same open frictions between secular autocrats and Islamic radicals as Egypt and Algeria. Maybe Khaddafi has been politically more adept at balancing these two competing forces.

In the rest of the Middle East, the Arabian peninsula is culturally and religiously not a fertile seedbed for democracy, whatever nods toward tightly-controlled constitutionalism might be made in some of the minor sheikhdoms. That leaves the more politically mature and culturally cosmopolitan regions whose Islam is less monolithic and militant. One would have thought that the Lebanese and the Palestinians might be candidates for solid democracies. But the cultural factors are outweighed by the interference in Lebanon’s affairs by Syria and Iran. Democratic tendencies cannot mature in Lebanon as long as those meddling countries themselves are not functioning democracies. The centrifugal effect of Lebanon’s internal factionalism among Druse, Maronites, and various other Christian, Sunni, and Shi’a groups is a challenge for democratic institutions in the most sedate of times. Adding to that the conscious undermining of such political evolution by outsiders who seek to establish political footholds in the country, dooms the project. The Palestinians are in the grip of political dysfunction remarkable even by regional standards. While the West Bank is currently relatively pacific, it is still in the control of Fatah. Gaza is a hopeless basket case under the control of an openly terrorist gangster regime, Hamas. While the Palestinians long were culturally moderate with decent educational levels and an entrepreneurial middle class, the successful ones have long since decamped to Jordan and Iraq or farther abroad to Europe and the U.S. What is left is primarily the detritus caused by U.N. and Arab political incompetence and scheming, Israeli military reaction, and Iranian power politics.

Jordan has its own internal divisions between Palestinians and more traditional Bedouins, but the whole country is moving gingerly towards constitutional monarchy with democratic tendencies. Still, it is a long way from an out-and-out democracy. Were the monarchy to collapse, one could not say with confidence that Jordan would not descend into a secular or military dictatorship or an Islamist thugocracy. Syria is a tempting target for democratization, but its non-theocratic impulse so far has simply resulted in continued Ba’athist fascism. Even if the latest Assad dictatorship fell, it is likely that the baton of oppression would be picked up by a military boss. With Islamist groups resolutely suppressed by the regime in Damascus, Syria has all the characteristics of Algeria and Egypt. The best chance for democratic evolution in Syria was after George W. Bush’s toppling of Saddam Hussein in neighboring Iraq. With that opportunity squandered by the unwillingness of the Americans to pursue the matter into Syria (where, some experts speculate, the hard evidence of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction program was spirited prior to the 2003 invasion) as a consequence of foreign and domestic (read, Democratic) anti-war hysteria, there is no reason to foresee any change in Syrian politics, barring some unexpected catalyst.

That leaves Iran and Iraq. As I have written before, I think that Iran has all the ingredients in place right now. It is true that, similar to the Palestinians, Iran suffered a diaspora after the Khomeini revolution of its most dynamic and educated people. It has also suffered from a horrible war with Iraq in the 1980s. But it retains a sufficiently sizable cosmopolitan stratum of people; it has a high level of educational and cultural achievement; and it has a “youth bulge” that is attuned to Western influence and values. Its Shi’a Islam is not traditionally as militant and intolerant as the Arab Wahhabi, Egyptian Salafist, or South Asian Deobandi versions of Sunni Islam, despite the fundamentalist spoutings of Ahmadi-Nejad. So, there is great potential, but Iran is like one of those planets that are said to have all the conditions for life, yet there is no life. Many observers are pessimistic that the entrenched Mullahocracy will be overthrown. And, as the youth bulge in Iran recedes, which it must, based on current birthrates, the populace becomes more sedate. There is no readily available direct military solution. An American population that quickly got the vapors dealing with Iraq is not going to have the stomach for a full-out military conflict with Iran short of some catastrophic miscalculation by Tehran. Iran also has extended its reach of terrorist allies in a way Hussein never could. Leaving aside Hizb’Ullah in Lebanon, it has set up a strong network among Palestinians and in Latin America, especially in the Argentina/Paraguay/Brazil border triangle. It has also entered alliance with various regimes that are more or less terrorist-friendly, such as Syria, Russia, Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela. None of those regimes have sterling democratic credentials, and they are not known for their admiration of Western democratic values. The European Union (and the U.S.) in its negotiations over the Iranian nuclear program has demonstrated its impotence for all the world to see. And the current occupant of the White House is not going to act militarily like Roosevelt, either the T.R. or the FDR version, despite the New Deal stylings of his domestic program. One just cannot imagine President Obama throwing down a T.R.-style “Perdicaris alive or Raisouli dead” rhetorical gantlet to the Mullahs in Q’om.

That leaves Iraq. It has the greatest potential for long-term, if imperfect, democracy. If it can set that example, it just might serve as the future catalyst of change in some of the more potentially hospitable places for democracy mentioned above, such as Syria and Iran, which, in turn, might bear fruit in Lebanon and among the Palestinians. If that happens, George W. Bush deserves the credit for facilitating the birth of democracy in the region. Again, it is an imperfect democracy, not likely to qualify as the 51st U.S. state, even were its people inclined in that direction. It is still Islamic, and there is always an underlying tension, if not incompatibility, between Islamic principles of a government based on submission to the law of Allah and democratic government based on the principle that humans are the supreme political actors and are empowered to regulate their affairs based on rules of their own autonomous making. Iraq still opposes Israel, which, to varying degrees of intensity, is de rigeur among Islamic regimes. It is still shaky on matters of respect for property rights, but democracy has never guaranteed liberal bourgeois Western-style regimes. See ancient Greek democracies, for example. In fact, some would argue that an intermediary step of a classical Western republican regime is necessary as a precondition to the protection of individual values. By promoting peaceful change of government, democracy, at most, is just a first possible step in the direction of a political culture that respects individual rights. But it is a step without guarantee of a successful journey. So one has to put the Iraqi elections in perspective. I agree with Mark Steyn’s evaluation of what happened in that election:

“Yes, I think it is, and it went off so peacefully that nobody over here reported it. The fact is this is the most democratic state in an undemocratic part of the world. The Saudis don’t hold elections like this, the Egyptians don’t, and not even the Jordanians. And the Iraqis are getting used to holding these elections far more smoothly than say the state of Minnesota does. And what is interesting to me is that if I look back at what I was writing in 2002-2003, I did say that if you wanted to actually destabilize the Middle East, which people like me wanted to do, then the point to do it at was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, because you had this relatively secular population, they’re not going to be crazy for theocrats or the Taliban or anything like that, and it did offer the best hope at building a pluralist, genuine democracy in the Middle East. Now it’ll be an imperfect one. The present Iraqi government has the same antipathy toward Israel that all the other governments in the region do, but the fact is that it’s the least worst government in the region, and the United States and the American people should be very proud of it. And they should recognize that George W. Bush stuck with this at a time when these finger in the windy types like John Kerry were ready to bail out on it.” 

This is a very thorough and informative, but long, analysis of the provincial election and a look ahead at the national elections next year by Reuel Gerecht of the Weekly Standard.

This is one of those difficult metaphysical questions. Which of these groups more deserves to win, the gang of very crazy and demented homicide-bombing terrorizers of innocent civilians, or the horde of very crazy and demented rocket-shooting terrorizers of innocent civilians? This reminds me of the beginning of a struggle similar to the one in the 1930s when fascists and communists faced off here and abroad. There are more similarities to the New Deal era than we like to admit.

This opinion piece from the Jerusalem Post lays out the potential problems faced by the American military as well. The potential liability of soldiers, especially high-ranking officers being dragged before international courts by the usual suspects in jurisdictions unfriendly to the U.S., is the main reason the U.S. refused to accede to jurisdiction by the International Criminal Court under the Rome Treaty. In addition, Senator Jesse Helms introduced the American Service-Members Protection Act (ASMPA) in response. The law was adopted in 2002. As the article states, ASMPA’s stated purpose was to “to protect United States military personnel and other elected and appointed officials of the United States government against criminal prosecution by an international criminal court to which the United States is not party.”

Moreover, “ASMPA gave the president far-reaching powers to take action against those who might try to prosecute soldiers, especially the ICC. Most strikingly, ASMPA provides the president with ‘all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any US or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the ICC.’ Simply stated, the law permits the president to employ military force, if necessary, to free any American soldier arrested on charges of war crimes from the custody of the ICC. It was for this reason that ASMPA has earned the nickname ‘The Hague Invasion Act.’

Furthermore, ASMPA prohibits any American governmental entity or court from cooperating with the ICC and bars the US from transferring any information to the ICC or to countries that are party to the Rome Treaty.”

Israel finds itself with similar vulnerability. Its armed forces already fight under a policy that essentially requires the military to get legal review before it does anything. Yet its enemies in the Middle East and their sympathizers in the West and at the United Nations turn every Israeli reaction against months of indiscriminate rocket attacks and against acts of terrorism into accusations of the worst war crimes imaginable.

Meanwhile those same critics of Israel and the U.S., both domestic and foreign, turn a blind eye to actual torture and war crimes by those they find ideologically sympathetic, such as Hamas. Hamas’s continual violation of the laws of war by firing indiscriminately on civilians and purposely waging war from civilian installations such as schools and hospitals constitute war crimes. But no one cares. It’s the usual liberal double standard. These people denounced American efforts in Vietnam, while cheering on the atrocities committed by the Viet Cong and ignoring the genocidal actions by the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. More recently the transnational left elite denounced George Bush and wants to have him and others tried for war crimes, while feting their heroes like Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez and ignoring Kim Jong-Il, the Iranian regime, Robert Mugabe, and assorted other thugs whose prime recommendation to the Left is that they are all anti-American. Human rights violations and true dictatorship just seem less evil when done by a leftist.

From Hugh Hewitt comes this report of the attempted seizure of $8 Billion of California taxpayer money by a court-appointed federal receiver (law professor J. Clark Kelso) to build seven state-of-the-art super medical facilities featuring the best in medical and dental care, yoga centers, and indoor basketball courts—for prison inmates. This is on top of current prison medical facilities. According to Attorney General Jerry Brown, whom Hewitt interviewed, the annual operating cost would be another couple of billion dollars, somewhere around $200,000 per prisoner-patient per year. Calculated per prisoner this universal care would be about $14,000 on top of the $14,000 already being spent. The average Californian gets about $4400 per year. If these numbers are correct, there is something seriously wrong with the gold-plated care given prisoners versus what is available for the non-felonious members of society, especially in light of the state’s budget deficit that requires cuts in state services. This extravagance reminds me of a case out of Kansas City, Missouri about twenty years ago. As part of a desegregation decree, a federal judge took over the district. While non-inner city schools were beggared, the judge ordered a billion dollar high school built “as a showcase” in the poor part of the city, complete with amphitheater, performing arts center, indoor swimming pool, and other similar “amenities.” That’s what happens when federal judges (not known for their appreciation of real life give-and-take) are placed in charge of what are political, economic, and administrative matters. The particular judge in this case, Thelton Henderson, is an old San Francisco left-winger.

And it gets worse. Apparently, another panel of judges is contemplating releasing 50,000 state inmates early. Even if that were limited to the least violent of the state’s 170,000 prisoners, it still involves felons. That is a disaster waiting to happen.

A few posts ago, I asked when Obama was returning the Guantanamo Bay naval base to the Cubans, now that he was closing the detainee facility. Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, the Beavis and Butthead of Latin American caudillo politics in the 21st century, are asking the same thing. Unlike our learned Justices of the Supreme Court, who treated Gitmo as much a part of American jurisdiction as Des Moines, Iowa, in order to give terrorists kept there the same constitutional rights as American citizens, the Fidel and Hugo duo see the American occupation of Guantanamo as illegal and Guantanamo as Cuban territory. 

This is a disturbing article about a nuclear weapon that explodes over an American city. Everyone should keep this in mind, as the Iranians and the North Koreans develop their partnership in rocketry and nuclear armament while the West continues in its delusional “talking.” One should also remember the described scenario if Obama makes good on his and the Democrats’ announced plans to curb weapons programs and especially the development of anti-missile systems. The Bush administration has moved R&D on those systems along, as have the Russians and the Chinese on theirs. But the Democrats have opposed “Star Wars” for a quarter century now. It’ll be interesting to see how the new administration will act now that it actually has to deal with the Iranians and North Koreans rather than have the luxury of just heaping invective on the adults trying to protect the U.S.

But scary weapons are nothing new. Here is a look at some of history’s frightening weapons that represented technological skill that gave the possessor a tremendous advantage over his enemy. One particularly impressive weapon system was the German World War II-era rocket program. Though it provided the foundation for the Russian and American space and military rocket programs after the war, and though it had tremendous psychological effect both on those on the sending end and those on the receiving end, the program overall did not live up to its potential at the time. It was developed too late, just as the German A-bomb program was about six to twelve months too late. Of course, most would say that was a good thing. Still, it is something to marvel at. Despite getting hammered by the Allies, the Germans developed and produced jet fighters, a delta-wing bomber that eventually became the model for the American B-2 stealth bomber, the V-1 rocket that became the model for cruise missiles, and the V-2 rocket that became the model for ballistic missiles and moon rockets. The Germans developed mobile launch pads for their rockets, and even successfully tested submarine-launched rockets that were supposed to be used against American cities. Toward the end of the war, they developed radio control for much increased accuracy of these supersonic missiles. Fortunately, a lack of resources to get submarines in proper position and the timely end of the war prevented the Germans from carrying out those plans.

The U.K. Spectator’s indefatigable Melanie Phillips writes her columns from “Londonistan.” In two such informative and passionate efforts, here and here, she gives a background to the causes of the current military conflict between Israel and the Iranian terrorist proxy Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Ms. Phillips also exposes and roundly condemns the hypocrisy and shameful immorality of the U.N. and the usual double standards from the self-loathing and anti-Israeli Western transnational elites in government and media.

Unfortunately, the Vatican has joined the calls for Israel to stop going after Hamas. While the Vatican’s position as such is defensible based on the desire to avoid killing of civilians, I would be a lot happier if the Pope, the Curia, or whoever is issuing these calls, were as assiduous in condemning the constant rocket barrages, suicide bombings, and killings of Israeli civilians by Hamas and assorted other terror groups. But one hears only silence, except on the occasion of some generic condemnation of killing of civilians directed at both sides. So the Vatican’s concern about the death of civilians in Gaza might be seen by those less charitably inclined than I as, well, biased in the same way as the Left is.

Michael Ramirez weighs in with his opinion.

In many ways, Pakistan is increasingly taking on the characteristics of a failed state, and a nuclear-armed one, at that. This article explores the deep and dangerous fissures in the Pakistani government and military that threaten peace with India and the U.S. effort against the Taliban and al Qaeda. WIth news of continued U.S. action inside Pakistan, and a renewed U.S.-Indian cooperation, these will be tricky waters for One Who Will Restore America’s Standing in the World to negotiate.

The Wall Street Journal provides a fascinating account of the terrorist attacks in Bombay (Mumbai), India. The article reads like the script of an action movie, but the bad guys are the gung-ho action types. The good guys are mostly bumblers, ill-led and ill-equipped.

The Atlantic’s Robert Kaplan analyzes how the attacks play into a widening Hindu-Muslim gulf in India that threatens India’s development as a world power and undermines U.S. efforts in Afghanistan. In that country, the U.S. struggle against al Qaeda and the Taliban covers up a broader background struggle between India and Pakistan for influence in the region. Kaplan argues that the religious divisions in India have deep historical roots and are becoming more pronounced due to rising Hindu nationalism and pan-Muslim radicalism whose emergence has been made possible by modern communication technology.

On the plus side, the Indian government seems far less reticent to thumb its nose at Westerners concerned about the rights of terrorists than our incoming administration’s talk makes it seem they would be.

And here is an analysis of the terrorist attack from the viewpoint of a gun rights supporter.

Hugh Hewitt provides links to some good interviews and articles. He wonders why the American media, with some exceptions, have been so superficial and flighty in their coverage of this event, as if it were an isolated matter rather that part of a broader ideological and cultural struggle going well beyond India.