Archive for the ‘Middle East Issues’ Category
by Thomas E. Brewton
With mounting stridency, news media demand to know why President Bush fails to bow to public opinion expressed in the recent Congressional elections and pull our troops out of Iraq.
The underlying assumption is that public opinion, expressed in elections or opinion polls, in all cases represents truth and wisdom. As I wrote in The Limitations of Public Opinion, such is seldom the case when complex policy matters are the subject of those opinions.
The stock market, for example, gives us a daily, broad spectrum opinion poll reflecting the outlook for business. Obviously, however, very few people have the knowledge and resources to become rich and to keep their wealth over time simply through knowing what composite market opinion is at any given time.
By Alan Caruba
Lyndon Johnson would tell anyone who would listen that he did not know how to get out of Vietnam. The result is a memorial wall in Washington, D.C. with the names of some 50,000 or more servicemen and women who died in a war this nation unequivocally lost. Four Presidents wrestled with the questions of whether to get into that civil war and then how to get out.
In the end, having failed to leave years earlier, our departure was ignominious. In failing to leave for political reasons, Richard Nixon compounded that ignominy in blood.
I wonder how many more of our soldiers will die in Iraq while President George W. Bush tries to find a way to leave as events in that nation and the Middle East conspire against him. There is no good way. There is only leaving.
By “leaving” I mean withdrawing our troops to a level that will vastly reduce the day-by-day loss to improvised explosive devices, snipers, and suicide bombers. That’s not the way our military is constituted to fight a war. That’s an internal guerrilla action intended to determine control of Iraq while ridding it of the American military presence. It is the needless sacrifice of young men and women in uniform for the notion that America cannot recover from leaving.
by Sher Zieve
A new virus is spreading throughout the US Senate and it appears that an increasing number of our lawmakers have been infected. The last notable germ to contaminate the Senate was this year’s Pro-Illegal-Alien bug that will continue to allow illegal immigrants to enter the US and destroy any continued hope for US sovereignty. However, this new highly-contagious and virulent disease may prove to be terminal—for both the United States of America and its people.
Some of the observable symptoms of this latest malady include:
- US Senators traveling to the Middle East, while rushing to formulate their own—individual—US foreign policies
- US Senators demanding that President Bush meet with Syrian President Bashar Assad to "help" with Lebanon and Iraq—even though Assad has been part and parcel to terrorist activities in the region
- US Senators demands that the Bush Administration open up "talks" with Iran regarding "assistance" in the ‘problems in the Middle East’—despite the fact that Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been the largest supplier of terrorists in Iraq, has called for Israel to be "wiped off the map" and is a weapons’ supplier to both Palestinian Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon
- Bent over US Senators looking under rocks, in order to find the elusive and mythical "appeasement Unicorn"—despite the fact that terrorists only respond positively to strength
- Senators heard almost incoherently mumbling, while gnashing their teeth: "We have to give up. We have to surrender…
by Christopher Adamo
The facade is beginning to peel back from the so-called ministry of Southern California Pastor Rick Warren, author of "The Purpose Driven Church" and "The Purpose Driven Life." Unfortunately, many among his ample flock have far too much invested in him, both emotionally and otherwise, to admit their mistakes and cut their losses.
Moreover, he certainly faces no possibility of in-depth scrutiny from the "mainstream media," as his brand of "Christianity" poses little or no threat to their liberal social agenda. Yet to the degree that anyone at all questions Warren as anything less than authentic, his response is thoroughly telling as to his true character, as well as the nature of his "ministry."
Joseph Farah, editor in chief of the premiere Internet news site, "World Net Daily," opened a can of worms by calling Warren to account over his fawning praise of the terrorist stronghold of Syria. While there, Warren lauded the brutish dictatorship as "peaceful," claiming that the Islamist government does not officially sanction "extremism of any kind."
When confronted by Farah, an American of middle-eastern decent who knows too well the history of horror and tragedy faced by persecuted Christians in that region of the world, Warren immediately denied ever making such statements.
By Thomas E. Brewton
It is said that diplomats must be prepared to negotiate with the Devil, which raises the question whether anything can be gained by negotiating with pure evil. Is it realism to assume that the Devil can be made less than evil?
Release of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group report puts the doctrine of foreign policy realism in the middle of the table. One implication of that doctrine is that values should play no role in foreign policy; only material national interests deserve consideration.
Yet liberal Republicans and liberal Democrats have been touting the forthcoming report (predictably leaked and already widely discussed by the New York Times) as a counter to the administration's policy.
How does diplomatic realism square with the endless barrages of criticism from liberals that the Bush doctrine of preemptive action has squandered the United States's moral capital with the rest of the world?
How does diplomatic realism square with liberals attacking all forms of clandestine surveillance of enemy activity? with demands that terrorists be treated like prisoners of war under the Geneva convention?
Senators Kerry, Kennedy, Levin, and Dodd apparently regard "sensitivity" and popularity as values that trump other national interests, ergo the UN and not US military action: ingratiation, not defense. Where does the expected diplomatic realism of the Baker- Hamilton Iraq Study Group report fit into that picture? Are "sensitivity" and popularity moral values?
by Thomas E. Brewton
Two of the basic recommendations in the Iraqi Study Group Report are utterly unrealistic. In each case the Study Group, in typical liberal-socialist fashion, bases its proposals upon the theoretical assumption that everyone sees the world as they do.
First, stating that the war in Iraq cannot be won without unified support here in the United States, the Study Group recommends that appropriate steps be taken to gain support from those opposed to the war.
One might as well have called for Hitler's support of the Allies' D-Day invasion in World War II. We are engaged in a cultural civil war in the United States in which fundamental compromise is impossible. Liberal Republicans and Democrats are engaged in a jihad against our founding Judeo-Christian principles, a jihad in which there is no middle ground.
By Alan Caruba
The president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, expressing the intention of the ayatollahs, has said he wants to wipe Israel off the map by killing every man, woman and child. Iran will use a nuclear weapon and is close to being able to make one any day now.
If the nuclear option is not used, the proxy armies of the Iranian puppet-masters will be Hezbollah attacking from Lebanon and Hamas from Gaza. Israel is in a pincers between armed camps sworn to destroy it. In the past it has been able to defeat its enemies. It may not be able to do so in the future.
Jerusalem has changed hands many times since the nation of Israel was established in 1321 B.C. Since King David founded it, it has been the Jewish capital for 3,300 years. There are some six million Jews living in the latest resurrection of Israel. They are, combined with all other Jews, a mere 0.02 percent of the world’s population, but they represent 40 percent of all the Jews in the world.
When the Jews declared Israel an independent state on May 14, 1948, five Arab nations immediately attacked it. Offered a state of their own by the United Nations, local Arabs said no. For nearly six decades, Israel has never had a day of real peace.
by Jeff Lukens
Elections have consequences. And for our recent election, the consequences have been a major setback in the war on terror and a greater threat to terrorist attack at home. This is so because a public with an attention deficit disorder has elected a liberal congress that wants pull the plug on Iraq at the first face-saving chance they get.
Many people draw comparisons between the war in Iraq and the war in Vietnam. Since the election I've had the nagging feeling we are in about the 1973 phase of the Vietnam War. That year the power shift in Washington away from a conservative president toward a liberal congress doomed the war effort and in effect condemned millions of our Vietnamese allies to death and reeducation camps. A similar scenario may now be unfolding regarding Iraq.
The effort to preserve our interests in the region just got a lot more difficult as antiwar Democrats take over Congress backed by a sympathetic press. Together they have convinced the public that Iraq is a costly misstep, and Republicans have failed to convince them otherwise.
Much of President Bush's strategy has been based on Natan Sharansky's book, The Case for Democracy. In it, Sharansky stresses that freedom abroad and security at home are linked, and that there can be no peace without democracy. His book has become the basis of the post-9/11 strategic thinking.
By Alan Caruba
In late October I attended a luncheon briefing in New York sponsored by the Middle East Forum. The speaker was R. James Woolsey, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and currently a vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton. The room was filled with men who represent a class of citizenry known as “influential.” Woolsey’s topic was “Energy Alternatives and the War on Terror.”
Normally, I give men like Woolsey a lot of respect because they’ve earned it. However, it didn’t take long before I began to hear views that made me begin to question, not just the wisdom of what Woolsey was saying, but why he was saying it.
“The way strategically over the long run to weaken the enemies of Israel, such as Ahmadinejad, is to weaken the role of oil,” said Woolsey. “Oil makes it harder to avoid genocide in Darfur because the Sudanese have a deal with China, and it makes it harder to deal with Iran, because China and Iran have an oil deal.”
Say what? Weaken the role of oil? Genocide in Darfur has something to do with China? Iran will not pursue its lunatic Islamic apocalypse because it has an oil deal with China?
A lot of what Woolsey told the attendees is fairly common knowledge. He noted that natural events such as hurricanes can affect the amount of oil available and that terrorism—he called it “malevolent interference”—could provoke a war that would interrupt the flow of oil out of the Middle East.
In early August, General John Abizaid, the commander of the U.S. Central Command and the most knowledgeable senior military official about Iraq, expressed his fears to a Senate Committee that conditions in Iraq are the very next thing to a “civil war.” New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman went further one day later when he wrote that our armed forces in Iraq “are baby-sitting a civil war.” Can any good come of continued U.S. presence in such a conflict? Isn’t it time to consider letting the Sunnis and Shiites settle their centuries-old animosity without our forces caught in the middle?
Wisdom imparted by past presidents of our nation has never been more needed than today. As the quagmire in Iraq deepens, and as cries are heard for U.S. involvement in the conflict between Israel and Lebanon, George Washington’s advice should be heeded. He urged commercial relations with other nations “but to have with them as little political connection as possible.” The sixth U.S. president, John Quincy Adams, concurred when he stated: “America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” And Calvin Coolidge, our nation’s 30th chief executive, famously summarized: “Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business.”