Iran: Obama’s “Nixon Goes to China” Legacy at a Crossroads

Barack Obama has a strategy for getting his “go to Tehran by giving Iran the bomb, just not now” program though a Republican congress. He paints Republicans as the party of war, the enemy of peace (see cartoon).

Obama does so not to overpower the GOP, but to force fence-sitting Democrats to choose between backing their president or siding with (evil) Republicans. He wants, as suggested earlier, the most liberal 34 senators to sustain his veto of any GOP-led anti-Iran efforts.

Obama’s execution of his divide-and-rule strategy re. Iran is already underway. Last week, speaking in the Rose Garden, the president said:

when you hear the inevitable critics of the deal sound off, ask them a simple question:  Do you really think that this verifiable deal, if fully implemented, backed by the world’s major powers, is a worse option than the risk of another war in the Middle East?

“inevitable critics. . . sound off.” He means (evil) Republicans, and he means to shame loyal Democrats into backing his Iran sell-out. So he warns:

If Congress kills this deal . . . then it’s the United States that will be blamed for the failure of diplomacy.  International unity will collapse, and the path to conflict will widen. The American people understand this, which is why solid majorities support a diplomatic resolution to the Iranian nuclear issue. 

“If Congress kills. . . solid majorities support a diplomatic resolution” means “Democrats, I’m talking to you! Do you stand with me or with (evil) Republicans; with the people or with the enemy?!”

Obama, as we all know by now, is playing for a place in history similar to that achieved by Henry Kissinger in 1971, when Kissinger turned great enemy Red China into a sometime U.S. partner, a triumph marked by Richard Nixon’s epic 1972 visit to Beijing and Shanghai. Iran is arguably our biggest enemy today, and Obama wants his own historic visit to Tehran and Isfahan. Democratic foreign policy gurus sidelined by Kissinger’s great China triumph also want their own piece of world history.

But now, Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei has threatened the supposed agreement by ruling out “extraordinary supervision measures” over Iran’s nuclear activities, adding that “Iran’s military sites cannot be inspected under the excuse of nuclear supervision.”  Khamenei also said sanctions “should be lifted all together on the same day of the agreement, not six months or one year later.”

And another event is jarring Obama’s reach for destiny. Henry Kissinger, still alive and coherent, has attacked the Obama negotiations with Iran, indirectly calling them no echo of his 44-year-old triumph with China.

Kissinger’s views are bound to carry weight with Congress, including Democrats. Writes Kissinger, along with fellow ex-Secretary of State George Shultz:

Cooperation is not an exercise in good feeling; it presupposes congruent definitions of stability. There exists no current evidence that Iran and the U.S. are remotely near such an understanding. Even while combating common enemies, such as ISIS, Iran has declined to embrace common objectives. Iran’s representatives (including its Supreme Leader) continue to profess a revolutionary anti-Western concept of international order; domestically, some senior Iranians describe nuclear negotiations as a form of jihad by other means.

Kissinger is saying Iran is no China. While China worked with the U.S., Kissinger sees Iran as a danger to all, including the U.S.:

The final stages of the nuclear talks have coincided with Iran’s intensified efforts to expand and entrench its power in neighboring states. Iranian or Iranian client forces are now the pre-eminent military or political element in multiple Arab countries, operating beyond the control of national authorities. With the recent addition of Yemen as a battlefield, Tehran occupies positions along all of the Middle East’s strategic waterways and encircles archrival Saudi Arabia, an American ally. Unless political restraint is linked to nuclear restraint, an agreement freeing Iran from sanctions risks empowering Iran’s hegemonic efforts.

Kissinger and Shultz conclude:

the projected nuclear agreement will reinforce, not resolve, the world’s challenges in the region. Rather than enabling American disengagement from the Middle East, the nuclear framework is more likely to necessitate deepening involvement there—on complex new terms.

From Kissinger’s mountaintop, the Obama effort looks “JV.” And frightening as a result.

Iran Bomb: At the Brink

Iran Bomb

“Whoever is not with [my enemy] is [with] me.”

--paraphrasing Jesus Christ (Matthew 12:30)

In short, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

In a letter, 367 members of Congress (84%, including a majority of Democrats) have warned the president that lawmakers must be satisfied that any Iranian nuclear agreement must "foreclose any pathway to a bomb" before they lift sanctions against Tehran. But the White House has already told Congress their Iran rapprochement won’t require congressional approval.

At this point is there any doubt--as the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens writes--about Barack Obama’s “upside-down” world view? Stephens, noting that the administration is now on better terms with Iran than it is with Israel, adds that the president

treats Republicans in the Senate as an enemy when it comes to the Iranian nuclear negotiations, while treating the Russian foreign ministry as a diplomatic partner. He favors the moral legitimacy of the United Nations Security Council to that of the U.S. Congress. He is facilitating Bashar Assad’s war on his own people by targeting ISIS so the Syrian dictator can train his fire on our ostensible allies in the Free Syrian Army.

He was prepared to embrace a Muslim Brother as president of Egypt but maintains an arm’s-length relationship with his popular pro-American successor. He has no problem keeping company with Al Sharpton and tagging an American police department as comprehensively racist but is nothing if not adamant that the words “Islamic” and “terrorism” must on no account ever be conjoined.

In light of these Topsy-turvy Obama policies and actions, Stephens’ advice to the Israeli government is:

Repay contempt with contempt. Obama plays to classic bully type. He is abusive and surly only toward those he feels are either too weak, or too polite, to hit back. . . The Israelis will need to chart their own path of resistance.

Comment: Obama has a consistent world view. Growing up as a minority half-black in Hawaii and Indonesia, Obama took comfort in the anti-colonial, anti-European wave of nationalism that swept through the mostly non-white world at the time. He rode that affirmative action tide through Columbia and Harvard Law to safe landing with his impressive black wife in mostly black South Side Chicago. Race remained his co-pilot as he rose through the Illinois State Senate and the U.S. Senate to the White House.

Don’t tell Obama the numbers are against him; he knows better. Israel is the past, much as Great Britain, Western Europe, and the Republican Party are the past. Time to align with a future that includes Iran, Obama’s own “Nixon goes to China” place in history.

Liberals Win Culture War; May Give Iran the Bomb (Part III)

Our last post quoted Shelby Steele’s conclusion that liberal “dissociation” has captured American culture. Liberals believe the U.S. is no better or worse than any other nation, and through this act of self-effacement, have “dissociated” American culture from the historic errors of our past especially slavery and segregation, from neo-imperialism in the guise of “nation building” and protecting the “Free World,” from pre-civil rights laws discriminating against Mexicans and Asians, and from suppression of women. This perfect dissociation from the American past grants liberals moral legitimacy, and so an entitlement to power with power the liberals’ ultimate objective.

Liberal moral legitimacy also puts conservatives in a bad spot, bad enough that liberals may prevail in today’s struggle over allowing Iran to acquire the bomb — a development America should unambiguously oppose.

Steele tells us:

post-1960s liberalism had so won over the culture, and so congealed into the new moral establishment, that conservatism — as a politics and a philosophy — became a centerpiece in liberalism’s iconography of evil. It was demonized and stigmatized as an ideology born of nostalgia for America’s past evils — inequality, oppression, exploitation, warmongering, bigotry, repression, and all the rest.

Conservatism — liberals believed — facilitated America’s moral hypocrisy. Its high-flown constitutional principles only covered up the low motivations that actually drove the country: the self-absorbed pursuit of wealth, the insatiable quest for hegemony in the world, the unacknowledged longing for hierarchy, the repression of women, the exploitation of minorities. . . Liberalism. . . won for its followers a veil of innocence[, a] gift that recommends it despite its legacy of failed, even destructive, public policies[—]the black underclass, the near disintegration of the black family, and the general decline of public education. . . Affirmative action presumed black inferiority to be a given, so that racial preferences locked blacks into low self-esteem and hence low standards of academic achievement.

conservatives. . . now feel evicted from their culture, . . .made to feel like outsiders even as they are accused of being traditionaists. And contemporary conservatism is now animated by a sense of grievance, by the feeling that the great principles it celebrates are now dismissed as mere hypocrisies.

[The] great irony that slowly emerged out of the turmoil of the 1960s is that conservatism became the new counterculture — a movement that was subversive in relation to the established liberal cultural order. And, continuing this irony, liberalism became the natural home of timid conventionalists and careerists — people who find it hard to know themselves outside the orthodoxies of mainstream “correctness.” The special energy of contemporary conservatism — what gives it the dynamism of a movement — comes from conservative outrage at being stigmatized in the culture as the politics in which all of America’s past evils now find a comfortable home.

Conservatives may dislike being connected to America’s hypocritical past, but the link is, Steele writes, liberals’ “greatest source of authority.” Liberals successfully smother conservatism by identifying it as another word for American evil. Tainting conservatism — its principles, policies, and personalities — with past American shames remains for liberals an “endless font of power.”

Liberals Win Culture War; May Give Iran the Bomb (Part II)

“Obama is not just a citizen of America. He’s a citizen of the world. And he’s a disbeliever in American exceptionalism in any sense stronger than the British believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks in Greek exceptionalism. . . Obama is very much in the mainstream of modern progressive thought in his embrace of cosmopolitanism and his distrust of nationalism.”

--Bill Kristol, Weekly Standard

Obama is our first non-white, third world-linked president. His arrival symbolizes the changed American elite leadership that grew out of the civil rights and feminist struggles of the 1960s and 1970s.

Shelby Steele

Shelby Steele, conservative author of the award-winning The Content of Our Character, wrote a recent National Review article proclaiming that in the cultural wars, it’s bigger than just Obama. Anti-American liberalism has won, and Steele helps us understand why--dissociation:

post-1960s liberalism fell into a pattern in which anti-Americanism — the impulse, as the cliché puts it, to “blame America first” — guaranteed one’s innocence of the American past. Here in anti-Americanism was the Left’s all-defining formula: relativism-dissociation-legitimacy-power. Anti-Americanism is essentially a relativism — a false equivalency — that says America, despite her greatness, is no better an example to the world than many other countries. And in this self-effacement there is a perfect dissociation from the American past, and thus a new moral legitimacy — and so, finally, an entitlement to power.

in the culture war between liberalism and conservatism that followed the tumultuous 1960s, liberalism won. That is, liberalism won the moral authority, the power, to set the terms of social relations among Americans — the manners, the protocols, the ideas of decency, the rules establishing how people must interact within the most diverse society in human history. Liberalism gave America a new “correctness” that enforced these new rules with the threat of stigmatization.

post-1960s liberalism won a certain moral hegemony over the culture by establishing dissociation as the über human value — the value that arbitrates the importance and relevance of all other values. Even those timeless, conventional values that people in earlier times never thought to challenge now come under the purview of dissociation. . . personal responsibility and the work ethic. . . Insistence on values such as these seems to put victims in double jeopardy. It makes them the victims of both oppression and their own irresponsibility — implying that their own choices are as much a cause of their inferiority as the fact of their oppression. . . the idea that the victims may be accountable in some way for their own ongoing weakness is just impermissible. It violates the assignment of guilt and innocence — who is culpable and who is entitled — that dissociation seeks to enforce.

When we look at American exceptionalism through the lens of dissociation, that exceptionalism is transformed into garden-variety white supremacy. Dissociation sees this exceptionalism as proof of America’s evil character. . . When you win the culture, you win the extraordinary power to say what things mean — you get to declare the angle of vision that assigns the “correct” meaning.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s well-received attack on Iran and its nuclear program, delivered to a packed audience of U.S. senators and congressmen, may be (white) Israel’s last, best hope to hold back Obama’s “nuclear weapons for Iran, not just now” foreign policy. In a changed world, a U.S. elite conditioned by dissociation from supporting any “dead white men’s foreign policy” may be ready to accept the reality of Iran’s bomb.

Liberals Win Culture War; May Give Iran the Bomb (Part I)

Rhodes w/President on Air Force One

It’s fair, I believe, to say that Barack Obama views life through the prism of race and gender. His memoir, Dreams from My Father, is subtitled “A Story of Race and Inheritance.”

Obama's black father was absent, he was raised by a white mother and grandmother, he was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, he understood the power of race in America in our time, and he knew how race--the American civil rights movement--became supercharged when the feminist movement joined the path toward equality, helping make minorities plus women the new national majority.

Obama’s “Dreams” years, 1961-88, a childhood and youth spent in nonwhite, nonblack Hawaii, newly-independent Indonesia, and black South Side Chicago, unfolded against the world backdrop of anti-colonialism, collapsing white empires, and the U.S. failure in Vietnam. Obama was not only part of a new American majority, he would move toward a presidency that enabled him to fit America into the world’s anti-colonialist majority.

On this changed globe, the white outpost of Israel artificially planted by Europeans in the Arab Middle East seems the relic of an older era, to Obama a last vestige of white imperialism. Obama’s “dream” would use U.S. power to re-balance the Israeli-Palestinian relationship, gaining Iran as an ally in the process.

When leaders come to power, they carry out ideas formed earlier, when they actually had time to think. I now realize how much the Iraq Study Group Report: The Way Forward – A New Approach, written in 2006 under the guidance of former Republican Secretary of State James Baker and former Democratic House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Lee H. Hamilton, influenced Obama.

An “expert adviser” to that report had anticipated the panel’s recommendation that the Bush administration should pressure Israel to make concessions so as to “entice Syria and Iran to a regional conference on Iraq,” and the report itself found “critics of the Bush Administration's handling of the [Iraq] war, including liberal media outlets and think tanks, applaud[ing] the report's recommendations [of] increased diplomacy with Syria and Iran.” [emphasis added]

Obama had to be among those applauding. As president, Obama made Ben Rhodes (see picture) his deputy national security adviser. Rhodes spent five years as Lee Hamilton’s assistant, helping to draft the Iraq Study Group Report, and in 2007, Rhodes began working as a speechwriter for the 2008 Obama presidential campaign. He later wrote Obama's 2009 Cairo speech "A New Beginning,” during which Obama addressed “the Islamic Republic of Iran:”

In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically-elected Iranian government. Since the Islamic Revolution, Iran has played a role in acts of hostage-taking and violence against U.S. troops and civilians. This history is well known. Rather than remain trapped in the past, I have made it clear to Iran's leaders and people that my country is prepared to move forward. The question, now, is not what Iran is against, but rather what future it wants to build. . . we will proceed with courage, rectitude and resolve. . . we are willing to move forward without preconditions on the basis of mutual respect.

Rhodes said recently that a deal with Iran is the “biggest thing President Obama will do in his second term on foreign policy.” Iran-born Valerie Jarrett. Ben Rhodes. Iran--front and center since Obama’s 2009 Cairo “new beginning” speech.

Iran--be very worried (continued).

Anti-Americans in Iran

narcissism is a child like state in with they believe the objective world exists as an extension of the self. . . they seem to think the world revolves around them.

--John Dunbar, Nashua NH Psychology Major, from TED

Barack Obama is an emotional child, a narcissistic leader who “knows” his dominant place in the world and is remarkably impervious to any evidence to the contrary. Shaped by growing up in non-black Hawaii attending part-white Punahou School, he found his identity among “people of color” who realized the world beyond our shores was already theirs, and that soon enough minorities would, along with consciousness-raised females, come to control the Democratic Party and eventually America. The nation just awaited the right leader of color, one familiar with the ways of the white man, one who could exploit his superior knowledge and insight to conquer “the Man’s” world on behalf of not only America’s, but also the world’s, victims.

We argued early that Obama stood on the shoulders of America in order to reach the (non-white) world. Later, we said that “supporting Israel represents the last beachhead of the ‘dead white man’ foreign policy.” And we recognized that Iran-born Valerie Jarrett, the White House’s closest confidante to Michelle and Barack Obama, is a central figure pulling Obama toward Tehran.

These conclusions add important context to former State Department official Michael Doran’s remarkable essay titled “Obama’s Secret Iran Strategy,” which appears in the latest issue of Mosaic, a journal subtitled, “Advancing Jewish Thought.” Please read the essay in its entirety, if you are concerned about Iran's intentions.

Doran sticks closely to fact-based analysis, and his findings are all the more powerful for his having done so. But unfortunately, Doran will not burrow beneath Obama’s twisted Iran strategy. Doran doesn’t tell us that Obama came to the White House determined to govern as the nation’s first minority president, determined to execute a policy that linked the U.S. with the world’s non-white majority, determined to ignore Europe in favor of non-white Asia and Africa, the non-Christian Middle East, and progressive Latin America. Obama wants to align his chunk of America with the world’s true people of color, not with traditional Western allies such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.

The most powerful anti-Western force in today’s world is Muslim extremism, not China’s proto-capitalism. And Iran, militantly anti-American and anti-Israel, arming Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, Shiite Iraq, conquering Yemen, present in Lebanon and Libya, soon to have the bomb and ICBMs, THAT’s the nation most likely to shift the balance of power against the West.

Iran fascinates Obama.  He sees a rapprochement between Islamic Iran and a multi-cultural U.S. changing the world, and in the process plowing under Israel's influence, damaging today's last outpost of white colonialism in the non-Western world.

Obama does not expect Iran to wipe out Israel any more than he expects Israel to wipe out Iran. As with moving the U.S. internally toward more equal parity between whites and people of color, his foreign policy seeks to rebalance the white and non-white worlds in favor of the latter.

We should be frightened. Iran isn’t interested in “balance of power.” Narcissist Obama vastly over-rates his personal influence over Iran, and over world events in general.

Obamatime: List of Federal Government Missteps & Failures

the party of government is presiding over a time of government failure and malpractice.

--Matthew Continetti, Washington Free Beacon  

under Obama an ever-expanding federal government has become the essential raison d’être for the party. . . in the future Obama [will] be remembered simply for being the nation’s “first black president.”

--Joel Kotkin, Orange County Register

It’s way beyond time to record the almost-continuous record of federal government screw-ups under the current administration, which loves Big Government (self-love):

1. The Stimulus (failure of “shovel ready”); Department of Transportation (2009) 
2. Foreign policy SNAFUs (Russian “reset,” abandoning Iraq, pull-out “date certain” in Afghanistan, chemical weapons “red line” in Syria, ISIS “JV terrorists,” Ukraine inaction, Iran gets bomb?); White House, National Security Council, Department of State (2009- ) 
3. Alternative Energy (Solyndra bankruptcy); Department of Energy (2011) 
4. “Fast and Furious” (gun walking); Department of Justice (2010-12) 
5. IRS (targeting conservatives); Department of Treasury (2010- ) 
6. $823,000 Las Vegas party; General Services Administration (2012) 
7. Benghazi (“spontaneous protest/anti-Muslim video”); Department of State (2012) 
8. Cartagena prostitutes; U.S. Secret Service (2013) 
9. Monitoring AP and Fox’s James Rosen’s phones; Department of Justice (2013) 
10. Monitoring our emails; National Security Administration (2013) 
11. Obamacare (rollout and “keep your doctor, keep your plan”); Health and Human Services (2013- ) 
12. Wait-list deaths; Veterans Administration (2014) 
13. Children crossing open borders; Department of Homeland Security (2014) 
14. Ebola outbreak chances “extremely low”; Centers for Disease Control (2014) 
15. Help! There’s a man in the (White) House!; U.S. Secret Service (2014) 
16. Cartagena prostitute; White House (2014) 

This incomplete list involves messups at 14 different departments or agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control, called by the New York Times’ liberal reporter Joe Nocera “the most trusted agency in the federal government,” and the U.S. Secret Service, two previously unsullied parts of a long-compromised federal behemoth.

When will we realize government’s just too big, too far beyond the people’s control? For insight into a related story--why and how the media protects Big Government--see former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson’s new book, Stonewalled.

Iran’s Khamenei is no Mao

It takes two to tango. Iran has rejected for now any partnership with the U.S. to fight (what we now call) Islamic State. In an article that details U.S. backtracking in the face of a major loss of face (Iran doesn’t want us!), Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has issued a very public and seemingly definitive rejection of private U.S. overtures to the militant Shiite state.

According to an LA Times report, Khamenei said that when the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad requested a meeting with his Iranian counterpart to discuss “coordination” between the two nations to confront the Islamic State threat,

I opposed [the U.S. request] and told them we will not cooperate with the Americans on the issue because their intent and hands are not clean. How is it possible for us to cooperate with the Americans under such circumstances?

Khamenei added that Iran also rebuffed a request from Secretary of State John Kerry for “cooperation” conveyed “personally” from Kerry to the Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif. The Supreme Leader proclaimed that:

Iran has voiced its opposition to being a party to that coalition from the very beginning. The Americans’ coalition is nonsense.

Comment: The article verifies speculation the U.S. tried more than once to reach Iran. The atmosphere today, please understand, is different from that which Henry Kissinger exploited with his 1971 opening to China. In Kissinger’s time, China already had the bomb, both the U.S. and China could see that the U.S.S.R. was benefiting from having relations with both the U.S. and China at our mutual expense, and Russians had killed Chinese in 1969 clashes along the Soviet-Chinese border. Both sides looked for improved relations with each other at Moscow’s expense.

Iran feels no similar pressure to advance relations with Israel’s major supporter and the main force blocking Iran’s possession of the bomb. Still, Khamenei’s use of the phrase, “under such circumstances” seems to tell the U.S. that if it gives Iran a path to the bomb, things could change. Iranians know that improved relations with the U.S. would in and of itself undermine U.S.-Israeli ties, as suggested in our previous post.

Foreign Policy: Obama Readies a “September Surprise”

“I don't want to put the cart before the horse. We don't have a strategy yet.”

--Barack Obama, 8.28.14
 

Iran Foreign Minsiter Mohammad Javad Zarif with Sec. John Kerry

People are unfairly jumping on the president for his “no strategy” comment. Obama does have a strategy. He’s just not ready to spring it on us. When he does, he hopes it will have the impact that John Kennedy’s “October surprise”--the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis--had on that year’s mid-term congressional elections. Hapless Republicans arguing at the time that Kennedy was soft on Cuba ended up embarrassed and their party defeated. Obama is about not only to be tough on ISIS (the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria), but also dramatic: Obama is readying an anti-ISIS coalition he hopes will include current enemy Iran.

We have argued that President Obama is moving toward a rapprochement with Iran that will be a lesser version of President Nixon’s dramatic 1971-72 opening to China. Evidence this move is on the way continues to mount. FOX News correspondent James Rosen recently reported that

Iran – one of four countries the United States accuses of supporting terrorism – has begun arming the Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq, as the Kurds scramble to combat the threat posed by ISIS. . . Dr. Dlawer Ala'Aldeen, a former Kurdish Cabinet officer [said] in an interview. “If you are in the place of the Kurds, what would you do when you’re facing that? You would ask for help from any neighbor.”

The link-up of Iran with Iraq’s Kurds is a surprise, because, as Rosen says, Iran

has used brutal means to suppress Iran’s own population of 8 million Kurds, whose yearning for independence matches that of their Iraqi brethren. By steering arms to the Iraqi Kurds, . . . the Iranians may be trying simultaneously to weaken the military position of ISIS and use influence with the Kurds to slow their bid for complete autonomy.

The Iran-Kurd link makes more sense if we notice that Iran’s backing a U.S. ally in the fight against the terrorist ISIS moves Iran and the U.S. itself closer together against the common enemy, along the path foreign policy guru Les Gelb earlier recommended.

 Peter Beinart, like Gelb a liberal New York City-based Jewish critic of Israel associated with New York’s Council on Foreign Relations, has in the Atlantic similarly hinted at an Iran-U.S. link. Beinart has done so by separating Iran from terrorist entities such as ISIS that plan for direct attacks on the U.S.

According to Beinart, Obama has a coherent strategy: it’s “don’t take on any foreign entity except al Qaeda-related forces.” That means leaving Iran alone:

Obama’s strategy—whether you like it or not—is [h]undreds of thousands can die in Syria; the Taliban can menace and destabilize Afghanistan; Iran can move closer to getting a bomb. No matter. With rare exceptions, Obama only unsheathes his sword against people he thinks might kill American civilians.  . . Electoral politics has driven him in the same direction. There’s a reason Obama spent his reelection campaign declaring that it’s time to “focus on nation-building here at home.” Those declarations won him votes.

Already, we can see the outlines of the coming Iran-U.S. anti-ISIS coalition in Secretary of State John Kerry’s Friday New York Times “we DO have a strategy” op ed. Kerry wrote that ISIS:

if left unchecked, will not be satisfied at stopping with Syria and Iraq. . . Even as they butcher Shiite Muslims and Christians in their effort to touch off a broader ethnic and sectarian conflict, they pursue a calculated strategy of killing fellow Sunni Muslims. . . With . . . the broadest possible coalition of nations, the cancer of ISIS will not be allowed to spread to other countries. . . The United States will hold the presidency of the United Nations Security Council in September, and . . . President Obama will lead a summit meeting . . . to put forward a plan to deal with this collective threat. . . no decent country can support the horrors perpetrated by ISIS, and no civilized country should shirk its responsibility to help stamp out this disease.

Drawing Iran into an anti-ISIS coalition works for Syria, Turkey, Qatar, Hezbollah, Shia Iraq, and Hamas, all already on Iran’s side. But it is most certainly a problem for Israel and Iran’s Sunni Muslim enemies worried about a nuclear, terrorist-helping Iran. Iran’s growing power has brought together Israel with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates. Re-read Kerry’s words above. He’s not addressing Shia Iran when he talks of ISIS pursuing “a calculated strategy of killing fellow Sunni Muslims.”

Discussion about Obama’s lack of strategy, along with growing signs some sort of major foreign policy re-alignment is afoot--one that possibly includes a surprise patterned after Nixon’s trip to China--has prompted the 91-year-old Henry Kissinger to educate us once again. Kissinger still believes in the relevancy of the nation-state, balance-of-power strategy he feels kept the peace in his time. Kissinger writes in the Wall Street Journal:

The clash between the international economy and the political institutions that ostensibly govern it . . . weakens the sense of common purpose necessary for world order. The economic system has become global, while the political structure of the world remains based on the nation-state. Economic globalization, in its essence, ignores national frontiers. Foreign policy affirms them.

Yet although Kissinger honors nation states, they are growing ever more irrelevant in the Middle East. Aren’t we able to see that though Kissinger is right about the power of the global economy to disrupt the traditional order worldwide, the chief counterforce isn’t the nation state?  Rather, it’s religion in the form of anti-modern Islam, whether Sunni extremism or Shia extremism, and whether Mecca- or Tehran- or ISIS-based.

Nuclear Option: Iran, U.S. Senate

Senate Majority Leader Reid                                         Iran President Rouhani

More signs Iran is going nuclear: the Washington Post, usually friendly to President Obama’s foreign policy, has published an editorial raising serious questions about Iran’s intention to set aside its "nuclear option."  The editorial nevertheless has a closing line cop-out, opining that delaying Iran’s progress toward a bomb “is far preferable to. . . military action.”  That's siding with the administration against a "straw man," since its opponents for now favor maintaining stiff sanctions, not bombing.

A week ago Saturday, the administration boosted Iran’s "nuclear option."  Two days earlier, Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) invoked the “nuclear option” in his chamber, enabling the administration for the first time to confirm judges and executive appointments by majority vote.  On this “nuclear option” no negotiations, no compromise with the Republican enemy, just a quick fait accompli that blew up Senate Rule 22, requiring a two-thirds vote to change any rule.  Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), in opposing his party’s action, quoted Levin’s predecessor Arthur Vandenberg (R-MI) in 1949 saying that that if the majority can change the rules at will, "there are no rules except the transient unregulated wishes of a majority of whatever quorum is temporarily in control of the Senate."

Nuke the G.O.P., give nukes to Iran. It confirms what we said here recently: Obama’s real enemy is Republicans. Of course it’s dangerous to appease Iran.  It’s also reckless to allow a simple majority to run the Senate, because in months, that majority might be Republican. Why the misplaced “nuclear options”?

Noah Rothman, writing in “Mediaite,” hazards a guess as to what’s happening in the Senate. It’s in line with “prospect theory,” a predictive model of economic behavior. Prospect theory

stipulates that when a person begins to come to terms with increasingly likely losses, they become risk-takers. Losses sting, the theory asserts, more than gains reward. Thus, risk-seeking behavior increases as the acute pain of an imminent loss comes clearly into focus.

It’s a phenomenon we’ve touched on many times, discussing how animals will fight harder to hold onto what they have than they will fight to gain new territory.

Rothman believes Democrats invoked the “nuclear option” because “the ground is collapsing” from under their feet:

In a panic, they are falling back on maneuvers which mitigate immediate pain and provide short-term gains, all the while acknowledging that the risks they are taking are high and the prospect of long-term advantage extremely low.

The same can be said for appeasing Iran--taking a risk for short-term gain, with “the prospect of long-term advantage extremely low.”

How unfortunate, these misdirected “nuclear options.”

The Youth Unemployment Bomb

Peter Coy has written an important Bloomberg Businessweek cover article on youth unemployment. Here are some highlights:

➢ In Tunisia, the young people who helped bring down a dictator are called hittistes—French-Arabic slang for those who lean against the wall. In Egypt, shabab atileen, unemployed youths; in Britain, NEETs—"not in education, employment, or training;" in Japan, freeters, the English word freelance and the German word Arbeiter, or worker; Spaniards call them mileuristas, those who earn less than 1,000 euros a month; in the U.S., they're "boomerang" kids back home after college; in China, the "ant tribe" are recent college graduates who crowd together in cheap flats on the fringes of big cities.

➢ the common element is failure—. . . of society . . . to harness the energy, intelligence, and enthusiasm of the next generation. . . extra-worrisome: The world is aging. . . the young are being crushed by a gerontocracy of older workers . . . determined to cling to the better jobs . . . and then, when they do retire, demand impossibly rich private and public pensions [youth must] shoulder.

➢ The highest rates of youth unemployment are found in the Middle East and North Africa, at roughly 24%. Most of the rest of the world is in the high teens—except for South and East Asia. . . with single-¬digit youth unemployment. Young people are nearly three times as likely as adults to be unemployed.

➢ A demographic bulge is contributing to the tensions in North Africa and the Middle East, where people aged 15-29 make up the largest share of the population ever. [15]- to 29-year-olds account for 34% of the population in Iran, 30% in Jordan, and 29% in Egypt and Morocco. (The U.S. figure is 21%.)

➢ the failure to launch has serious consequences for society—. . . "Educated youth have been in the vanguard of rebellions against authority certainly since the French Revolution and in some cases even earlier," says Jack A. Goldstone, a sociologist at George Mason. Goldstone [talks of] the "paradox of autocracy: any authoritarian ruler who wants to modernize his country has to educate the workforce. But when you educate the workforce you also create people who are not so willing to follow authority. Thus you create this threat of rebellion and disorder."

➢ rich democracies [also] ignore youth unemployment at their peril. In the 34 industrialized nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, at least 16.7 million young people are not employed, in school, or in training, and about 10 million of those aren't even looking. . . the job market has split between high-paying jobs that many workers aren't qualified for and low-paying jobs that they can't live on.

➢ In the U.S., 18% of 16- to 24-year-olds were unemployed in December 2010. . . For blacks of the same age it was 27%. . . many teens have simply given up. . . The percentage of American 16- to 19-year-olds who are employed has fallen to below 26%, a record low.

➢ more education is not always better. . . [In] the Chinese labor market, newly minted technical-school graduates are earning as much or more than new university graduates, with monthly pay of 2,000 to 4,000 renminbi a month, and in some cases 6,000 renminbi, vs. 2,000 to 2,500 for the university grads. (Monthly pay of 2,000 renminbi equals $3,600 a year.)

➢ Germany and Austria experienced milder youth unemployment . . . partly because of blue-collar apprenticeship programs. . . Last year. . . Germany's youth unemployment rate was 13.9%, compared with a Europe-wide average of 21.2% and 21% in the U.S. In . . . the Netherlands . . . university students . . . gain work experience while enrolled. . . 70% of Dutch youth ages 20-24 are getting some work experience. By contrast in Italy and Portugal only about 10% work while in school. The Netherlands' youth unemployment rate is just 11.2%.

➢ The only surefire cure for youth unemployment. . . is strong, sustained economic growth that generates so much demand for labor that employers have no choice but to hire the young.

9/12

The goal of any organized terrorist attack is to goad a vastly more powerful enemy into an excessive response. And over the past nine years, the United States has blundered into the 9/11 snare with one overreaction after another . . . much of what [Bin Laden] has achieved we have done, and continue to do, to ourselves.

--Ted Koppel, 9.12.10

[Islamic] terrorists regard themselves as “jihadis” - heroic Islamic warriors and conquerors. They see their enemies as “infidels” - enemies of Allah. Yes, the jihadis and those who support them have grievances against America, Europe and Israel. But resolving policy differences is not their goal. Their goal is to defeat the West, and to restore to Muslims the power and glory they enjoyed in the past and which they are confident they are destined to enjoy again.

Iranians are paying members of the Taliban to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan. Think about that: Iran’s rulers are collaborating with the Taliban, an affiliate of al-Qaeda. Political leaders . . . ought to be pondering what . . . it will mean if Tehran succeeds in acquiring nuclear weapons. . .

-- Clifford D. May, President, Foundation for Defense of Democracies, 9.11.10

It takes a high IQ to evade the obvious.

--Thomas Sowell, 9.7.10

Why are intellectuals such as Ted Koppel so determined to downplay the serious, ongoing threat we face from Islamic extremism? Does a high IQ really lead people to evade the obvious?

Most Muslims aren’t “jihadis,” but the minority who are jihadists threaten peace more than any other group of believers practicing politics/terror today. Most Soviet citizens longed for peace; those who didn’t fought in Spain, signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler that while enabling Hitler to invade Poland and start World War II, led to U.S.S.R. seizure of eastern Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, war with Finland, the eventual conquest of Eastern and Central Europe and creation of a satellite empire, the creation North Korea and the invasion of South Korea, theft of A-bomb secrets and a subsequent Cold War that threatened the entire planet.

A significant minority of American intellectuals supported the U.S.S.R. in the 1930s, a big majority during World War II when the Soviet Union was an ally, smaller numbers wanted to “ban the bomb” in the 1950s and found sympathy with Castro in the early 1960s. As a result of America’s Vietnam debacle, the intellectual left gained control over the Democratic Party in 1968, forcing Democratic President Lyndon Johnson from office. Since then, Democrats, led by its intellectuals, have generally opposed U.S. military action abroad, favoring big government at home, a small military footprint overseas.

Republicans, junior partners in big government/big military coalitions led by Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson from 1941 to 1968, are now the party of national security; the only unified political force still focused on overseas threats. And making the separation complete, Republicans now strongly believe in small government at home.

The division shapes our deeply contrasting visions. To intellectuals, smarter than the rest of us, it’s obvious Islamic extremism doesn’t threaten our way of life—homegrown poverty, racism, poor education and health, religious superstition, and polluting businesses pursuing short-term profits do. We can fix our problems by having intellectuals spend money wisely at home.

Here’s what the rest of us realize. Intellectuals are so focused on their domestic enemies, the ones trying to downsize all the government programs they lovingly put together with their own hands, that they refuse to see bad people who don’t like us will take us down unless we fight back, and it’s urgent we beat the bad guys to the punch. We won World War II because we fought back, but at great cost—we could have begun earlier and saved millions of lives. We won the Cold War by fighting back each step of the way, having learned our lesson in World War II. Now, post-9/11, we’ve got another war to win.

9/12.

Iran

"We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world."

-- Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1980)

Khomeini, Khamenei. 1980, 2010. It's all much the same. What changes is Iran’s growing ability to carry out its threat. To Israel, George Will reports after visiting with Israeli Premier Binyamin Netanyahu, Iran constitutes the greatest threat to its existence since Israelis fought with mostly small arms against Arab tanks in 1948.

Iran’s threat stems from the Iranian revolutionary government’s take-over in 1979, its unflagging militancy since, its aggressive encouragement and arming of Hezbollah and Hamas starting in the early 1980s, the Hezbollah victory over the Israeli army in 2006, the present-day threat Hezbollah and its rockets on Israel’s northern border pose to the Jewish homeland today, Hamas’ emergence unfazed from Israel’s invasion of Gaza last year, with virtually the entire world condemning Israel’s action (condemnation repeated when Israeli commandos repulsed a Muslim-supported effort to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza in May), and the current threat of Hamas rockets fired from Gaza into southern Israel.

Then there’s Iran with the bomb—perhaps within two short years. Khamenei calls Israel the "enemy of God." Iran's former president, Ali Rafsanjani, considered a "moderate" by many, calls Israel a "one-bomb country," meaning, fairly accurately, one bomb, and Israel is no more.

The only threat comparable to a nuclear Iran is an already-nuclear Pakistan under militant Islamic control. Our foreign policy must continue to be fixed on Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Liberals Deserting Israel

Israel is a democracy fighting for its life for 62 years now. When Labor ruled Israel, Democrats in the U.S. were comfortable with the government in charge. But liberals have more trouble with Likud, Israel’s nationalistic, militaristic, hold-onto-the-West-Bank-by-building-settlements party.

Knowledgeable liberals take their cues on Israeli politics from the pro-Labor Haaretz (they read its English edition), Israel’s most influential newspaper. Of yesterday’s Israeli commando raid on a Turkish-organized flotilla of activists bringing relief supplies to Gaza, Haaretz has said:

the question was not who would win the confrontation, but who would win more public opinion points. In this test, Benjamin Netanyahu's government failed completely. [His] policy boomeranged and cost Israel its international legitimacy.

Haaretz’s stand—remember, the paper is talking to Israelis in the context of trying to undermine Netanyahu’s government—is echoed in the influential David Ignatius’ Washington Post column on the incident:

a wise leader should hedge his bets rather than roll the dice with a showy commando operation at sea.

Israel’s a democracy. For the democracy’s other side of the story, one supporting the position that flotilla activists left Netanyahu with little choice but to board the ships, please see Mona Charen’s list of facts in the conservative National Review.

Ignatius and other liberals live in an echo chamber of declining support for Israel, one well separated from the days when liberals defended Israel and stood up to conservative, WASPy Arabists in the State Department, roughly the period from 1948 to the early 1980s. Besides Likud’s having replaced Labor in running Israel, what’s going wrong?

Israel, to liberals, looks more and more like apartheid South Africa, minority whites using force to suppress a majority of non-white Palestinians (never mind everybody's a Semite). South Africa tried to wall off blacks into bantustans, depriving them of the vote within South Africa proper. Liberals feel Israel tries to treat the West Bank as its bantustan. Liberals could reach for spiritual unity by rallying against South Africa; now they have Israel and its strong military to rally against.

Briefly, the parallel is outrageously unfair to Israel. Israel is not only a democracy at home, it truly wishes to be rid of the West Bank, but now has to fear that Hamas will take over the West Bank, as it has taken over Gaza, and squeeze Israel from two sides, with Hamas's friends Hezbollah dropping rockets in from the North. Scary. Very scary indeed, with Iran close to having the bomb.

We must support Israel. Israel owes its existence to us, and we are its only friend. Liberals, don’t go wobbly now.

Obamistory

Let's face it this has been the toughest year and a half since any year and a half since the 1930s.

--Barack Obama, 5.25.10

Daniel Halper, writing in the conservative Weekly Standard, rightly excoriates the President for his self-absorbed reading of history. Halper sarcastically notes the “smooth sailing” FDR enjoyed with World War II, Truman’s ending World War II by having to nuke the Japanese, Eisenhower’s Korean War, and Kennedy and Johnson’s Vietnam, along with living with the Russians ability to nuke America from Cuba, or any other place in the world.

Here are my candidates for “toughest year and a half” since the 1930s:

1-18. August 1939-August 1942 (separate overlapping 18-month periods: 18)

Germany and U.S.S.R. sign non-aggression pact; Hitler invades Poland; U.S.S.R. invades Poland and Finland; Hitler invades Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, France, conquering most of Europe; Battle of Britain, unrestricted submarine warfare in Atlantic; Mussolini invades Egypt, Greece; Rommel advances in Africa; Germany invades Yugoslavia, takes over Greece; Germany invades the U.S.S.R.; Japan attacks Pearl Harbor; Japan captures Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, invades Philippines, Burma, Dutch East Indies, controlling most of Southeast Asia, advances into India and toward Australia.

19. August 1949-February 1951

Soviet Union shocks world by exploding A-bomb; China falls to Communists; top State Department official Alger Hiss convicted of perjury for lying about Communist Party membership, legitimizing U.S. “Red scare” and unleashing McCarthyism; ex-Communists Julius and Ethel Rosenberg arrested for passing A-bomb secrets to Soviet Union, convicted March 1951; North Korea invades South Korea; U.S. sends forces to Korea and moves to protect Taiwan, French Indochina; China enters Korean War against U.S.; Gen. MacArthur demands U.S. nuke China.

20-32. October 1967-May 1970 (separate overlapping 18-month periods: 13)

March on Pentagon dramatizes strength of U.S. anti-war opposition to Vietnam war; McNamara resigns as Secretary of Defense; Vietcong Tet Offensive, resulting in attacks on several provincial capitals, capture of Hue, and successful penetration of the U.S. embassy compound in Saigon; strong reaction in U.S. against Vietnam war; President Johnson gives up re-election plans, announces partial bombing halt and effort to begin peace talks; Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy assassinated; Soviets invade Czechoslovakia and crush peaceful “Prague Spring”; Police riot mars Democratic convention; Nixon elected president, but war continues unabated, as does anti-war movement; Nixon efforts to appoint two successive Supreme Court justices blocked by Senate; Nixon (in frustration?) invades Cambodia, setting off riots across U.S. and closing many college campuses for the year.

33-48. October 1979-August 1982 (separate overlapping 18-month periods: 16)

1979 energy crisis caused by revolutionary Iran’s cutback on oil production continues throughout 1980; in October 1979, government-backed militant students seize U.S. embassy in Iran, capture 66 Americans and hold 52 hostages for 444 days; President Jimmy Carter responds by dramatizing seriousness of crisis, which helps him win primary election battle with Ted Kennedy, who appears disloyal for taking on his party’s leader during a crisis; dramatic “America Held Hostage” reports every night on ABC TV; hostage issue turns strongly against Carter after his effort to free the hostages ends in spectacular failure in the Iranian desert, with Carter’s Secretary of State resigning in protest; inflation reaches 11.3% in 1979 and an unbelievable 13.5% in 1980; Fed Chair Paul Volcker drives up interest rates to kill inflation and sends unemployment from 5.9% in November 1979 to 7.8% in July 1980; economy enters recession in 1980, pulls out, goes back into recession for 1981-82; entire period marred by “stagflation,” no growth plus inflation; the “misery index”, which measures Inflation + unemployment, hits its all-time high of 22 in July 1980; Ronald Reagan defeats Carter on twin issues of Iran and the economy; under Reagan, Volcker keeps driving interest rates up until the Fed funds rate hits 20% in June 1981 with the prime rate up to 21.5%, with resulting unemployment reaching 10.8% in November 1982; Henry Kaufman’s August 17, 1982 pronouncement that interest rates have passed their peak kicks off a stock market rally that signals the end of “stagflation.”

49. April 1945-November 1946

Truman, unknown, unbriefed, unprepared, forced to replace the dead Franklin Roosevelt with war unfinished, negotiates with Stalin at Potsdam terms favorable to U.S.S.R. control over Eastern and Central Europe all the way to the Elbe River, drops two A-bombs on Japan, presides over post-war America that sees inflation leap as high as 6% in a single month as government lifts wartime price controls, rising unemployment, unprecedented numbers of strikes and labor disputes, rising tension with the U.S.S.R., tremendous housing shortages as soldiers and sailors return and start families, all resulting in a resounding defeat for Democrats in the 1946 mid-term elections.

50. November 1963-July 1965 (20 months)

Kennedy’s assassination sends America into a funk; Vice President Johnson takes over, pushes a strong domestic agenda of civil rights and a “War on Poverty,” later, his “Great Society,” but postpones until 1965 the tough decisions on Vietnam as the situation in that country deteriorates monthly; finally, in February-March 1965, Johnson begins bombing North Vietnam, then escalates even more in May-July 1965 by sending in American combat troops, changing the conflict from a civil war to a “war of national liberation” that pits North Vietnamese nationalists against the neo-colonialist U.S., leading to America’s first losing war.

51. September 2001-March 2003

George W. Bush responds to 9.11 terrorist attacks, the worst ever on U.S. soil with more expected, by invading Afghanistan and overthrowing its pro-al Qaeda government, while reshaping our domestic defenses; Bush then mobilizes country and international allies to deal with the threat oil-rich Iraq, led by Saddam Hussein and armed, we thought, with weapons of mass destruction, poses as a potential base for future al Qaeda attacks on the West; after Saddam denies U.N. weapons inspectors access to several facilities, thereby violating several U.N. resolutions, and fearing time was running out on an invasion in advance of Iraq’s crippling summer heat, Bush invades Iraq, triggering an insurgency that still has life, even as the situation in Afghanistan flares up again.

52. June 1961-October 1962 (16 months)

Fresh, new American President John Kennedy seeks to take the measure of his Soviet rival, Nikita Khrushchev at Vienna in June 1961 to bad effect; Khrushchev thinks little of the callow Kennedy, follows up the meeting by generating a Berlin crisis, demanding the West withdraw all its troops from Berlin by year's end, and eventually building a wall across Berlin that violates agreements treating Berlin as a single city; Kennedy responds by calling up the reserves and doubling the draft, taking us to the brink of war; Khrushchev moves on in 1962 to shipping offensive, nuclear-tipped missiles to Cuba in a bold effort to tip nuclear power balance in the Soviet Union’s favor, thus creating the Cuban Missile Crisis that perhaps had a one-in-three chance of ending in nuclear holocaust.

53. February 1973-August 1974

Nixon’s “Watergate caper” goes bad when some of those directly involved begin talking; the cover-up grows worse as higher-ups implicate the President himself; as Nixon fights to hang onto power, he creates a constitutional crisis at home, and carries us to the brink of war with the Soviet Union during Egypt’s October 1973 Yom Kipper invasion of Israel as the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. stand on opposite sides; the war triggers an oil crisis and deep recession, partly related to Nixon’s inattention to duty as he fights unsuccessfully for his political life.

54. October 1957-March 1959

Soviet Union launches Sputnik satellite, followed a month later by Sputnik 2, a massive, 1/2-ton satellite with a dog inside that proves Soviets have rocket engines powerful enough to fire intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) sending thermonuclear warheads directly from the U.S.S.R. to the U.S., U.S. attempt to launch its own Vanguard satellite a month later ends in ignominious failure as rocket blows up on launchpad in full view of world; a humiliated U.S. undertakes major reorganization of its research and education system in effort to catch up with Soviets, close perceived "missile gap"; economy meanwhile spins into its worst recession since the Great Depression, while overseas, China frightens the world by undertaking its "Great Leap Forward," a massive reorganization of rural China into communes that first claims tremendous increases in output but ends in mass starvation; the Sputniks and the bad U.S. economy under President Eisenhower cost Republicans dearly in the 1958 elections, with Democrats picking up 15 Senate seats and 49 in the House.

55. September 2008-March 2010

Bush and Barack Obama cope with the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and the worst recession since 1982, while continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

OK. Perhaps Obama’s “toughest year and a half” isn’t the 55th worst 18-month period since the 1930s. It most certainly isn’t #1, however.

U.S., Israel, Iran, and War

Two weeks ago, I wrote that Obama may have picked a fight with Israel to change the subject away from Democratic unwillingness to sanction war with Iran. Obama, in fact, has a strategy for dealing with Iran that he has linked directly to Israeli expansion of settlements into Palestinian territory.

Obama’s strategy for pressuring Iran to forego nuclear weapons, as the blog noted last year, involves first getting Israel to stop construction of new settlements in Palestinian areas, then using Israel’s cooperation on settlements to unite most of the Arab world against Iran’s nuclear program.

Israel isn’t cooperating, so Obama has reason to be upset with Israel. And he also has grounds to feel that lack of Israeli cooperation on settlements means Israel must care more about that issue than it does about uniting Arabs against Iran. As a senior White House official put it, “the Israelis need all of us to be working together on the common goal of keeping the pressure on the Iranians to back off.”

Comment: Obama makes a big mistake if he uses anger at Israeli settlement construction as an excuse to back the U.S. away from war with Iran. It seems Democrats don’t want war with Iran more than they don’t want Iran with the bomb. But Democrats shouldn’t gamble with our future in such a manner. As Israel and others understand, we have to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, even if that objective means war.

The Real Enemy

I think I understand why Barack Obama is being so tough on Israel, on March 20 leaving Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stew and fidget for over an hour while Obama had dinner with his family elsewhere in the White House.

Democrats simply aren’t going to go to war with Iran’s leadership over Ayatollah Khamenei's determination to take Iran nuclear. This even though all we have to do is allow Israel to employ whatever resources we collectively have between us to bomb Iran’s centrifuges into oblivion. We don’t have to undertake any sort of ground war with Iran. Israel previously destroyed nuclear facilities in Iraq and in Syria. It’s harder to knock out Iran's multiple, fortified sites, but an air war certainly seems preferable to a nuclear-armed Iran.

Except Democrats don’t want war of any kind. So Israel’s efforts to get us to help stop Iran from going nuclear are embarrassing Americans. If we make Israel instead of Iran the chief Middle East problem, we can shift our agenda there away from war against Tehran.

That’s what I think is going on.

Anyway, here's what Amos Harel, in the leading Israeli newspaper Harretz, reports:

The key question is how far the world powers are prepared to go to stop [Iran’s] nuclear program. . . Sources in Jerusalem say that behind closed doors, American and European officials are already discussing how to face the "day after" Iran attains nuclear weapons. Although publicly Israel is downplaying the crisis in its relations with the United States, the rift will have an impact on the attempt to keep Tehran in check, making bilateral coordination more difficult.

Israel wants to focus on Iran. We don’t.

Richard Haass: Misunderstanding Choice

Richard Haass can lay claim to being one of the current foreign policy wisemen. He’s head of the establishment Council on Foreign Relations after having served the last two Republican presidents, leaving in 2003 as Colin Powell’s policy planning chief.

Now he’s attempting to influence Obama’s foreign policy through a new book and a book-based Washington Post op-ed. He believes “We would have been better off without Bush’s war of choice” in Iraq, just as we shouldn’t have followed Gen. Douglas MacArthur into North Korea in 1950, we should avoid further escalation in that “ graveyard of empires” called Afghanistan, and that somehow (how, really?), we should allow Iran to enrich uranium, but not enrich enough to build a bomb (!).

Haass sees the world as “gray and nuanced.” In a recent interview, Haass defended his reasoning.

wars of choice are anything but straightforward - they pose some of the most fateful decisions for any president. [After 9.11,] the threat posed by Iraq and Saddam Hussein had in no way increased, [our] goals [weren’t] specific and limited. . . the idea was to transform Iraqi society, [but] it was never clearly stated how the U.S. would bring democracy to Iraq.

Iran’s strategic gain is . . . the principal strategic result of America’s Iraq policy. Iran is dominating in Lebanon through Hezbollah, they are dominating in Gaza through Hamas, and they are now closer to realizing their nuclear ambitions. . .The U.S. strategic position has worsened: Iran is much stronger, Iraq is weak and divided. . . We’re now in an era where Iran, various militias and terrorists now have a much larger share of power. We’re still the most important external actor in the region, but our position has clearly suffered. . . The [current] era of Middle Eastern history . . . will be worse for the United States. . . I think the prevailing view is that the Bush administration left things worse than they inherited.

(Why didn’t you resign?) I believed Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons. Never once, in all my years in government, did some analyst take me aside and say otherwise.

Haass maintains the first Bush administration pursued a “Goldilocks outcome” in Iraq, wanting a weaker and more pliant Iraq, but not one so weak that it wouldn’t be able to balance Iran. But to me, this seems pretty far from where Bush 41 actually was. More accurately, 41 wanted Saddam out of power, but expected the Gulf War loser to fall of his own weight. Iran was a theocratic, anti-U.S. state in 1991 to be sure, but far from going nuclear and having barely fought Saddam to a standstill in 1980-88, Iran was less the problem than it was part of the anti-Saddam solution of that time. Iraq was the enemy.

Going back over 2002-07, after 9.11 we faced Islamic extremist threats from both al Qaeda and Iran. In Iraq, we took on and beat al Qaeda, leaving Iran the principal Middle East threat today. In my view, in the view of many others, we are safer today because Saddam no longer controls the world’s third-largest source of liquid petroleum, and because al Qaeda chose to take its stand in Iraq and lost.

The debate goes on. But given the danger Saddam posed to the world from 1990 on, including after 9.11, necessity (not choice) dictated we end his rule. Now we at least have the chance a democratic Iraq will help counter Iran’s extremism.

Obama’s Sandbox

Obama won’t have the initiative on domestic policy. That role will be with the Democratic congress. And the nature of the Democratic Party—it’s a collection of interest group hierarchies that gain power by respecting and deferring to each other—means union views on trade protection will seriously inhibit America’s and Obama’s ability to expand our economy through free trade.

Make no mistake, free trade and the economic expansion it produced has helped move America and the world toward prosperity for over 60 years, my entire lifetime. We are going to suffer because unions hold a misguided, Michael Moore-type view of how job creation works. For nearly three decades, the U.S. has been blessed by being able to ignore union bosses. No longer.

International economics aside, Obama will have relatively free rein to shape and execute foreign policy and national security. He names the key officials involved, and congress can’t keep pace with swiftly developing world events. Foreign policy is fun. It involves lots of nice food and drink, big speeches, travel, and TV face time. Wherever Obama goes, he comes in at the top of society, with all that that involves. In the end, it’s why folks most want to be president.

Fortunately for Obama, Bush leaves the world a safer place than it was in 2001. Al Qaeda is on the run. Contrary to what Obama says about Afghanistan’s being the “main front,” al Qaeda is in Pakistan (not Afghanistan) because it has nowhere else to go. It would have much rather prevailed in oil-rich Iraq, in the heart of the Middle East, less than a 500-mile straight shot to Israel.

Bush has also impressed Russia and China with his willingness to use force in Iraq and elsewhere, a language they understand. Obama, for all his appeasement rhetoric, will have a group of sober advisors around him who know how to handle Russia and China. They realize both powers respect force, not chatter.

Obama nevertheless faces two great “militants + the bomb” challenges in Iran and Pakistan. And he needs to find a two-state solution to the Palestinian question. Richard Haass, the head of the Council on Foreign Relations, shows pretty well in his Newsweek “Memorandum to the president-elect” that solutions are hard to find. Still, I’m sure Obama welcomes the opportunity, finally, to act, not instruct.

It’s his sandbox.

How to Attack McCain’s Foreign Policy: A Debate Preview?

In 1976, Richard Holbrooke was 35, and managing editor of Foreign Policy, the new, edgier, more openly Democratic foreign affairs publication. Holbrooke prepped Jimmy Carter for his foreign policy debate with Gerald Ford, a big task because the ex-Georgia governor had no foreign policy experience, and Ford had been part of Washington since 1948 as a congressman, vice president, and president.

Holbrooke performed his task brilliantly, coaching Carter to attack Ford from the right for being soft on Communism. Carter's opening blast at Ford so unhinged the president that later in the debate, Ford proclaimed—contrary to fact—that Poland and Eastern Europe were not under Soviet domination. Ford’s error cost him the election. Carter rewarded Holbrooke by offering him any sub-Cabinet foreign policy job he wanted (Holbrooke chose East Asian assistant secretary).

In 2008, Obama has Holbrooke on board, late because Holbrooke had been Clinton’s chief foreign policy advisor. Now Holbrooke may well be prepping Obama for Friday’s foreign policy debate, seeking to repeat his 1976 triumph. So what surprise will Holbrooke have for McCain?

A recent Foreign Affairs article (of 8,000 words) suggests Holbrooke may be advising Obama to attack McCain as even more neo- conservative than Bush. Holbrooke also may counsel Obama to switch the conversation to economics, arguing the economy is crucial to a strong foreign policy.

Holbrooke's article included the following points Obama could use against McCain:

 Although the economy is usually treated as a domestic issue, reviving it is as important to the nation's long-term security as is keeping U.S. military strength unchallengeable.

 [On oil,] Obama has a far more comprehensive plan, with an ambitious goal for emissions reduction, a market-based mechanism that has broad support among economists on the left and the right, and substantially greater investments than McCain's plan in technologies that will help achieve these goals. McCain stresses . . .offshore drilling. This is hardly a serious long-term solution. . .

 [The U.S. and China should develop] joint projects on energy-saving, climate-change-friendly technology [to] increase. . .energy efficiency and [reduce] carbon emissions in both countries. . . carbon capture to clean coal. . .

 McCain's . . . vague "League of Democracies" . . . sounds like an expansion of an organization, the Community of Democracies, created by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright that still exists . . . [And w]hatever McCain says, his "League," unlike the forum created by Albright, would be viewed by everyone as an attempt to create a rival to the UN. . . not even the United States' closest allies -- let alone . . .India -- would support a new organization with such a mandate.

 [Bush let] Hamas, the terrorist organization, run in the 2006 Palestinian elections, with disastrous results, while backing away from democracy promotion in Egypt.

 The [new] president should . . . tackle. . .the arc of crisis that directly threatens the United States' national security -- Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

 [To help in this area, issue] a clear official ban on torture and clos[e] the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which now holds only 260 prisoners. . . Obama supported, and McCain opposed, an important statutory requirement to hold the CIA to the same standards for interrogation as the military, as mandated in the U.S. Army Field Manual.

 McCain supports or takes harder-line positions than the Bush administration. . . it is impossible to ignore the many striking parallels between him and the so-called neoconservatives . . .

 McCain[‘s] position on Iran. . . is tougher than that of the Bush administration. . . ("Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran," he once sang at a public rally). Coupled with his criticism of the Bush administration's deal with North Korea and his call to throw Russia out of the G-8, his position suggests a deep, visceral aversion to talking . . . skepticism of diplomacy as a frontline weapon in the United States' national security arsenal. . . Obama's closer to the traditional default position of almost everyone [including] loyal pro-McCain Republicans, such as James Baker, Robert Gates (before he became secretary of defense), Henry Kissinger, and Brent Scowcroft. . . [Talking to Iran] would strengthen the United States' position . . . with other Muslim states, regardless of its outcome.

 the toughest [Afghanistan-related] challenge is the insurgent sanctuaries . . . of western Pakistan. . . which can destabilize Afghanistan at will -- and has. . . Nothing -- not even Iraq -- represents a greater policy failure for the outgoing administration.