Daily Blurb #4

The Death of Alireza Palhlavi

The death of 44-year-old Alireza Pahlavi, the former Shah of Iran’s youngest son at his home in Boston yesterday, is another sharp reminder of how elusive a return to normalcy continues to be for Iran today.  Although the younger Pahlavi was not involved in the Iranian emigre opposition in the United States and had played a very minor role in his older brother’s campaign to restore the Iranian Peacock Throne, his death symbolizes the frustration so many emigres have experienced over the past three decades as they have watched their country’s descent into fascism.

Perhaps even more significant, the suicide has opened a window on the splintered and severely divided ex-patriate Iranian community in the United States.   Pahlavi’s brother, Reza Pahlavi, the Shah’s oldest son and the pretender to the Peacock throne, is not taken seriously by many – although with his name and prestige he could be supported as a likely leader of a future  Iranian constitutional democracy.  Now with over 25 Iranian opposition groups in existence, bereft of  a central leader or focus, the Iranian opposition, which if  united could marital substantial financial and diplomatic resources for democracy advocates within the forlorn Iranian Green Movement, is instead a rather useless weapon with which to assault the Iranian regime.   Alireza may have played no significant role in any of this.  But his name alone bore weight.  The sad ebbing of Iranian hopes parallels  the tragedy of this young man’s own passing.

Mark Twain’s Problem with the ” N”  word.

The New York Times offers a sensible editorial this morning on the suggestions of how to clean up Mark Twain’s language in his classics The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.  The editorial is a response to the announced release of a combined volume of the two classics in which the word ” nigger” is replaced by ” slave’”  and “Injun”  converted to “Indian.”

The editorial astutely argues that:  “What makes Huckleberry Finn so important in American literature isn’t just the story, it’s the richness, the detail, the unprecedented accuracy of its spoken language. Substituting the word “slave” makes it sound as though all the offense lies in the “n-word” and has nothing to do with the institution of slavery. Worse, it suggests that understanding the truth of the past corrupts modern readers, when, in fact, this new edition is busy corrupting the past.”

I couldn’t agree more.  It is ludicrous to project modern sensibilities on to works of art dating from more than a century ago.   It reminds me of my participation in a book group that I was leading in the early 90s.   The book we had chosen for a particular  month was The Picture of Dorian Gray, the sole novel  by Oscar Wilde.  A young woman who had participated in the group for a few months called me to explain that she could not attend that month’s reading because Wilde’s message was so anti-feminist.  I asked  her whether she would refuse to read Scott’s Ivanhoe because it promoted imperialism or why she had failed to object to the choice of Nabokov’s  Lolita since it deals with pedophilia.

The novels and art of previous generations reflects the temper and temperament of their times.  We can’t change the past; we can only observe and understand it.  By editing  the masterpieces of our literary forbears  so as to make them comply with  our own politically correct notions, we run the risk of denuding them of all authenticity. With so little of it in our own world, we should steer well clear of that kind of tampering.

The Fourth Turning

Yesterday I had the pleasure of interviewing Neil Howe, co-author of  The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with History. You can listen to the  full one hour interview here.    Howe wrote his book in 1997 in attempt to understand where the United States stands in the cycles of history.   He  and his co-author, William Strauss conclude that this country is fast approaching a crisis, or a fourth turning, replicating other eras in human history in which a civilization passes through a process of education, awakening  and corrosion before encountering  a frightening denouement.   Previous American cycles had ended in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and World War II.  The book was remarkably prescient in predicting our financial meltdown of September, 2008 and gave a good indication that we are in for rough waters ahead.

But Howe (and  his book for that matter) was surprisingly optimistic about the American future=, stating that if this fourth turning conforms with previous turnings in the nation’s history, then a winnowing out of destructive moral, cultural and social ills will be forthcoming to be followed by a reversion to fundamental American ideals and values

For those who hang their heads in despair at the rampage of political correctness  in our society and its domination by alien ideals, this is an impressive and joyful read.  I highly recommend it.

The Progressives’ Bunker Mentality

Progressives seem rather hard pressed these days to understand what has become of their agenda.   Take journalist and author Neal Gabler, writing in the Los Angeles Times on Monday:

“Americans don’t have the political will to encourage their government to act boldly when necessary, and because we shrink from addressing the things that assail us, we aren’t likely to get the car out of the ditch we’re in anytime soon. And while Americans cling to their self-image of intrepidness here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, we are on target to demonstrate at the polls that we are anything but.”

Or former presidential candidate, John Kerry:

” We have an electorate that doesn’t always pay that much attention to what’s going on so people are influenced by a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what’s happening,”

Or Hollywood director Rob Reiner

“My fear is that the Tea Party gets a charismatic leader, because all they’re selling is fear and anger and that’s all Hitler sold. “I’m angry and I’m frightened and you should hate that guy over there.”

One can imagine such chastened progressives sitting glumly around tables at Hollywood dinner parties, bemoaning the fate of their agenda and wondering what could have possibly gone wrong.

After all , it was only 24 months ago that the most radical leader in American history, a man with little experience in government nor even as a politician, had whipped his Democratic base into a frenzied belief that his Administration was going to save America.

The tears of joy rolling down the cheeks of Oprah Winfrey and Jesse Jackson; the chill that traveled down the leg of  Chris Matthews; the sense of relief claimed by Nancy Pelosi and Edward Kennedy  – all of it, for an electorate that is frightened, has real no backbone, can’t bear change and  doesn’t deserve its Savior.

Such entropy spits at such an electorate which has consistently refused to embrace untested and expensive government programs or to expand failing existing ones.

Perhaps, then,  it is time for the intrepid, bold progressives to be reminded of something by passive, frightened conservatives.   The United States became the most prosperous country in the world, with a population which enjoys more personal freedoms than any other people in history because of its prudence in not following the failed social experiments of Europe and in resisting, for the most part, ensnarement in other nations’ territorial squabbles.

There have been, to be sure, mistakes and missteps along the way.

But Gabler, Kerry, Reiner et al.  should at least be aware that despite the failure to live up to the  progressive vision, the ‘timorous’ American electorate remains anchored to values that have prevented drift into murky ideological waters and provided  journalists, politicians and entertainers such as themselves with a platform and a freedom to write and speak  contemptuously of their own country.

The President of the United States doesn’t seem to understand any of it either.

At a fundraiser in Boston on October 16 he remarked:

“And so part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now, and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time, is because we’re hard-wired not to always think clearly when we’re scared.  And the country is scared, and they have good reason to be.”

Hard wired not to think clearly?  When will this president finally appreciate that it is not economic turmoil nor crisis which has scarred the American electorate.  It is, rather, his own  failure to inspire confidence and an inability to take the  measure of  the political climate which has sent millions of disenchanted voters fleeing into the arms of the Tea Party Movement.

It would be a tragic mistake for progressives to fail to learn the lessons of this election cycle.  If they persist in casting blame on ordinary Americans, those who feel Obama has gone too far in mortgaging their future to foreign nations or shackling the country to an unworkable health care system, they will almost certainly guarantee that the failed experiment in progressivism will not be revisited in their lifetimes.

It is well then that Rob Reiner invokes the image of Adolf Hitler.  It provides me with an unmatched opportunity to make my own reference to the German dictator.   Near the end of his life, Hitler took  to blaming the German people for his country’s military and diplomatic catastrophes, endlessly declaiming that the Germans had missed their opportunity for greatness and that they did not deserve him.

Hitler’s final days, as reported by his surviving aides , left us with the nomenclature for a mind under siege – bunker mentality.

As it stares in the face of a crushing defeat, that seems to be a surprisingly apt description for the entire progressive movement itself.

Goodbye Juan Williams

Juan Williams’ ouster from his position as commentator at National Public Radio should come as little surprise to any regular listener to NPR. For years I have heard conservatives refer to NPR as National Communist Radio for its compulsive addiction to stories about the evils of capitalism and its apotheosis of the working class.

I have always felt that description went too far.  While NPR has certainly won its stripes as a left of center platform, its ideological core could hardly be described as communist.  Focusing on the poor and dispossessed does not mean a surrender to socialist dogma.  And even if the commentators and reporters could be described as latent socialists, I couldn’t wish for a more calming introduction to their new world order.   The mellifluous tones of Morning Edition‘s Bob Edwards’ voice, and those of his successors Renee Montagne and Steve Inskeep, gave me the capacity to swallow even the most devastating  news with a certain equanimity,a remarkable skill that in my view has not been replicated anywhere else in the United States – in either  print, television or radio.

Nevertheless, several years ago, after nearly 20 years as an NPR addict, I just stopped listening.  I failed to tune in at 6:00 am as was my wont and ceased to pay my annual membership dues to the local NPR affiliate, KCRW.  This was related directly to the unfathomably biased reporting I heard coming from the NPR reporters and commentators regarding the Arab- Israeli conflict.  In the process of making a documentary on the Battle for Jenin in 2002, I had the occasion to interview a few of the NPR reporters in both Israel and the United States and discovered, to my dismay, that there was an alarming absence of knowledge on the part of these individuals on basic historical facts – such as that Israel was created by a U.N. resolution in 1947  or that it had been three Arab armies which had initiated hostilities during the Six Day War ( resulting in the Israeli army’s conquest of the West Bank)  and not the reverse.

The virtual acceptance of  the Arab narrative of the conflict was certainly not the only example of bias. During the Iraq War, there were constant jabs at the Bush Administration’s policies, with a nary a response solicited from the other side.  I was appalled when I heard a NPR reporter in Denmark during the the Danish Cartoon Riots of 2006 call for the Muslim courts , rather than Danish courts, to try the violators of the peace.

And so I ended my membership.   I am not aware whether things changed at NPR but in all likelihood they have not.   There has never been a serious inquiry, to my knowledge,  of the distinctly  Islamic motivations of the 9/11 attacks, an oversight which conveniently side steps the most pressing issue which confronts Western civilization.

Which brings us to Juan Williams.  Williams, it should be noted, did not make his comments  about his nervousness around religiously garbed Muslims on NPR itself.  He made them on FOX News, where he knew such views would be more openly tolerated.  But he also knew he was expressing a sentiment that millions 0f other Americans would  voice without even a second thought -  that religious Muslims, in this country at least, have done an abysmal job over the past ten years in convincing us that their intentions are peaceable and that, as a group, they are categorically opposed to violence.

The failure of Muslim leaders to unequivocally and defiantly  repudiate the violent actions of their co-religionists arouses unease.   Is that really so controversial?  Where, we should demand from this publicly funded institution, are its in depth reports and interviews with the U.S. imams and Muslim community leaders who should be asked pointedly where they stand on the issue of violent jihad and terrorism?   Why is it, as Marty Peretz of the New Republic asked to a howl of liberal condemnation last month, that so few Muslims in this country voice protest about the Muslim slaughter of fellow Muslims in foreign countries?    Where is their outrage about what fellow Muslims do in the name of Islam?

Those are questions which do not find a home in National Public Radio.  And it is that abdication of responsibility which makes regular listeners such as me -  and  perhaps even in-house commentators such as Juan Williams, wonder which “public”  National Public Radio is actually addressing.

Barack Obama and Rolling Stone Magazine

This week Rolling Stone Magazine issued its 1115th issue with the President of the United States featured on its cover. It is the third time Barack Obama has appeared as the magazine’s cover story. The two previous appearances occurred before he became president. This is the first time during his presidency that he has given Rolling Stone an extended, exclusive interview.

Rolling Stone has been hoisted into the pantheon of influential American periodicals in recent months after its report on Afghanistan U.S commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal in May revealed the general to be contemptuous of his civilian commanders and impatient with their procrastination. The story ultimately led to the general’s dismissal. Parading around McChyrstal’s scalp has given Rolling Stone a certain cache among serious magazines that it otherwise does not deserve.

You have to wonder what Barack Obama has to gain by appearing in the magazine. Rolling Stone,from its counter culture heyday in the 1970s, has deteriorated in the past decade into a third rate gossip sheet that trafficks in soft porn, hate mongering and verging, in its indefatigable attacks on Wall Street and big finance, on antisemitism. There is nothing like balance nor objectivity in the magazine and it stands out as a model of the yellow journalism that spits at any position that opposes the progressive agenda.

Suffice to say, no conservative president of modern times – not George W. Bush, nor his father, nor Ronald Reagan, were ever given the same exposure or opportunity.

Based on the affection Obama expresses for the magazine, one has to wonder about the company he and his wife keep. In the very issue in which Obama is interviewed, there appears a homoerotic ad for the new Marc Jacobs fragrance BANG, which offers Mr. Jacobs himself naked, save for a small mirror covering his private parts. A spread on its annual “Hot List”, features the five male members of the performance troupe Jackass, naked and groping one another in a photo montage and reporting on their cinematic antics, which include urinating on an audience and being catapulted through the air in a porta-potty. Its tired political commentary from the vicious Matt Taibbi, who is relentlessly anti-just-about-everything, makes absurd, sweeping generalizations about the Tea Party movement, based on conversations with only a handful of its adherents, contradicting Obama’s own earlier more nuanced understanding of its general philosophy.

The interview with Obama itself is nothing more than a plea by Obama to progressives to return to the hustings and battle for the continued advancement of his agenda. That he senses he is losing even these redoubtable followers is evidence of a certain desperation. If Obama’s own core constituency, he must be reasoning, is shrugging its shoulders about his fate, he may well be standing beneath an avalanche which will bury his agenda and ultimately his presidency. That is why Obama pointedly, in his last statement, demands that Democrats and progressives stand shoulder to shoulder with him in the upcoming mid-term elections. To lose this base, is, in his rather short term thinking, to lose control of the presidency.

” It is inexcusable for any Democrat or progressive to stand on the sidelines in the mid-tern elections…. Right now we have a choice between a Republican Party that has moved to the right of George W. Bush … versus an administration that has been the most successful administration in a generation in moving progressive agendas forward.”

It is difficult to think of a more picaresque revelation. Here not only is Obama conflating the progressive agenda (which no doubt embraces the Rolling Stone nihilist credo) with the general Democratic agenda, but also reveals that he is no longer the centrist president of all Americans he pronounced himself to me on election night in November, 2008. He is now a self-proclaimed progressive.

What a disastrous admission. With the anti-progressive Tea Party movement rapidly escalating into a political hurricane, an anti-incumbent attitude sweeping across the land and the Republicans licking their lips at the meal they are going to make of Democrats in November, there would appear to be nothing more asinine than painting your face such a vibrant shade of red. Obama should already have realized that his presidency will only be saved by a genuine move towards the center, at least appearing to recognize the demands of independents and Tea Party activists who will increasingly have exert a tremendous influence on political discourse in this country for at least the next two election cycles.

To save his presidency, Barack Obama must abandon the progressives and their nihilistic agenda. This might mean no further Rolling Stone feature interviews. But it is a relatively small price to pay for ensuring against the prospect of historical irrelevance.

The Mexican War of Survival

Will Mexico cease to exist as a self governing nation state?

That is a question that we might all be asking ourselves considering recent developments in that country and a growing likelihood of the outbreak of some kind of civil war.

Not a day goes by without a news item revealing yet another outrage perpetrated against a judge, a prosecutor, a political leader or a major business figure.  Kidnappings and killings have reached into such formerly safe enclaves as Acapulco, Cancun and Monterrey.

Today’s Los Angeles Times reveals how even the country’s most important national enterprise, PEMEX – a natural gas exploration and refining giant, has been cowed and intimidated by the drug lords.   Tracy Wilkinson reports that 30 employees of the corporation have gone missing for a month, with no word from them or their supposed kidnappers.  No one wants to talk about the abductions – not the familys’ relatives, not the government investigators and not even the government itself.  Why?   For fear of reprisals from the drug cartels who seem to have penetrated and intimidated every echelon in Mexican society.

Wilkinson reports this frightening reality:

“The capacity of the traffickers to exert influence over a company as mighty as Pemex only solidifies the widely held perception that the cartels are growing in size and strength despite the government’s crackdown.” “How is it,” asked a relative of a kidnapped worker, “that Pemex, supposedly the backbone of the nation, can be made to bow down like this?”

Despite the capture of the drug kingpin  ‘Le Barbie’ last week,  the view that the country is slowly falling apart due to increasing fear and an ensuing collaboration by ordinary citizens with criminal elements is gaining increasing currency.

That is because the public  trust that should exist in police and government forces are actually working to protect Mexican society rather than collaborating with the  Cartels, has substantially eroded.  Last month it was discovered the murdererers of the popular mayor of Monterrey were actually city policemen and included his own bodyguards.  It sent a sobering message of what has happened to Mexican society – you can’t trust anyone, any time.  Its everyone for themselves in a Mexican War  of Survial.

The increasing opinion of Mexican editorialists is that President Calderon’s  four year  struggle with the Cartels is not succeeding and as Wilkinson reports, may be leading to a growing assumption that the country is headed towards break up.  Feuding cartels will  battle it out over huge swathes of territory, making local elected government an anachronism.

The consequences of a potential Mexican collapse for the United States are underplayed and simply underreported in this country.   Such an eventuality would produce a refugee crisis that would make the South Asian crisis of the late 70s look like a family picnic.  It would cause untold hardship and violence in our own border towns and it would create a humanitarian crisis of unparalleled duration.

For years I have called for United States intervention in the mess that is Mexico – a devotion of our resources to destroying the cartels.  We MUST pay more attention if we are going to prevent this war from spilling into our southern cities and border towns and becoming not only Mexico’s War for Survival, but something of our own.

The World’s Raging Gushers

The new immigration law in Arizona, the Greek bail out plan and the attempt to control the Louisiana oil spill all seem to share at least one thing in common.  They are all desperate measures to plug raging gushers – human, financial and environmental – which threaten to swamp the lives and economies of millions of people in the West.

Lets examine each in turn.

Arizona

In Arizona, Governor Jan Brewer signed Senate Bill 1070 with the intent of addressing a problem that the Federal government has proved itself singularly incompetent to handle.   For 20 years the Arizona border has been a porous sieve, with tens of thousands of Hispanics finding a way to avoid border patrols and surveillance from federal authorities.  With the tightening of border controls in California and Texas, the illegal  immigration rush has been funneled into the two desert states of Arizona and New Mexico, which have traditionally proven much harder to police.  A Department of Homeland Security high tech fence has not worked out and is now in hiatus pending a review.   Washington D.C., meanwhile, has engaged in a heated debate over the way of dealing with the status of illegal immigrants already in the United States.  But it is doing nothing to address the means of circumventing their entry.

The furor that has greeted Senate Bill 1070 wasn’t hard to predict.  Multi-culturalists, amnesty devotees, civil rights advocates and those generally not so hot on the federal government’s exercise of sovereign rights, have described the legislation as akin to a Nuremberg law.  That idea, of course , is preposterous.   The Nuremberg Laws were Nazi racial edicts passed in 1935 against legitimate German citizens.  SB1070 only targets those who have already broken American law and are not citizens. Nor does it target race or ethnic groups.

The one thing that has so many people exercised is this amendment to the wording of  Sec. 2. Title 11, chapter 7 is:

” A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER, WITHOUT A WARRANT, MAY ARREST A PERSON IF THE OFFICER HAS PROBABLE CAUSE TO BELIEVE THAT THE PERSON HAS COMMITTED  ANY PUBLIC OFFENSE THAT MAKES THE PERSON REMOVABLE FROM THE UNITED STATES”

The apparent ability of Arizona’s police force to arrest anyone on a mere suspicion that they are illegal will transform Arizona, into, you guessed it, a police state.   But the law does not breach any of the 4^th Amendment prohibitions against illegal searches and seizures. Arizona police are prohibited from racially profiling or stopping anybody merely because of appearance or ethnicity.  They may only  stop someone whom they suspect of either having committed a crime or misdemeanor or of being in the process of doing so.   Lest we forget, being in the United States without proper authorization or identification such as a passport and visa  or a driver’s license, is such a federal misdemeanor.   In reality, SB1070 does nothing to the law but seek to enforce it,  a responsibility the federal government has abrogated.

Greece

The Greek bail out plan announced this week, in which the International Monetary Fund will join with many of the larger European countries in supporting the collapsing Greek economy, was also an attempt to stave off a disaster.    The Greeks have for months teetered on the edge of default on their foreign loans, the prospect of which I explored in the my piece A Greek Tragedy.

The bail out plan rocked markets in Spain and Portugal, threatening to lower their bond ratings.  The drop in investor confidence has rightfully been called a  contagion which  could well spread to many of the smaller and more vulnerable European  economies, such as Italy and Ireland (who, together with Spain, Portugal and Greece, make up the colorful European acronym ” PIIGS”).  The outcome for the Euro’s stability could be devastating as the larger countries are forced to contribute  substantial amounts of their  GDP to shore up  their less robust fellow EU’ers to the south.

Germany plays a pivotal role in all of this and in my previous article, I identified its growing resistance to be being drawn into the vortex of a general European collapse.

But there is an interesting flip side to these developments.  The weakening Euro has made German imports in the United States and Asia cheaper, which is becoming something of a boon to German industry.   One other development, not spoken about too openly these days, is the prospect of a renewed German domination of Europe.  With all the smaller countries of Europe helplessly dependent on German largess, the economic behemoth to the north will exert, by force if necessity, an increasingly controlling influence on monetary policy and financial regulation in those countries.

Although the Germany of 2010 is not the Germany of  1940 and no one is accusing the Germans of a potential political dictatorship, we cannot evade the truth that financial power is often the lever used to exert political power, and the prospects for one country coming to totally dominate that area of the world, cannot be discounted as a fantasy.

Louisiana

You would think poor old Louisiana had had enough trauma to last at least a century.   But then along comes the oil spill of the decade as a burning rig off  Venice, LA, leaves 11 men missing, (presumed dead) and threatens an environmental catastrophe not witnessed since the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska in 1989.

The extraordinary irony of this occurrence is that it happened in the wake of the Obama administration’s decision ( see my piece Surprise! Off Shore Drilling May Not  Be Just a Conservative Passion)  to relax the moratorium on off- shore drilling in Virginia and in other select areas.  The decision came as increasing pressure had mounted on the administration to allow the United States to develop its own oil resources instead of being held at the mercy of the oil cartels in the Middle East and Latin America.

All of that will now be put on hold as environmentalists launch a vigorous “you see” campaign to demonstrate how foolish such an idea would be.   They will paint a bleak future in which no beach in the world will offer water pure enough to allow children to swim safely and drinking water would affected by  oil seepage into water tables.

But lets talk a little common sense, please.   The likelihood of a spill of this nature with any regularity, is highly remote.  The causes of the freak explosion on the Transocean rig are unknown and it is simply too early to suggest that the rig demonstrates the inherent  danger of oil rigs or that all rigs will result in absolute  environmental degradation.  The noise emerging from the environmentalists reminds me of the Three Mile Island fiasco in 1979, when our entire nuclear industry was stopped in its tracks without any evidence at all  that the partial  reactor meltdown in Pennsylvania had  had  any permanent affect on humans in the area.

Such intemperate environmentalist scare tactics neutered the nuclear industry and  set us on a course of energy dependence which, as we well know, has had far reaching consequences.

Conclusion

None of these problems are at all simple to resolve.   Gushers are never too amenable to easy fixes and plugs.   But lets not forget that these are human problems, to which humans will, in their ingenious way, apply human solutions.  The jury should therefore not be called and there should be no rush to judgment on SB1070 , the Euro meltdown  or the Louisiana oil spill, until all the evidence is actually in and we can subject it all to reasoned, discriminating analysis.

The ‘Out’ing of Dennis Ross

The United States’ Jewish community was roiled this week when the news blog  POLITICO reported that a senior member of the Obama Administration had indicated that Middle East adviser Dennis Ross might have dual loyalties.   The official’s words, at least as reported by Politico, were that  “he ( Ross)  seems to be far more sensitive to Netanyahu’s coalition politics than to U.S. interests and doesn’t seem to understand that this has become bigger than Jerusalem but is rather about the credibility of this administration.”

The report was immediately denied by NSC chief of staff Denis McDonough who defended Ross, underscoring “his commitment to this country and to our vital interests.”

Denial apart, the very serious allegation that a U.S. Jewish diplomat may be focused on things other than the interests of the United States, should ring some warning bells.   It was exactly the aspersion cast against Benjamin Disraeli when he became prime minister of  Britain in 1868 and then again in 1874, despite the fact that he had been baptized at the age of 12 and had been an Anglican since that time.   Much of the criticism of his policies was actually couched in anti-Semitic terms.  He was depicted in various  antisemitic political cartoons with a big nose and curly black hair, referred to as “Shylock” and “abominable Jew,” and portrayed in the act of ritually murdering the infant Britannia.

Disraeli, to his credit, never denounced Jews or shied away from the acknowledgment of  his Jewish roots.   In fact he evinced pride in his heritage, famously responding to a parliamentary slanderer : “Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the Right Honourable Gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the Temple of Solomon.”   Disraeli saw no conflict of interest in using British power to support Jewish interests and would have almost certainly been a firm and committed Zionist, having penned his novel Tancred as a proto- Zionist blueprint.

Similarly Herbert Samuel, appointed the first High Commissioner for the British Mandate of Palestine in 1921, was pilloried as unfit to be a High Commissioner because of his own Jewish extraction.   Like Disraeli , Samuel was not a practicing Jew but before his appointment he was an open Zionist and had strongly favored the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.  This made him anathema to the Arabs and distasteful to British elites, who were certain that his biases would turn the Arab world against Britain.  But his four years in Palestine were, if anything, a great disappointment to the Zionists who felt he had bent over backwards to mollify Arab opinion at the expense of the rights of Palestine’s Jewish community.  His appointment of the villainous antisemite Hajj  Amin al Husseini as Grand Mufti  was to have dire consequences for the region and his decision to slow the rate of Jewish immigration only added to Jewish frustration.  He left his post in 1925 hated by his Jewish brethren and looked at askance by his own government.

The two models offered by Disraeli and Samuel suggest to the Jewish members of the Obama Administration some interesting contrasts.   Either they can willingly renounce their attachment to Israel  – its welfare and security, in the interests of the administration’s “credibility”  – or they can hold fast to their own identities and make  the evident case that there is no divergence in interests between the two nations and that Israel’s security is in fact America’s as well.

For his part, Dennis  Ross should have no cause for worry that he will be castigated as a traitor.   Much like Samuel and Disraeli,  he is not a practicing Jew and has built his career demonstrating even handedness as a Middle East envoy.

Dennis Ross’s credentials as an American patriot can therefore not be impugned.   There are, in fact, much better reasons to repudiate him.   They revolve around  his abysmal diplomatic track record  and his alarming  absence of good  judgment.  Ross was one of the great boosters of the 1993 Oslo Accords and throughout the 90s remained a die hard Oslo loyalist even as Israeli citizens were being blown to smithereens by Palestinian suicide bombers.   He was a genuine believer in Arafat and the Palestine Authority as credible  partners for peace, even as incontrovertible proof mounted that the P.A’s leadership had masterminded the Second Intifada, sending the peace process spiraling into desuetude.  He still holds firm to his understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict as a struggle over territory, when he is certainly astute enough to recognize that it is really a contest over Israel’s right to exist.

But be that as it may, the fire purportedly extinguished this week  by NSC Chief of Staff Dennis McDonough, still smolders as a reminder to Jews both inside and outside this administration that they are being watched.  How these individuals respond to such surveillance – either with the defiance of a Disraeli or the submissiveness of a Samuel, may define not just American- Israeli relations for the duration of the Obama administration, but relations between the  U.S. Jewish community and broader community as well.

Are All Options Still on the Table Regarding Iran?

Four years ago this month I asked an astute U.N. observer what she thought was going to happen with Iran and its nuclear program.

She looked at me rather glumly and said, “I think they’re going to get the bomb.”

I remember being shocked at that assessment.  It seemed inconceivable to me that neither the United States nor the West would  be capable of summoning the will to thwart such a threat to our civilization.  In the event they did nothing, I at least felt certain that Israel would rise to the occasion and deliver a knockout blow to the Iranian reactors, much as it done to the Iraqis in 1981.

I am in shock no longer.

With each passing day it seems the commitment of our leadership to preventing Iran’s possession of nuclear weaponry becomes weaker.  Barack Obama has ramped down the tough rhetoric in order win China’s and Russian support for sanctions.  Hilary Clinton is even hinting about extending the U.S.  nuclear shield to the Middle East, a clear sign of the administration’s resignation to the fact of  a nuclear armed Iran.  Israel looks increasingly hemmed in by an American administration which has no apparent patience for its claims of vulnerability to an Iranian missile attack.

Obama’s expectation that China and Russia will join the United States in a full throttle U.N. sanctions campaign against the Iranians seems sorely  misplaced.  The Chinese and Russians have displayed only tepid interest in such a campaign, with a willingness to undertake only the narrowest of sanctions, even as the Iranians are revealed to be purchasing vital equipment for constructing centrifuges from Chinese companies!

But the sanctions in and of themselves do not seem to be worth very much anyway.

A front page story in the Wall Street Journal on Monday April 4 indicated that freezes of Iranian assets have produced pitiful results to date, with only $43 m secured, or roughly a quarter of what Iran earns in a single day from its oil revenues.

There is almost no doubt that the Iranians are rolling with laughter at the apparent feebleness of the West in building an effective barrier to its acquisition of nuclear weaponry.

With such an absolute failure of resolve, could there be another way of bringing Iran to heel?

Yes.

One way is to tie up the amount of refined petroleum making its way into Iran.  Because it lacks sufficient facilities for refining crude oil, Iran must import nearly 40% of its petroleum needs from other countries.  Seven years ago, during a petroleum shortage, there were riots in Iranian cities when the government was forced to impose steep increases in gas prices.  Tightening access to refined crude could have an instant and dramatic impact on the regime.  It is the kind of pressure that can quickly undermine the credibility of any government, as former U.S. president Jimmy Carter can well attest.

Another means, rarely mentioned or spoken about, is to destroy Iran’s purchasing power by making it conduct financial transactions in a currency other than dollars or euro.   In Israel, an organization called Shurat HaDin , or the Israel Law Center, has been pursuing for years a strategy in which terrorist organizations and their state sponsors have been sued through United States courts on behalf of plaintiffs who have suffered injury or death from a terrorist attack.

Pending judgments against the Palestinian Authority have attached the P.A.’s  U.S.  based assets – namely bank accounts.   Successful judgments like this can force many banks to eschew dealing with regimes that support or finance terror.  The result  could be an increasing skittishness among American banks  in dealing with unstable regimes like the PA , which, in the event of the execution of the judgment, may need to open accounts in places as far distant as Argentina.  This may serve to restrict or outright debar the PA from trading in American currency.

Finally, there is the pure threat of military force.   Teddy Roosevelt, at the turn of the 20th Century, understood that diplomatic engagement with aberrant regimes needed to backed up by the quiet understanding that the United States would not renounce force as an option should diplomacy fail.    The Iranians have shown that they are quite susceptible to this kind of unrealized threat.  After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and in fear that they might be next, the Iranians made all kinds of conciliatory gestures towards the United States, including offers to curtail its nuclear program and improve diplomatic relations. A show of force in the Persian Gulf could make a substantial impression on the mullahs in Tehran who are as prone as any unpopular regime to tremble before a determined and overpowering  force.

It is a mistake, then, to believe that there are no options available to the American government other than sanctions.  The failure to do nothing other than bleat about the iniquity of the Iranians,  at this point threatens a potential catastrophe for American prestige and diplomatic clout.   For not only will it offer terrorist sponsoring states such as Syria and Yemen a hegemonic shield behind which it can conduct its more nefarious activities with impunity.   It will also encourage allies who have been tentative about their allegiance to the United States in the first place, to drift from its sphere of influence and towards the China/ Russia bloc.  This augurs the disintegration of American hard and soft  power.

Both our two most recent presidents are on record as consistently stating that “all options are on the table” for dealing with the recalcitrant nuclear aspirations of the North Korean and Iranian regimes.  But you can’t keep options on a table if you have already swept them under the carpet.

Sadly, that is the conclusion our adversaries may have already come to as American resolve to thwart the most significant threat to global stability in our generation, slowly collapses.

Surprise! Drilling May Be More Than a Conservative Passion

Those who were around for the Republican Convention in September 2008  will recall some of  its more interesting highlights.  First there was the electrifying acceptance speech by the then politically unknown Sarah Palin.   Then there was the feisty, no holds barred address by Rudi Guiliani (remember  “Change is not a destination, just as hope is not a strategy?”)

But by far the most interesting attraction of that convention for me was the sound of the convention members themselves roaring, ” drill, baby, drill,”  grafting an awkward sexual  innuendo onto an otherwise staid policy platform.

It was of course believed back then that Democrats were perennially and viciously opposed to any off -shore drilling and that the efforts  for developing the vast stores of oil wealth lying beneath the continental shelfs  of California, Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico would be stymied by Democrats for years into the future.

Hence the rather suggestive Republican mantra.

So you can imagine the surprise of many Democrats when Barack Obama announced on March 31 that a 20 year old federal moratorium that has limited drilling along coastal areas other than the Gulf of Mexico would be lifted.  The new plan, announced by the Secretary of the Interior, allows new oil drilling off Virginia’s shoreline and considers it for a large chunk of the Atlantic seaboard as well.

In addition, the Interior Department will forge ahead with drilling  platforms in the eastern Gulf of Mexico if Congress allows that moratorium to expire.   It will also  allow exploration along the south Atlantic and mid- Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf “to support energy planning” — a step toward potential leasing.

Environmentalists, as you might expect, are writhing in apoplexy about this assault on a long held liberal orthodoxy.

David Helvrag, the President  of the environmental group Blue Marine Foundation opined in the Los Angeles Times on Thursday:

” Offshore drilling has done little to wean us from Middle Eastern oil. And with less than 5% of our domestic oil located offshore, more ocean drilling won’t help now either. The only real way to quit relying on foreign oil is to wean ourselves from oil, and that’s something our leaders are unlikely to fully embrace until we’ve tapped that last reserve of sweet crude.”

Ah, there it is -  the standard trope of the NOAAC ( No Oil At Any Cost) crowd – that only the elimination of fossil fuels as an energy source will relieve us of that triple headed monster -  our dependence on Middle East oil, the  pollution of our oceans and the perils of  global warming.

It is a neat cure all, but like many simple minded solutions,  almost totally falacious.

The United States is presently importing 70 percent of the oil we use at a cost of about $700 billion per year paid to foreign countries, some of which could be secretly pledged to our destruction .

To get an idea of what we are losing daily in not developing our own extraordinary off shore resources try and swallow these statistics:   We pay $50 million every day to Russia, $109 million to Saudi Arabia and $150 million to Venezuela.

At this rate, that kind of wealth transfer will  give our enemies the financial clout, in only five years, to finance the take over  of the combined $18 trillion worth of the Fortune 500.

This is when we possess an estimated worth of $60 trillion in off shore oil  and natural gas  deposits that our moratoria, until now at least, will not allow us to touch.

Would all  this be enough to wean us off our foreign oil dependency?  Not immediately perhaps.   But it might offer something even better – a level of domestic  competitiveness that will drive the OPEC controlled price of foreign oil down.

Also forgotten,  is that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s oil deposits contain one of the greatest areas for drilling in the world with an estimated 60 billion barrels of oil buried beneath its surface.  Those who think that oil production will ruin a pristine natural environment there simply don’t know the facts.  For the area sought to be drilled is only a 2,000 square area adjacent to the coast, which occupies just 2%  of the total area of the ANWR.   Nor is it a true wildlife habitat or a pristine forested areas at all, but barren, windswept tundra.

The argument that oil development will lead to the despoliation of the environment is also mostly nonsense.  Oil exploration and extraction has advanced to such a high level of sophistication in the past forty years that drilling can now be  conducted sideways without huge rigs blotting the  seascape.  Intensive safety procedures have ensured that there has not been even one serious incident of spillage from an oil well (even during the devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina) in the past forty years.

As for global warming,  we are still years away from the cost efficient development of bio-fuels that could replace fossil fuels.  This was implicitly recognized by the President when he suggested that the granting of leases for off shore oil exploration was a” temporary measure” to help the nation through a period where alternative sources of energy can be developed and be made more widely available.

The embrace of this reality, together with the administration’s advancement of nuclear power as a safe, clean and cheap source of energy for America’s needs, is a welcome sign of sanity among Democrats.

But that probably won’t prevent  the certain flood of  law suits soon coming the president’s way.    They will arrive because environmentalists still act as if the Santa Barbara oil spill, which catalyzed the movement for bans on off shore drilling,  occurred only last week.  In fact it occurred in January, 1969 and since then oil drilling has become inordinately safer, more exact and less expensive.

And while we have been twiddling our thumbs the rest of the world has shown no embarrassment whatsoever about developing newly discovered off shore oil deposits.  Brazil has displayed few qualms about seeking to develop recently discovered off shore oil fields near Rio De Janiero.   Russia and Britain have not been stymied by a litigious environmental movement in developing the North Sea.  Nor, for that matter, have China and Japan, who have recently entered into a joint project to develop vast natural gas deposits in the Sea of Japan.

With such facts populating our calculations of the American future, how can anyone sensibly argue that the movement to restore off shore drilling is just a Republican fillip to its oil industry paramours.

It all reminds me of a story told about the late Ted Kennedy who, in the early 90s, was photographed in a compromising position on a speedboat with a naked 22-year-old companion.  Widely distributed and reported on, an embarrassed Kennedy was approached by Alabama Democratic Senator Howell Heflin who chortled:  “Well I do believe the Senator from Massachusetts has changed his position on offshore drillin’!”

That is a joke, I suppose, that Democrats and Republicans can both now appreciate.

The Volunteer Attorneys

The battle over the attorneys continues.  First the Bush administration fired nine Justice Department attorneys in December, 2006 occasioning a Congressional investigation of Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales’ conduct and resulting, a year later, in his resignation.  Then the Obama administration launched an investigation into the conduct of Legal Counsel to the President’s office, helmed by John Yoo and Jay Bybee to determine the extent of their liability for giving legal sanction to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program.  Unlike Gonzales, Yoo and Bybee emerged innocent of all charges, even if they were badly singed by the process. 

Now its the Republicans’ turn.  In his book Courting Disaster, former  Department of Defense speech writer Marc Thiessen devoted an extensive chapter to the way in which several Obama appointees to the Justice Department had voluntarily defended Guantanomo Bay detainees.  U.S. justice calls for every man to have his innocence defended in court by legal counsel and indeed our courts are mandated to appoint  legal counsel where the accused has not elected to defend himself .    But should those who have volunteered to represent the enemies of the state be serving in our own Department of Justice? 

That is the volatile question posed by Keep America Safe, an organization co-founded by Liz Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney.  In an advertisement distributed through YouTube, Cheney demands that  Attorney-General Eric Holder identify the seven Department of Justice attorneys who once served as voluntary counsel for the Guantanomo Bay al Qaeda inmates.  Should Holder be forced to disclose those names and why is it important? 

The Wall Street Journal Weekend Journal posed that very question two attorneys who should know something about the issue.  Steve Jones was the Oklahoma City based attorney who defended Timothy McVeigh after his arrest in 1996 on charges of planning the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City.  Andrew C. Mc Carthy was the lead federal prosecutor of the plotters of the World Trade Center bombing in New York in 1993. 

Jones leads off with a case for attorneys who defend unpopular clients.  He  states that it has long been the position of American system of justice to offer a defense of criminals who our system labels innocent until proven guilty.  John Adams defended British soldiers accused of shooting several Boston’s citizens in 1770 and suffered public opprobrium for doing so.  But that did not stop him from becoming our second president. 

As an attorney Abraham Lincoln also took up unpopular causes, as did many of our distinguished federal judges.  Jones concludes that “neither history nor experience demonstrates that the points being made by Ms. Cheney and her allies have any merit.  They merely represent “forensic vigilantism,” and “a political lynch mob mentality.” 

Not so, says McCarthy.   It is not an American tradition for U.S. attorneys to volunteer to represent enemies of the state, but rather a modern anomaly.  The prisoners at Guantanomo Bay, were not U.S. citizens who had been deprived of their right to habeas corpus but unprivileged, alien enemy combatants.   U.S. law has also not traditionally extended the right of legal counsel in habeas corpus cases, even to U.S. citizens – and until 2004, enemy prisoners were not entitled to challenge their detention at all.  Moreover, he defends the Keep America Safe advertisement in its insistence that when attorney volunteer to participate in cases, where there is no requirement of representation of legal counsel, that choice likely reflects their policy preferences.  

On balance, Jones’ case comes out as unconvincing.   It fails to answer the question of how the American public should regard those who voluntarily (rather than as draftees, as he was) defend non-citizen enemies of the state and whether it has a right to have the political orientation and policy biases exposed through a demonstration of their choices. 

There is almost no question that at a time of grave national security risk (or war, as Mc Carthy calls it), the country’s legal team should be composed of individuals, who, at the very least, place the country’s security first and individual human rights in only a secondary position.  For as the John Yoo episode well demonstrated, we rely upon these attorneys for the legal justification of our national security policy.  If their position is that the individual rights of terrorists trumps the need for the American public to be protected, then we should demand their resignation. 

In the end, this debate exemplifies the struggle between the exigencies of national defense on the one hand and the rights of individuals to privacy and protection on the other.  In another sense it also illustrates the battle between those who reject American particularism, which requires that American law apply to just Americans  – and those who support the notion that American protections and privileges should have universal application.    

Does the decision of the so called ‘al- Qaeda Seven’ to defend non-citizen enemy combatants make them, ipso facto, supporters of al Qaeda’s ideology?  Of course not.  But equally it does not makes them heroes of conscience whom we should reward with employment in an important national office tasked with responsibility for our safety and well being.