February 24, 2009 .com



February 24, 2009

Now that we have a president universally loved by the world, we are going to get some more help in Afghanistan. Right? Abe Greenwald says not so much.

... It was always the height of silliness to suppose that leaders would readily send their countries’ citizens to fight alongside Americans if only America would ask more nicely. Other countries will fight with us when they believe our cause is their own, and when it comes to the War on Terror, there was never much hope of convincing an increasingly Muslim Europe to publicly join the U.S. in fighting jihadists.

Other Western countries desperately want America to get the job done; they just don’t want to risk the domestic upheaval that would come should they join in the fight. ...

 

Mark Steyn chronicles the rise of radical Islam.

... From Islamabad, let us zip a world away to London. Among the growing population of Yorkshire Pakistanis is a fellow called Lord Ahmed, a Muslim member of Parliament. He threatened "to bring a force of 10,000 Muslims to lay siege to the House of Lords" if it went ahead with an event at which the Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders would have introduced a screening of his controversial film "Fitna."

Britain's Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, reacted to this by declaring Wilders persona non grata and having him arrested and returned to the Netherlands.

Smith is best known for an inspired change of terminology: last year she announced that henceforth Muslim terrorism (an unhelpful phrase) would be reclassified as "anti-Islamic activity." Seriously. The logic being that Muslims blowing stuff up tends not to do much for Islam's reputation – i.e., it's an "anti-Islamic activity" in the same sense that Pearl Harbor was an anti-Japanese activity.

Anyway, Geert Wilders' short film is a compilation video of footage from recent Muslim terrorist atrocities – whoops, sorry, "anti-Islamic activities" – accompanied by the relevant chapter and verse from the Koran. ...

 

And Spengler reports on surprising trends in Iran.

Political Islam returned to the world stage with Ruhollah Khomeini's 1979 revolution in Iran, which became the most aggressive patron of Muslim radicals outside its borders, including Hamas in the Palestinian territories and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Until very recently, an oil-price windfall gave the Iranian state ample resources to pursue its agenda at home and abroad. How, then, should we explain an eruption of social pathologies in Iran such as drug addiction and prostitution, on a scale much worse than anything observed in the West? Contrary to conventional wisdom, it appears that Islamic theocracy promotes rather than represses social decay.

Iran is dying. The collapse of Iran's birth rate during the past 20 years is the fastest recorded in any country, ever. Demographers have sought in vain to explain Iran's population implosion through family planning policies, or through social factors such as the rise of female literacy.

But quantifiable factors do not explain the sudden collapse of fertility. It seems that a spiritual decay has overcome Iran, despite best efforts of a totalitarian theocracy. Popular morale has deteriorated much faster than in the "decadent" West against which the Khomeini revolution was directed.

"Iran is dying for a fight," I wrote in 2007 (Please see Why Iran is dying for a fight, November 13, 2007.) in the literal sense that its decline is so visible that some of its leaders think that they have nothing to lose. ...

 

Christopher Hitchens has ideas how Obama should talk to Iranians.

... For decades, we have wondered what might happen when or if an apocalyptic weapon came into the hands of a messianic group or irrational regime. We are surely now quite close to finding out. I am not one of those who believe that the mullahs will immediately try to incinerate the Jewish state. This is for several reasons. First, the Iranian theocracy is fat and corrupt and runs a potentially wealthy country in such a way as to enrich only itself. A nuclear conflict with Israel would be—in a grimly literal sense—the very last thing that it would embark upon. Second, and even taking into account the officially messianic and jihadist rhetoric of the regime, it remains the case that a thermonuclear weapon detonated on the Zionist foe would also annihilate the Palestinians and destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque. (Even Saddam Hussein at his craziest recognized this fact, promising with uncharacteristic modesty only to "burn up half of Israel" with the weapons of mass destruction that he then boasted of possessing.)

Nor, I think, would the mullahs hand over their hard-won nuclear devices to a proxy party such as Hezbollah or seek to make a nuclear confrontation with the United States or Western Europe. What they almost certainly will do, however, is use the possession of nuclear weapons for some sort of nuclear blackmail against the neighboring gulf states, most of them Arab and Sunni rather than Persian and Shiite, but at least one of them (Bahrain) with a large Shiite population and a close geographical propinquity to Iran. Already you hear the odd rumble in hard-line circles in Tehran to the effect that Bahrain ought properly to be part of the Persian motherland. Imagine if Saddam Hussein had acquired a nuke before invading Kuwait. (This is why so many Arab governments and newspapers have been so tepid about supporting Iran's proxies Hamas and Hezbollah in the most recent confrontations with Israel.) ...

 

Mark Steyn has some Corner posts on Obama's responsibility summit and the markets.

On the Is-he-wingin'-it-or-is-he-a-Machiavellian-genius? thing that Derb started this morning, I'd say the president is wingin' it. That summit today was hilarious, especially the bit before all the bigshots went off to their "breakout sessions" and Obama told them, in best Community-Organizer-in-Chief mode, "not just to identify problems, but to identify solutions." ...

 

Even Chris Matthews has figured out Obama is a fool.

I can hardly believe what I'm watching on MSNBC right now. Chris Matthews is almost critical — no, not even almost, he's flat-out critical of President Obama on the economic front. He mentions an earlier conversation with CNBC's manic stock analyst Jim Cramer and a University of Maryland professor (Peter Morici?) knocking Obama for several economic decisions — that the stimulus bill needed more real infrastructure and less pork, that the housing bill isn't inspiring confidence and doesn't look like it will work, and that no one has faith in Tim Geithner's solution for the banks. ...

 

David Brooks too.

... Readers of this column know that I am a great admirer of Barack Obama and those around him. And yet the gap between my epistemological modesty and their liberal worldviews has been evident over the past few weeks. The people in the administration are surrounded by a galaxy of unknowns, and yet they see this economic crisis as an opportunity to expand their reach, to take bigger risks and, as Obama said on Saturday, to tackle every major problem at once.

President Obama has concentrated enormous power on a few aides in the West Wing of the White House. These aides are unrolling a rapid string of plans: to create three million jobs, to redesign the health care system, to save the auto industry, to revive the housing industry, to reinvent the energy sector, to revitalize the banks, to reform the schools — and to do it all while cutting the deficit in half.

If ever this kind of domestic revolution were possible, this is the time and these are the people to do it. The crisis demands a large response. The people around Obama are smart and sober. Their plans are bold but seem supple and chastened by a realistic sensibility.

Yet they set off my Burkean alarm bells. I fear that in trying to do everything at once, they will do nothing well. I fear that we have a group of people who haven’t even learned to use their new phone system trying to redesign half the U.S. economy. ...

 

Obama doesn't have enough to do here, he's going to send $900 million to Hamas. Gaza first for window dressing, but Hamas eventually. Andy McCarthy has the story.

Various la-la land conservatives and moderates assured us that Obama, despite a career spent in the Left's fever swamps, is really a "pragmatist" who would govern from the center.  They pooh-poohed us knuckle-draggers who doggedly pointed to his radical intimates, like Hamas-apologist Rashid Khalidi.  I wonder what they're thinking today as Obama takes time out from destroying the economy to send $900M from the mint's busy printing press to Hamas. ...

 

VDH comments on the Hamas Stimulus Program.

 

 

More on Bill Moyers. This time from Jack Shafer at Slate.

... When Moyers was Johnson's press secretary, he believed that journalists existed to serve the president. James Deakin writes in Straight Stuff: The Reporters, the White House and the Truth that Johnson's assistant press secretary Joe Laitin told Moyers that it was OK to plant a question with reporters every once in a while at presidential news conferences. A bogus idea, for sure, but Laitin thought the technique was useful in getting important information out. "When [the president] volunteers something, everybody immediately is on guard: what's he trying to sell?" Laitin told Deakin.

Moyers pitched the idea of planting questions to Johnson, who embraced it, giving Moyers a couple of questions for Laitin to distribute, which he did.

Johnson so loved this innovation that he was determined to plant every question at his next news conference. About 15 minutes before the session started, Moyers brought Laitin about 10 questions from the president. When Laitin protested that this was too much—"Bill, this isn't the way it's done"—Moyers said, "Do it!" ...

 

The country might be having troubles, but things are great in DC. Business Week with the story.

Look out, New York. Washington is gaining on you.

As the nation's most populous metro area feels Wall Street's pain, the fourth-largest -- Washington -- is barely sensing the recession. In fact, Moody's estimates that metro Washington's economy will actually grow 2.5% from mid-2008 through mid-2010. New York's economy is expected to shrink 4.2%. ...

 

Apropos of David Warren's latest column, a new T shirt for Welcome Back Carter.

 

[pic]

[pic]

[pic]

 

 

Contentions

How to Win Friends and Influence Nothing

by Abe Greenwald

Can we finally acknowledge the inutility of Barack Obama’s “international appeal”?

AFTER repeated rebuffs, America is preparing to abandon its insistence that Nato allies commit more combat troops to Afghanistan, despite fears the Taliban are gaining strength.

[…]

President Barack Obama’s administration announced last week that it was sending an extra 17,000 troops to join 32,000 already in Afghanistan, but European countries have yet to pitch in more than a few hundred.

So there’s the much anticipated result of America being “liked” again. The man who promised to restore the U.S.’s image in the world has met with “repeated rebuffs” from our NATO allies and is hanging it up. (Just wait until he tries to cash in his good-guy chips in the Muslim world.)  This marks Obama’s second failure to elicit new international help: European countries have dashed all administration hopes of taking in Guantanamo detainees.

It was always the height of silliness to suppose that leaders would readily send their countries’ citizens to fight alongside Americans if only America would ask more nicely. Other countries will fight with us when they believe our cause is their own, and when it comes to the War on Terror, there was never much hope of convincing an increasingly Muslim Europe to publicly join the U.S. in fighting jihadists.

Other Western countries desperately want America to get the job done; they just don’t want to risk the domestic upheaval that would come should they join in the fight. The die was cast in March of 2004 when Spain — a country whose leadership could not have had a more cordial relationship with George W. Bush — did an about-face and pulled out of the Iraq War after al Qaeda blew up commuter trains in Madrid.

One of George W. Bush’s biggest failings was that he let his critics convince Americans that European ambivalence was a response to American arrogance. That hobbled our effort further by draining domestic support for the War on Terror. That Bush was succeeded by a president who’s building his foreign policy around this ahistorical delusion is frightening.

 

Orange County Register

Islamic radicalization is on the rise

by Mark Steyn

In the Swat Valley, where a young Winston Churchill once served with the Malakand Field Force battling Muslim insurgents, his successors have concluded the game isn't worth the candle. In return for a temporary ceasefire, the Pakistani government agreed to let the local franchise of the Taliban impose its industrial strength version of Sharia across the whole of Malakand Region. Malakand has more than five million people, all of whom are now living under a murderous theocracy. Still, peace rallies have broken out all over the Swat Valley, and, at a Swat peace rally, it helps to stand well back: As one headline put it, "Journalist Killed While Covering Peace Rally."

But don't worry about Pakistani nukes falling into the hands of "extremists": The Swat Valley is a good hundred miles from the nation's capital, Islamabad – or about as far as Northern Vermont is from Southern Vermont. And, of course, Islamabad is safely under the control of the famously moderate Ali Zardari. A few days before the Swat deal, Mr. Zardari marked the dawn of the Obama era by releasing from house arrest Abdul Qadeer Khan, the celebrated scientist and one-stop shop for all your Islamic nuclear needs, for whose generosity North Korea and Iran are especially grateful.

From Islamabad, let us zip a world away to London. Among the growing population of Yorkshire Pakistanis is a fellow called Lord Ahmed, a Muslim member of Parliament. He threatened "to bring a force of 10,000 Muslims to lay siege to the House of Lords" if it went ahead with an event at which the Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders would have introduced a screening of his controversial film "Fitna."

Britain's Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, reacted to this by declaring Wilders persona non grata and having him arrested and returned to the Netherlands.

Smith is best known for an inspired change of terminology: last year she announced that henceforth Muslim terrorism (an unhelpful phrase) would be reclassified as "anti-Islamic activity." Seriously. The logic being that Muslims blowing stuff up tends not to do much for Islam's reputation – i.e., it's an "anti-Islamic activity" in the same sense that Pearl Harbor was an anti-Japanese activity.

Anyway, Geert Wilders' short film is a compilation video of footage from recent Muslim terrorist atrocities – whoops, sorry, "anti-Islamic activities" – accompanied by the relevant chapter and verse from the Koran. Jacqui Smith banned the filmmaker on "public order" grounds – in other words, the government's fear that Lord Ahmed meant what he said about a 10,000-strong mob besieging the Palace of Westminster. You might conceivably get the impression from Wilders' movie that many Muslims are irrational and violent types it's best to steer well clear of. But, if you didn't, Jacqui Smith pretty much confirmed it: We can't have chaps saying Muslims are violent, because they'll go smash the place up.

So confronted by blackmail, the British government caved. So did the Pakistani government in Swat. But, in fairness to Islamabad, they waited until the shooting was well underway before throwing in the towel. Twenty years ago this month, Margaret Thatcher's Conservative ministry defended the right of a left-wing author Salman Rushdie to publish a book in the face of Muslim riots and the Ayatollah Khomeini's attempted mob hit. Two decades on, a supposedly progressive government surrenders to the mob before it's even taken to the streets.

In his first TV interview as president, Barack Obama told viewers of al-Arabiya TV that he wanted to restore the "same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago." I'm not sure quite what golden age he's looking back to there – the Beirut barracks slaughter? The embassy hostages? – but the point is, it's very hard to turn back the clock. Because the facts on the ground change and change remorselessly.

Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30 percent of the global population to just over 20 percent, while the Muslim world increased from 15 percent to 20 percent. And in 2030, it won't even be possible to re-take that survey, because by that point half the "developed world" will itself be Muslim: in Bradford as in London, Amsterdam, Brussels and almost every other western European city from Malmo to Marseilles the principal population growth comes from Islam.

Along with the demographic growth has come radicalization: It's not just that there are more Muslims, but that, within that growing population, moderate Islam is on the decline – in Singapore, in the Balkans, in northern England – and radicalized, Arabized, Wahhabized Islam is on the rise. So we have degrees of accommodation: surrender in Islamabad, appeasement in London, acceptance in Toronto and Buffalo.

 

 

Asia Times

Sex, drugs and Islam

By Spengler

Political Islam returned to the world stage with Ruhollah Khomeini's 1979 revolution in Iran, which became the most aggressive patron of Muslim radicals outside its borders, including Hamas in the Palestinian territories and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Until very recently, an oil-price windfall gave the Iranian state ample resources to pursue its agenda at home and abroad. How, then, should we explain an eruption of social pathologies in Iran such as drug addiction and prostitution, on a scale much worse than anything observed in the West? Contrary to conventional wisdom, it appears that Islamic theocracy promotes rather than represses social decay.

Iran is dying. The collapse of Iran's birth rate during the past 20 years is the fastest recorded in any country, ever. Demographers have sought in vain to explain Iran's population implosion through family planning policies, or through social factors such as the rise of female literacy.

But quantifiable factors do not explain the sudden collapse of fertility. It seems that a spiritual decay has overcome Iran, despite best efforts of a totalitarian theocracy. Popular morale has deteriorated much faster than in the "decadent" West against which the Khomeini revolution was directed.

"Iran is dying for a fight," I wrote in 2007 (Please see Why Iran is dying for a fight, November 13, 2007.) in the literal sense that its decline is so visible that some of its leaders think that they have nothing to lose.

Their efforts to isolate Iran from the cultural degradation of the American "great Satan" have produced social pathologies worse than those in any Western country. With oil at barely one-fifth of its 2008 peak price, they will run out of money some time in late 2009 or early 2010. Game theory would predict that Iran's leaders will gamble on a strategic long shot. That is not a comforting thought for Iran's neighbors.

Two indicators of Iranian morale are worth citing.

First, prostitution has become a career of choice among educated Iranian women. On February 3, the Austrian daily Der Standard published the results of two investigations conducted by the Tehran police, suppressed by the Iranian media. [1]

"More than 90% of Tehran's prostitutes have passed the university entrance exam, according to the results of one study, and more than 30% of them are registered at a university or studying," reports Der Standard. "The study was assigned to the Tehran Police Department and the Ministry of Health, and when the results were tabulated in early January no local newspaper dared to so much as mention them."

The Austrian newspaper added, "Eighty percent of the Tehran sex workers maintained that they pursue this career voluntarily and temporarily. The educated ones are waiting for better jobs. Those with university qualifications intend to study later, and the ones who already are registered at university mention the high tuition [fees] as their motive for prostitution ... they are content with their occupation and do not consider it a sin according to Islamic law."

There is an extensive trade in poor Iranian women who are trafficked to the Gulf states in huge numbers, as well as to Europe and Japan. "A nation is never really beaten until it sells its women," I wrote in a 2006 study of Iranian prostitution, Jihads and whores.

Prostitution as a response to poverty and abuse is one thing, but the results of this new study reflect something quite different. The educated women of Tehran choose prostitution in pursuit of upward mobility, as a way of sharing in the oil-based potlatch that made Tehran the world's hottest real estate market during 2006 and 2007.

A country is beaten when it sells its women, but it is damned when its women sell themselves. The popular image of the Iranian sex trade portrays tearful teenagers abused and cast out by impoverished parents. Such victims doubtless abound, but the majority of Tehran's prostitutes are educated women seeking affluence.

Only in the former Soviet Union after the collapse of communism in 1990 did educated women choose prostitution on a comparable scale, but under very different circumstances. Russians went hungry during the early 1990s as the Soviet economy dissolved and the currency collapsed. Today's Iranians suffer from shortages, but the data suggest that Tehran's prostitutes are not so much pushed into the trade by poverty as pulled into it by wealth.

A year ago I observed that prices for Tehran luxury apartments exceeded those in Paris, as Iran's kleptocracy distributed the oil windfall to tens of thousands of hangers-on of the revolution. $35 billion went missing from state oil funds, opposition newspapers charged at the time. Corruption evidently has made whores of Tehran's educated women. (Please see Worst of times for Iran, June 24, 2008.)

Second, according to a recent report from the US Council on Foreign Relations, "Iran serves as the major transport hub for opiates produced by [Afghanistan], and the UN Office of Drugs and Crime estimates that Iran has as many as 1.7 million opiate addicts." That is, 5% of Iran's adult, non-elderly population of 35 million is addicted to opiates. That is an astonishing number, unseen since the peak of Chinese addiction during the 19th century. The closest American equivalent (from the 2003 National Survey on Drug Use and Health) found that 119,000 Americans reported using heroin within the prior month, or less than one-tenth of 1% of the non-elderly adult population.

Nineteenth-century China had comparable rates of opium addiction, after the British won two wars for the right to push the drug down China's throat. Post-communist Russia had comparable rates of prostitution, when people actually went hungry. Iran's startling rates of opium addiction and prostitution reflect popular demoralization, the implosion of an ancient culture in its encounter with the modern world. These pathologies arose not from poverty but wealth, or rather a sudden concentration of wealth in the hands of the political class. No other country in modern history has evinced this kind of demoralization.

For the majority of young Iranians, there is no way up, only a way out; 36% of Iran's youth aged 15 to 29 years want to emigrate, according to yet another unpublicized Iranian study, this time by the country's Education Ministry, Der Standard adds. Only 32% find the existing social norms acceptable, while 63% complain about unemployment, the social order or lack of money.

As I reported in the cited essay, the potlatch for the political class is balanced by widespread shortages for ordinary Iranians. This winter, widespread natural gas shortages left tens of thousands of households without heat.

The declining morale of the Iranian population helps make sense of its galloping demographic decline. Academic demographers have tried to explain collapsing fertility as a function of rising female literacy. The problem is that the Iranian regime lies about literacy data, and has admitted as much recently.

In a recent paper entitled "Education and the World's Most Raid Fertility Decline in Iran [2], American and Iranian demographers observe:

A first analysis of the Iran 2006 census results shows a sensationally low fertility level of 1.9 for the whole country and only 1.5 for the Tehran area (which has about 8 million people) ... A decline in the TFR [total fertility rate] of more than 5.0 in roughly two decades is a world record in fertility decline. This is even more surprising to many observers when one considers that it happened in one of the most Islamic societies. It forces the analyst to reconsider many of the usual stereotypes about religious fertility differentials.

The census points to a continued fall in fertility, even from today's extremely low levels, the paper maintains.

Most remarkable is the collapse of rural fertility in tandem with urban fertility, the paper adds:

The similarity of the transition in both urban and rural areas is one the main features of the fertility transition in Iran. There was a considerable gap between the fertility in rural and urban areas, but the TFR in both rural and urban areas continued to decline by the mid-1990s, and the gap has narrowed substantially. In 1980, the TFR in rural areas was 8.4 while that of urban areas was 5.6. In other words, there was a gap of 2.8 children between rural and urban areas. In 2006, the TFR in rural and urban areas was 2.1 and 1.8, respectively (a difference of only 0.3 children).

What the professors hoped to demonstrate is that as rural literacy levels in Iran caught up with urban literacy levels, the corresponding urban and rural fertility rates also converged. That is a perfectly reasonable conjecture whose only flaw is that the data on which it is founded were faked by the Iranian regime.

The Iranian government's official data claim literacy percentage levels in the high 90s for urban women and in the high 80s for rural women. That cannot be true, for Iran's Literacy Movement Organization admitted last year (according to an Agence-France Presse report of May 8, 2008) that 9,450,000 Iranians are illiterate of a population of 71 million (or an adult population of about 52 million). This suggests far higher rates of illiteracy than in the official data.

A better explanation of Iran's population implosion is that the country has undergone an existential crisis comparable to encounters of Amazon or Inuit tribes with modernity. Traditional society demands submission to the collective. Once the external constraints are removed, its members can shift from the most extreme forms of modesty to the other extreme of sexual license. Khomeini's revolution attempted to retard the disintegration of Persian society, but it appears to have accelerated the process.

Modernity implies choice, and the efforts of the Iranian mullahs to prolong the strictures of traditional society appear to have backfired. The cause of Iran's collapsing fertility is not literacy as such, but extreme pessimism about the future and an endemic materialism that leads educated Iranian women to turn their own sexuality into a salable commodity.

Theocracy subjects religion to a political test; it is hard for Iranians to repudiate the regime and remain pious, for religious piety and support for political Islam are inseparable, as a recent academic study documented from survey data [3].

As in the decline of communism, what follows on the breakdown of a state ideology is likely to be nihilism. Iran is a dying country, and it is very difficult to have a rational dialogue with a nation all of whose available choices terminate in oblivion.

[1] Der Standard, Die Wahrheit hinter der islamischen Fassade

.

[2] Education and the World's Most Raid Fertility Decline in Iran

.

[3] Religiosity and Islamic Rule in Iran, by Gunes Murat Tezcur and Tagh Azadarmaki.

 

 

 

Slate's Fighting Words

Don't Let the Mullahs Run Out the Clock

Obama must talk directly to the Iranian people.

by Christopher Hitchens 

It's strange how some totalitarian types feel the urge to be blunt and honest, even almost confessional. I call as my witness the senior member of the Robert Mugabe coterie who was quoted in the New York Times on Feb. 11 concerning the sham swearing-in of Morgan Tsvangirai as prime minister of Zimbabwe. After the ceremony, according to Celia W. Dugger's report:

[A] veteran ZANU-PF official who belongs to the party's politburo said of Mr. Tsvangirai, speaking on the understanding that he would not be quoted by name: "He will not last. I swear to you. We just want to buy time."

I thought that I knew that, but it's often useful to have one's suspicions confirmed.

Now, does anyone—I mean anyone at all—imagine that the Iranian government's flirtation with "direct talks" is anything—anything at all—but a precisely similar attempt to run out the clock while the centrifuges spin and to buy (or, more accurately, to waste) time until sufficient fissile material is ready and the mask can be thrown off?

Estimates differ, but it seems quite plausible that Iran will be able to make some such announcement before the end of this year. That would mean that all international agreements, all negotiations with bodies like the European Union, all "inspections" by the International Atomic Energy Agency had been, in effect, farcical and void. It would mean being laughed at by the mullahs in the here and now. And it would involve, for the rest of the future, having to treat them with exaggerated politeness. What a wonderful world that would be.

For decades, we have wondered what might happen when or if an apocalyptic weapon came into the hands of a messianic group or irrational regime. We are surely now quite close to finding out. I am not one of those who believe that the mullahs will immediately try to incinerate the Jewish state. This is for several reasons. First, the Iranian theocracy is fat and corrupt and runs a potentially wealthy country in such a way as to enrich only itself. A nuclear conflict with Israel would be—in a grimly literal sense—the very last thing that it would embark upon. Second, and even taking into account the officially messianic and jihadist rhetoric of the regime, it remains the case that a thermonuclear weapon detonated on the Zionist foe would also annihilate the Palestinians and destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque. (Even Saddam Hussein at his craziest recognized this fact, promising with uncharacteristic modesty only to "burn up half of Israel" with the weapons of mass destruction that he then boasted of possessing.)

Nor, I think, would the mullahs hand over their hard-won nuclear devices to a proxy party such as Hezbollah or seek to make a nuclear confrontation with the United States or Western Europe. What they almost certainly will do, however, is use the possession of nuclear weapons for some sort of nuclear blackmail against the neighboring gulf states, most of them Arab and Sunni rather than Persian and Shiite, but at least one of them (Bahrain) with a large Shiite population and a close geographical propinquity to Iran. Already you hear the odd rumble in hard-line circles in Tehran to the effect that Bahrain ought properly to be part of the Persian motherland. Imagine if Saddam Hussein had acquired a nuke before invading Kuwait. (This is why so many Arab governments and newspapers have been so tepid about supporting Iran's proxies Hamas and Hezbollah in the most recent confrontations with Israel.)

Faced with the appalling contingency of regional nuclear bullying disguised as "strategic ambiguity," the Bush administration managed, as so often, to achieve the worst of both worlds. It used to be that Bush officials, when asked about Tehran's nuclear ambitions, would reply in a dark and meaningful manner, "We will not leave this problem to the next administration." But, as you may have noticed … Still, one has to hope that the Obama administration does not make the opposite mistake and substitute a "make nice" policy for a policy that displayed neither soft speech nor the big stick. In that instance also, the Iranian reactors continued to hum and the centrifuges to whirl while in the wings, the missiles were also being acquired or tested (and something very odd was happening at a North Korean-built Syrian reactor site nearby).

The idea of direct and transparent negotiations with the Iranians is not wrong in principle, but it depends on which Iranians are the actual or potential partners. The president can address the Iranian people directly if he chooses, from the podium of the United Nations (as I urged Bush to do). He can tell them that just as the United States can and will help them to build civilian nuclear reactors, so it will not stand still and watch all Iran's agreements with international bodies be flagrantly broken. He can tell them that the mullahs' sponsorship of Hezbollah and Hamas is a reason for Iran's continued isolation. He can add—as I've suggested before—that in its zeal for armaments, the theocracy has been culpably negligent in preparing Iran and its people for the likelihood of a serious earthquake in the next few years and that the United States stands ready to share its seismological expertise in the here and now.

There are, in other words, several options and stages in between the polar opposites of confrontation with Iran and mute passivity in the face of clerical defiance of international law. But the time in which this "space" can be employed is diminishing, and it ought to be clearly stated and understood that if a confrontation does arise, it will not have been of Obama's making.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair

 

 

 

The Corner

Wingin' in the reign   [Mark Steyn]

On the Is-he-wingin'-it-or-is-he-a-Machiavellian-genius? thing that Derb started this morning, I'd say the president is wingin' it. That summit today was hilarious, especially the bit before all the bigshots went off to their "breakout sessions" and Obama told them, in best Community-Organizer-in-Chief mode, "not just to identify problems, but to identify solutions." A reader adds:

I haven't heard dialogue that leaden since Edward D. Wood was producing, directing and writing his classic films. Plan Nine From Chicago. All Obama needs is a silk body suit, a tin foil helmet and a shower head that's supposed to be a ray gun.

It'd be funny if the shower head wasn't shooting trillion-dollar bills . . .

 

The Corner

South and souther   [Mark Steyn]

The Dow hit a ten-year low today, but don't worry, there'll be a new low along in a day or two. This was Rush on Friday:

The investors, the people who are the real poll on the state of the economy are not investing.  They are betting on the market continuing to go south. . . . Folks, Obama doesn't have it . . . Biden doesn't have it. Reid doesn't have it, Pelosi doesn't have it, Barney Frank doesn't have it.  There is nothing that is going to come along tomorrow and restore the value of your house, replenish your 401(k) and your kids' college fund, take the Dow back to 13 on the way to 15; it isn't there. It could be again, but not with the leadership we have now. 

That sounds right. If the United States government got out of the way, things might get worse before they get better. With the government in the way, we have only the certainty of worse. Washington is engaged in the doomed project of attempting to re-inflate a credit bubble. Can't be done. But, in attempting it, they're massively expanding government spending and further distorting the rules of the market in the same ways that worked out so well for American home owners. And, as Iain noted below, the one group of people economic illiterates like Barney Frank don't seem to mind screwing over are the lenders - the investor class.

So why would you invest right now? From the point of view of investors in mortgage-backed securities, the "Hope for Homeowners" plan boils down to a government-mandated unilateral rewrite of the terms of your investment. It's different in degree from, say, investing in a copper mine in Africa and then finding that this week's president-for-life is going to nationalize without compensation. But it's not so different in principle. And, if you're an investor, what you have to ponder is whether the "Hope for Homeowners, Change for Mortgage Lenders" approach might soon spread to other areas of economic activity. Right now, that seems a safe assumption.

But relax, there'll be another economic summit, maybe as soon as Thursday. And in the afternoon breakout session they'll all wear blindfolds and try to pin the tail on the stimulus. ("Aaaaoow!" "Sorry, Nancy.")

 

Campaign Spot

Meltdown on MSNBC: The Leg Tingle Is Gone?

I can hardly believe what I'm watching on MSNBC right now. Chris Matthews is almost critical — no, not even almost, he's flat-out critical of President Obama on the economic front. He mentions an earlier conversation with CNBC's manic stock analyst Jim Cramer and a University of Maryland professor (Peter Morici?) knocking Obama for several economic decisions — that the stimulus bill needed more real infrastructure and less pork, that the housing bill isn't inspiring confidence and doesn't look like it will work, and that no one has faith in Tim Geithner's solution for the banks.

Howard Fineman of Newsweek says Obama has been "grim and a little distant at the same time . . . Tim Geithner hasn't inspired any confidence anywhere, as far as I can tell."

Matthews: "He seems like Barney Fife to me."

Eugene Robinson: "I actually referred to him as Doogie Howser, Treasury Secretary, and I think it's a little unfair." Much laughter ensues.

More Fineman: "Despite his high approval rating and obvious intellect and goodwill, he hasn't quite yet seemed to convey the sense that he knows the way forward and that he can get us there . . . I thought the first fifteen minutes of this show were devastating. Not that Jim Cramer is the only person they have to convince, but they have to convince people that they know what they're doing, that they're not just feeling their way forward." Robinson points out that they are feeling their way forward.

Matthews: "I thought 8,000 was the floor, and it looks like 6,000 is the floor. People are angry, I'm getting angry."

 

NY TImes

The Big Test

by David Brooks

“We cannot successfully address any of our problems without addressing all of them.”

Barack Obama, Feb. 21, 2009

When I was a freshman in college, I was assigned “Reflections on the Revolution in France” by Edmund Burke. I loathed the book. Burke argued that each individual’s private stock of reason is small and that political decisions should be guided by the accumulated wisdom of the ages. Change is necessary, Burke continued, but it should be gradual, not disruptive. For a young democratic socialist, hoping to help begin the world anew, this seemed like a reactionary retreat into passivity.

Over the years, I have come to see that Burke had a point. The political history of the 20th century is the history of social-engineering projects executed by well-intentioned people that began well and ended badly. There were big errors like communism, but also lesser ones, like a Vietnam War designed by the best and the brightest, urban renewal efforts that decimated neighborhoods, welfare policies that had the unintended effect of weakening families and development programs that left a string of white elephant projects across the world.

These experiences drove me toward the crooked timber school of public philosophy: Michael Oakeshott, Isaiah Berlin, Edward Banfield, Reinhold Niebuhr, Friedrich Hayek, Clinton Rossiter and George Orwell. These writers — some left, some right — had a sense of epistemological modesty. They knew how little we can know. They understood that we are strangers to ourselves and society is an immeasurably complex organism. They tended to be skeptical of technocratic, rationalist planning and suspicious of schemes to reorganize society from the top down.

Before long, I was no longer a liberal. Liberals are more optimistic about the capacity of individual reason and the government’s ability to execute transformational change. They have more faith in the power of social science, macroeconomic models and 10-point programs.

Readers of this column know that I am a great admirer of Barack Obama and those around him. And yet the gap between my epistemological modesty and their liberal worldviews has been evident over the past few weeks. The people in the administration are surrounded by a galaxy of unknowns, and yet they see this economic crisis as an opportunity to expand their reach, to take bigger risks and, as Obama said on Saturday, to tackle every major problem at once.

President Obama has concentrated enormous power on a few aides in the West Wing of the White House. These aides are unrolling a rapid string of plans: to create three million jobs, to redesign the health care system, to save the auto industry, to revive the housing industry, to reinvent the energy sector, to revitalize the banks, to reform the schools — and to do it all while cutting the deficit in half.

If ever this kind of domestic revolution were possible, this is the time and these are the people to do it. The crisis demands a large response. The people around Obama are smart and sober. Their plans are bold but seem supple and chastened by a realistic sensibility.

Yet they set off my Burkean alarm bells. I fear that in trying to do everything at once, they will do nothing well. I fear that we have a group of people who haven’t even learned to use their new phone system trying to redesign half the U.S. economy. I fear they are going to try to undertake the biggest administrative challenge in American history while refusing to hire the people who can help the most: agency veterans who are registered lobbyists.

I worry that we’re operating far beyond our economic knowledge. Every time the administration releases an initiative, I read 20 different economists with 20 different opinions. I worry that we lack the political structures to regain fiscal control. Deficits are exploding, and the president clearly wants to restrain them. But there’s no evidence that Democrats and Republicans in Congress have the courage or the mutual trust required to share the blame when taxes have to rise and benefits have to be cut.

All in all, I can see why the markets are nervous and dropping. And it’s also clear that we’re on the cusp of the biggest political experiment of our lifetimes. If Obama is mostly successful, then the epistemological skepticism natural to conservatives will have been discredited. We will know that highly trained government experts are capable of quickly designing and executing top-down transformational change. If they mostly fail, then liberalism will suffer a grievous blow, and conservatives will be called upon to restore order and sanity.

It’ll be interesting to see who’s right. But I can’t even root for my own vindication. The costs are too high. I have to go to the keyboard each morning hoping Barack Obama is going to prove me wrong.

 

The Corner

As long as we're passing out piles of cash, why not $900M for Hamas?   [Andy McCarthy]

Various la-la land conservatives and moderates assured us that Obama, despite a career spent in the Left's fever swamps, is really a "pragmatist" who would govern from the center.  They pooh-poohed us knuckle-draggers who doggedly pointed to his radical intimates, like Hamas-apologist Rashid Khalidi.  I wonder what they're thinking today as Obama takes time out from destroying the economy to send $900M from the mint's busy printing press to Hamas.

Oh, of course, they're saying it's not going to Hamas but to the suffering people of Gaza.  As the New York Times report (linked in the NRO web-briefing) states,

the aid would not go to Hamas but ... would be funneled through nongovernmental organizations....  By seeking to aid Gazans but not Hamas, the administration is following the lead of the Bush administration, which sent money to Gaza through nongovernmental organizations. In December, it said it would give $85 million to the United Nations agency that provides aid to Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

The Times is careful not to mention the name of "the United Nations agency" in question.  It is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).  The paper's diffidence should come as no surprise. 

The UNRWA is effectively an arm of Hamas in Gaza (and elsewhere).  In its second term, the Bush State Department was reckless in enabling Palestinian terrorists on its utopian quest for Middle East peace.  As in so much else, Obama is taking that parlous policy and multiplying it by a hundred.

Even Obama's pal Khalidi has acknowledged that UNRWA has on its payroll official "members of different political groups such as… Hamas and Islamic Jihad, without reference to their belonging to a specific group" (emphasis added).  UNRWA fails to screen its 23,000 employees (99 percent of whom are Palestinians) for terrorist ties.  As my friend Claudia Rosett recently wrote in Forbes, the agency's Israel-bashing commissioner, Karen Koning Abuzayd, absurdly told Congress it was too difficult for UNRWA to run checks against terrorist watch lists because "Arab last names sound so familiar."  UNRWA further permits its employees to affiliate openly with Hamas and other terrorist organizations.  In addition, the agency claims it cannot screen recipients of its largesse for terror ties because — besides Arab names being so very difficult for Arabs to distinguish — attempting such screening would endanger staff members.  Translation:  Of course we give the money to Hamas.

And that's not the half of it.  UNRWA-sponsored schools inculcate the Palestinians' virulent, anti-Semitic brand of radical Islam.  In 2003, as the Jewish Policy Center recounts, one of the agency's "teachers' representatives," Suheil al-Hindi, "openly applauded suicide bombings" at a school in Gaza's Jabiliya refugee camp.  UNRWA's response?  Al-Hindi received a promotion and was later elected to UNRWA's clerks union.  Other UNRWA teachers have included Said Sayyam, now Hamas's "minister of interior and civil affairs."  More importantly, the UNRWA schools have produced top Hamas operatives, including Abd al-Azziz Rantisi, the terror organization's co-founder who was killed by Israel in 2004; Ismail Haniyeh, the terrorist organization's former "prime minister"; and Ibrahim Maqadama, who helped create Hamas's military structure.

Furthermore, UNRWA ambulances are used by Hamas to transport weapons and explosives to terrorists.  Its other vehicles have been used to ferry terrorist operatives for attacks against Israeli troops.  Its schools have been used both for launching terror attacks and as "summer camps" that provide paramilitary training to tens of thousands of Palestinian children.  UNRWA camps are used by Hamas as bomb- and arms factories.

And most recently, UNRWA has been used as the Hamas message service.  The Israeli press is reporting that U.S. diplomats are livid because UNRWA has embarrassed them by using Sen. John Kerry to try to pass a letter to Pres. Obama during Kerry's recent Middle East swing.  (Kerry claims ignorance, which is certainly plausible.)  The letter reportedly offers direct negotiations.

The game here is obvious.  UNRWA takes in hundreds of millions (indeed, billions) in aid.  Some is directly funnelled to Hamas in cash or in kind.  But for the most part, UNRWA performs social welfare services quite consciously to free Hamas — the Palestinians' chosen government — to divert its limited resources to wage a terrorist war ("the resistance") against Israel.

If an organization comprised of American citizens attempted to do this, they could be prosecuted and imprisoned for decades on charges of providing material support to a terrorist organization.  (I would say "would be prosecuted," but with this administration, who knows?)  Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (an old hand at empowering Palestinian terrorists) are now proposing to give nearly a billion dollars to a Hamas subsidiary — knowing full well that this funding must inevitably result in the murder of innocent people.

Congress can stop this from happening.  Michael Steele and Republicans can show real leadership and moral clarity in the war against Islamic radicalism while the many Democrats who support Israel can step up to the plate.  It's one (foolish) thing to "engage" our enemies in self-loathing negotiations; it's quite another to fund them.

 

The Corner

The Hamas Stimulus Program   [Victor Davis Hanson]

I think most Americans would prefer to help an Iraqi constitutional government that has fought anti-American Islamic terrorism, rather than give $900 million for the terrorists of Hamas who fight a constitutional pro-American Israeli government.

 

 

Slate's press box

The Intolerable Smugness of Bill Moyers

He just can't help himself.

by Jack Shafer

Bill Moyers took it in the shins this week after the Washington Post's Joe Stephens, drawing on FBI files liberated by a FOIA request, reported the liberal lion's role in hunting suspected homosexuals inside the Lyndon Johnson White House.

     [pic]

                  Bill Moyers, 1965

The Post story's primary focus is on the FBI investigation of presidential aide Jack Valenti's sexual orientation, an investigation OK'd by President Johnson. It also reports that Moyers, then a special assistant to the president, asked the FBI to investigate two additional administration figures thought to have homosexual tendencies.

These weren't the only Moyers White House homo-hunts. On Commentary's blog, Jason Maoz quotes former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Laurence Silberman, who wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2005 that weeks before the 1964 Johnson-Goldwater election, Moyers "was tasked to direct [FBI Director J. Edgar] Hoover to do an investigation of Goldwater's staff to find similar evidence of homosexual activity. Mr. Moyers' memo to the FBI was in one of the files."

The Wizbang blog continues the Moyers bashing by quoting from CBS News correspondent Morley Safer's 1990 autobiography, Flashbacks: On Returning to Vietnam. Safer writes:

[Moyers'] part in Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover's bugging of Martin Luther King's private life, the leaks to the press and diplomatic corps, the surveillance of civil rights groups at the 1964 Democratic Convention, and his request for damaging information from Hoover on members of the Goldwater campaign suggest he was not only a good soldier but a gleeful retainer feeding the appetites of Lyndon Johnson.

Rounding out the week's pillory is my old boss, Miami Herald TV critic Glenn Garvin, who finds the Post discovery consistent with the thuggery that marked Moyers' political career. As long as Moyers is taking such a well-deserved beating, allow me a couple of licks.

When Moyers was Johnson's press secretary, he believed that journalists existed to serve the president. James Deakin writes in Straight Stuff: The Reporters, the White House and the Truth that Johnson's assistant press secretary Joe Laitin told Moyers that it was OK to plant a question with reporters every once in a while at presidential news conferences. A bogus idea, for sure, but Laitin thought the technique was useful in getting important information out. "When [the president] volunteers something, everybody immediately is on guard: what's he trying to sell?" Laitin told Deakin.

Moyers pitched the idea of planting questions to Johnson, who embraced it, giving Moyers a couple of questions for Laitin to distribute, which he did.

Johnson so loved this innovation that he was determined to plant every question at his next news conference. About 15 minutes before the session started, Moyers brought Laitin about 10 questions from the president. When Laitin protested that this was too much—"Bill, this isn't the way it's done"—Moyers said, "Do it!"

A rebuked Laitin approached John Pomfret of the New York Times first, primarily because the two were close. Deakin quotes Laitin:

I said, "John, would you mind asking the president this question?" There was no time for amenities; I had to be blunt because they were waiting and it was now eight minutes away from call time. He looked at me and said, "How dare you try to plant a question on the New York Times? I'm offended by this, and it's highly unethical."

Laitin did succeed in planting one or two questions, but, as Deakin writes, "the Grand Plan had failed."

Nancy Dickerson confirms the Moyers methodology in her 1976 memoir, Among Those Present: A Reporter's View of Twenty-Five Years in Washington. She writes:

The tactic [of planting questions] has been tried before, notably in Ike's day, with little fuss, but it hurt Johnson immeasurably. …

One day when I phoned Bill Moyers he asked if I was going to go to the news conference later that day. When I said that I was, he suggested, "You'd be the perfect one to ask LBJ how he feels; after all, it's his birthday.

Dickerson agreed to the request, but another reporter beat her to the question at the news conference. She continues:

I don't know how many other plants there were that day, but in retrospect I know that I was wrong in agreeing to ask one, even if it was a valid news question. Bill Moyers was out of line in suggesting it, and I was at fault in agreeing to it. Years later Bill told me that [Eisenhower press secretary] Jim Hagerty and [Kennedy press secretary] Pierre Salinger had done the same thing with great skill, and that it was necessary to compensate for the inadequacies of a press corps that often fails to ask the key question. I disagree. If a President has some information he feels the American people should know, he has only to make an announcement before the reporters' questions start.

Now compare Moyers' willingness to script Johnson news conferences with the sanctimonious interview he gave to Buzzflash in October 2003. He observes that modern journalists "who don't serve a partisan purpose and who try to be disinterested observers find themselves whipsawed between these corporate and ideological forces" and goes on to complain about the White House press corps, saying:

I think these forces have unbalanced the relationship between this White House and the press. Frankly, even if we had tried it in LBJ's time, we wouldn't have gotten away with the kind of press conference President Bush conducted on the eve of the invasion of Iraq—the one that even the President admitted was wholly scripted, with reporters raising their hands and posing so as to appear spontaneous.

Where does the guy who planted questions at LBJ news conferences, who told Nancy Dickerson that previous press secretaries had done it, and who told her that planting questions was necessary get the moxie to accuse the Bush press corps of participating in a scripted news conference?

The scripted news conference he's harping about is the one from March 6, 2003, in which Bush snubbed a reporter who was trying to get his attention by saying:

We'll be there in a minute. King, John King. This is a scripted—(laughter.)

Does this mean the Bush news conference was "scripted"? Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer claimed absolutely not in a March 7, 2003, briefing. Fleischer said that Bush had called upon questioners from a "suggestion" list he had prepared. The president preferred this method because it results in a "more orderly news conference," added Fleischer. The scripted comment was just another Bush joke gone flat. (If you have a Nexis account, see the nicely done March 8, 2003, Newsday news story "Not Scripted, but Listed: Checklist of reporters helps Bush work news conference" by Ken Fireman.)

Bush isn't the only president to have relied on the list approach. Barack Obama favors it, too, something that Chicago Sun-Times columnist Carol Marin was complaining about in early January, before the Obama inauguration and well before his first news conference (Feb. 9). As you may recall, Obama made no effort to conceal his reliance on a list as he called on reporters.

I await Moyers' "expose" of the Obama administration's blatantly scripted news conferences.

 

Business Week

While New York Bleeds Washington Thrives

At the same time Wall Street is losing jobs and prestige, the nation's capital is gaining steam as it ramps up to fight the recession 

by Peter Coy

Look out, New York. Washington is gaining on you.

As the nation's most populous metro area feels Wall Street's pain, the fourth-largest -- Washington -- is barely sensing the recession. In fact, Moody's estimates that metro Washington's economy will actually grow 2.5% from mid-2008 through mid-2010. New York's economy is expected to shrink 4.2%.

It wouldn't be the first time that Washington benefited from a national crisis. Back in 1930 the District of Columbia was a quiet Southern town, scoffed at by New York sophisticates. But as the federal government ramped up to fight first the Great Depression and then World War II, its population grew 65% in two decades, vs. just 14% for New York City.

This time Washington is getting a boost from government spending to fight the recession and fix the financial system, as well as the ongoing expenses of fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and promoting homeland security. While President Barack Obama pointedly left Washington for Denver to sign the $787 billion stimulus package on Feb. 17, locals expect the metro area to garner a big share of the dollars.

Where Home Sales Rise

"Oversight alone will (mean) tons of new jobs," enthuses Jill Landsman, a spokeswoman for the Northern Virginia Assn. of Realtors, who says the pace of home sales has picked up over the past year even as prices have continued to fall.

Job-seeking Wall Streeters who jump on Amtrak's Acela to Washington may be dismayed to find that the maximum pay for an FDIC bank review examiner is close to $180,000. That's great for most folks, but paltry next to the bonus-swelled compensation many bankers are used to. The pay can be a lot better, though, at the Beltway Bandit consulting firms that are ramping up to assist the FDIC, Treasury Dept., and others. Consulting jobs for senior specialists in finance "can pay north of $200 an hour," says Andrew Reina, a practice director for risk consultant Ajilon Solutions.

Companies such as Computer Sciences Corp., Science Applications International Corp., or SAIC, and Booz Allen Hamilton employ tens of thousands of people in the Washington area and continue to expand. Even before the current crisis, professional and business services, which include private-sector lawyers, accountants, engineers, and consultants, made up 21% of metro Washington's annual economic output, even more than the 20% made up by government itself, according to a BusinessWeek estimate based on government data. The financial crisis "creates opportunities for companies like ours" to provide expert assistance, says David Booth, Computer Sciences Corp.'s president of global sales and marketing.

 

     [pic]

 

 

[pic]

 

 

[pic]

 

 

[pic]

 

 

[pic]

 

 

[pic]

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download