Haruna Ur Rashid
The 38-hour trip of Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj to Dhaka from 25 June was remarkable for various reasons.
First, it demonstrated the priority the Narendra Modi government places on India’s relations with Bangladesh. Second, Swaraj promised to remove the obstacles in order to strengthen relations with Bangladesh – irrespective of the party in power in the country; and emphasised on people-to-people relations. Third, Swaraj stated that the Indian government would work with the Sheikh Hasina government in Bangladesh to further strengthen relations and at the same time by meeting with the Chairperson, Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) , the largest opposition party outside the parliament , she showed her prudence and sense of pragmatism. Fourth, she was found straightforward, plain-speaking, pleasant, and indeed a very likeable person.
The people of Bangladesh did not expect the first foreign visit by Swaraj to resolve pending issues with India; but they are the respective citizens’ issues because these issues – such as the Teesta Water Sharing Agreement and the Land Boundary Agreement – directly affect the people on the ground. Her telephone call to the Chief Minister of West Bengal Mamata Banerjee before the visit reflected the Modi government’s keen desire to reach a consensus with the various stakeholders in India to resolve the issues.
The people of Bangladesh believe that the Modi government has an excellent opportunity to build a new era of relationship with Bangladesh – similar to what Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, did during her New Delhi visit in January 2010.
The Hasina government had cooperated in removing the threat of insurgency to India’s northeastern states by expelling the insurgents who operated out of sanctuaries in Bangladesh. She had allowed, without a transit agreement, transit facility to the India’s northeastern states – including the transportation of heavy duty equipment for ONGC Tripura Power Company’s 727 MW gas-based project located at Palatana, and the transportation of 10,000 tons of food grains for Tripura through its territory.
However, in return, Bangladesh did not get what India has promised and this has been a severe disappointment for Bangladeshi citizens. The trust-deficit with India remains high in Bangladesh and it needs to be removed to usher in a new invigorated bilateral relationship.
The Minister laid bare some of the policies in a speech at the Bangladesh International Institute of Strategic Studies on 26 June. She expressed gratitude for the cooperation her country received from Bangladesh in combating trans-boundary crime, insurgency and terrorism.
The Minister reportedly said democracy needed strong institutions and a culture of tolerance, inclusion and respect for differences. She used the weighty words which have enough food for thought and meaning for all about the need of observance of democratic norms in a country.
Observers say that this statement appears to have been made in the context of non-inclusive 5 January parliamentary elections which returned the Hasina government in power for the third time. Many observers say that the statement is a stark contrast to the view held by the former Congress-led government in New Delhi regarding the 5 January elections.
On a major irritant in relations – such as the killing/abduction of Bangladeshi civilians at the Indo-Bangladesh border – she stated that India’s objective must not only be to reduce incidents along the border but also enhance peace, stability and goodwill.
Bangladesh was looking forward to the Minister’s endorsement for the proposed new economic corridor among Bangladesh-China-India- Myanmar (BCIM) in her speech but the visiting Indian Minister did not mention it. Does that mean the Modi government has lost interest in the BCIM corridor?
Swaraj said India's development could not be complete and sustainable unless they successfully partnered with their immediate neighbours. It is noted that the 2011 Indo-Bangladesh Framework Agreement on Cooperation and Development opened up possibilities in cooperation on bilateral, sub-regional and regional level on areas such as, water, energy, food security and environmental safety. Furthermore, the Modi government may take initiative in constituting a sub-regional unit comprising Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, and the northeastern states of India. If their economy is integrated to the region, it could turn into hub of economic activities and when people have money into their pockets, they are happy and are not lured towards militancy or insurgency.
Bangladeshi people are hopeful that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s invitation to the SAARC leaders for his swearing-in ceremony in New Delhi, on 26 May, will generate productive spirit of regional cooperation in which South Asia can be an economic powerhouse.
The 21st century has been described as “Asian century” because both economic and strategic weights are shifting toward Asia; and South Asia, under the new strong and imaginative leadership of India, could contribute to translating that into reality, and Bangladesh will fully cooperate with India to this end.
29 Jun 2014
MORE UNRAVELING
Stephen F. Hayes
As the Obama administration’s case for the Bowe Bergdahl-Taliban prisoner exchange further unraveled last week, the geo-political implications of the deal became clearer. They’re not pretty.
In the hours before Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel clicked on the microphone to testify about the swap on June 11, Obama administration officials told reporters to expect a forceful defense of the exchange and an aggressive refutation of the criticism that has attended it.
That didn’t happen. Instead, Hagel walked members of the House Armed Services Committee through the administration’s well-worn talking points, which had already failed to satisfy many members of Congress. And on several occasions he contradicted explanations administration officials had offered over the previous 10 days — including some arguments that Hagel himself had made.
In the early stages of the controversy, the administration defended the decision, and its choice not to inform Congress as required by law, by pointing to the failing health of Bowe Bergdahl. The captive soldier’s “health was deteriorating,” Hagel said during a June 1 interview on Meet the Press. “This was essentially an operation to save the life of Sgt. Bergdahl.”
Administration officials had pressed this case aggressively in the days following the swap, culminating in a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal reporting that the final proof-of-life video provided by the Taliban showed Bergdahl looking frail. “Rapid deterioration of soldier’s health persuaded leaders to back exchange,” the paper reported. A spokesman for Director of National Intelligence James Clapper pointed to Bergdahl’s condition as a key reason for the urgency of the exchange, telling the Journal that the intelligence community had “evidence that Sgt. Bergdahl’s health was failing and that he was in desperate need of medical attention.”
But 10 days later, after several news outlets noted that the video was shot in December and that intelligence officials had privately disclaimed any such evidence, the administration backed off. In his June 11 testimony, Hagel sounded almost like an administration critic. “We didn’t know what kind of health Bergdahl was in,” he said. “All we had was a six-month [old] video.”
Another problem for the administration is its insistence, simultaneously, that the war in Afghanistan is just like other wars that the United States has engaged in, and that it is unlike any other war we’ve ever fought.
Hagel spent much of his testimony insisting that the Obama administration had not, technically, negotiated with terrorists. The United States negotiated this deal with the Qataris, he argued, who merely served as an intermediary for the Taliban, who merely spoke on behalf of the actual terrorists of the Haqqani network, who had held Bergdahl for much of his captivity in Pakistan. Despite the fact that he was held by terrorists, who were represented by the Taliban, a nongoverning nonstate actor, Hagel insisted that Bergdahl was “not a hostage; he was a prisoner of war.”
And yet, when Republicans pressed Stephen Preston, the Pentagon’s top lawyer, on whether members of the Taliban could be held legally after the conflict ended, he acknowledged that the “Taliban [could be] held as associates of al Qaeda.”
Hagel also continued to insist that the U.S. government had “substantially mitigated” the threat that the freed Taliban commanders would pose to the United States despite two additional reports confirming that senior U.S. intelligence officials believe they will return to the fight.
While much of the focus at home remained on the Obama administration’s shifting justifications for the swap, the potential damage the deal has done overseas is significant. The Afghan government publicly embraced the exchange, but it had little choice. With the dramatic drawdown of U.S. troops well underway and a full departure of combat troops scheduled to take place by 2016, Hamid Karzai and other Afghan leaders are racing to find some reconciliation with the Taliban — or at least with segments of the Taliban, however small, that may be reconcilable.
Administration officials have gone out of their way to say that they hope this deal revives those efforts. The opposite seems more likely. Hamid Karzai has been a challenging and uneven ally. But by cutting his government out of these talks and dealing directly with the Taliban (and later indirectly through the Qataris), the Obama administration has badly undermined the government in Kabul.
As the Obama administration’s case for the Bowe Bergdahl-Taliban prisoner exchange further unraveled last week, the geo-political implications of the deal became clearer. They’re not pretty.
In the hours before Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel clicked on the microphone to testify about the swap on June 11, Obama administration officials told reporters to expect a forceful defense of the exchange and an aggressive refutation of the criticism that has attended it.
That didn’t happen. Instead, Hagel walked members of the House Armed Services Committee through the administration’s well-worn talking points, which had already failed to satisfy many members of Congress. And on several occasions he contradicted explanations administration officials had offered over the previous 10 days — including some arguments that Hagel himself had made.
In the early stages of the controversy, the administration defended the decision, and its choice not to inform Congress as required by law, by pointing to the failing health of Bowe Bergdahl. The captive soldier’s “health was deteriorating,” Hagel said during a June 1 interview on Meet the Press. “This was essentially an operation to save the life of Sgt. Bergdahl.”
Administration officials had pressed this case aggressively in the days following the swap, culminating in a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal reporting that the final proof-of-life video provided by the Taliban showed Bergdahl looking frail. “Rapid deterioration of soldier’s health persuaded leaders to back exchange,” the paper reported. A spokesman for Director of National Intelligence James Clapper pointed to Bergdahl’s condition as a key reason for the urgency of the exchange, telling the Journal that the intelligence community had “evidence that Sgt. Bergdahl’s health was failing and that he was in desperate need of medical attention.”
But 10 days later, after several news outlets noted that the video was shot in December and that intelligence officials had privately disclaimed any such evidence, the administration backed off. In his June 11 testimony, Hagel sounded almost like an administration critic. “We didn’t know what kind of health Bergdahl was in,” he said. “All we had was a six-month [old] video.”
Another problem for the administration is its insistence, simultaneously, that the war in Afghanistan is just like other wars that the United States has engaged in, and that it is unlike any other war we’ve ever fought.
Hagel spent much of his testimony insisting that the Obama administration had not, technically, negotiated with terrorists. The United States negotiated this deal with the Qataris, he argued, who merely served as an intermediary for the Taliban, who merely spoke on behalf of the actual terrorists of the Haqqani network, who had held Bergdahl for much of his captivity in Pakistan. Despite the fact that he was held by terrorists, who were represented by the Taliban, a nongoverning nonstate actor, Hagel insisted that Bergdahl was “not a hostage; he was a prisoner of war.”
And yet, when Republicans pressed Stephen Preston, the Pentagon’s top lawyer, on whether members of the Taliban could be held legally after the conflict ended, he acknowledged that the “Taliban [could be] held as associates of al Qaeda.”
Hagel also continued to insist that the U.S. government had “substantially mitigated” the threat that the freed Taliban commanders would pose to the United States despite two additional reports confirming that senior U.S. intelligence officials believe they will return to the fight.
While much of the focus at home remained on the Obama administration’s shifting justifications for the swap, the potential damage the deal has done overseas is significant. The Afghan government publicly embraced the exchange, but it had little choice. With the dramatic drawdown of U.S. troops well underway and a full departure of combat troops scheduled to take place by 2016, Hamid Karzai and other Afghan leaders are racing to find some reconciliation with the Taliban — or at least with segments of the Taliban, however small, that may be reconcilable.
Administration officials have gone out of their way to say that they hope this deal revives those efforts. The opposite seems more likely. Hamid Karzai has been a challenging and uneven ally. But by cutting his government out of these talks and dealing directly with the Taliban (and later indirectly through the Qataris), the Obama administration has badly undermined the government in Kabul.
THEIR 9/11 ROLE
Thomas Joscelyn
One of the five senior Taliban leaders transferred to Qatar in exchange for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl played a key role in al Qaeda’s plans leading up to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Mohammad Fazl, who served as the Taliban’s army chief of staff and deputy defense minister prior to his detention at Guantánamo, did not have a hand in planning the actual 9/11 hijackings. Along with a notorious al Qaeda leader, however, Fazl did help coordinate a military offensive against the enemies of the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan the day before. And Osama bin Laden viewed that September 10 offensive as an essential part of al Qaeda’s 9/11 plot.
The 9/11 Commission found that the hijackings in the United States on September 11, 2001, were the culmination of al Qaeda’s three-step plan. First, on September 9, 2001, al Qaeda assassinated Northern Alliance commander Ahmed Shah Massoud in a suicide bombing. Massoud’s death was a major gift to the Taliban because he was their chief rival and still controlled parts of the country. The assassination was also intended to weaken opposition to the Taliban and al Qaeda within Afghanistan before the United States could plan its retaliation for the most devastating terrorist attack in history. The Northern Alliance did, in fact, play a role in America’s response.
The following day, September 10, al Qaeda and the Taliban took their second step. A “delayed Taliban offensive against the Northern Alliance was apparently coordinated to begin as soon as [Massoud] was killed,” the 9/11 Commission found. Fazl and one of bin Laden’s chief lieutenants, Abdul Hadi al Iraqi, played key roles in this setup for 9/11. At the time, al Iraqi oversaw what al Qaeda called the Arab 55th Brigade, which was Osama bin Laden’s chief fighting force inside Afghanistan and fought side by side with Mullah Omar’s forces.
According to a leaked Joint Task Force Guantánamo (JTF-GTMO) threat assessment of Fazl, al Iraqi met with Fazl “on several occasions to include immediately following the assassination of [Massoud] in September 2001.” Al Iraqi “stated the Northern Alliance was demoralized after the assassination and [he] met with [Fazl] to immediately coordinate an attack with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance.”
Al Qaeda viewed both the assassination of Massoud and the offensive launched the following day as necessary components of the 9/11 plot. At first, Mullah Omar and other Taliban leaders were said to be wary of any spectacular attack against the United States, as it would likely draw fierce retaliation from the world’s lone superpower. (The 9/11 Commission did find “some scant indications” that Omar “may have been reconciled to the 9/11 attacks by the time they occurred.”) The plan to attack the United States was controversial even within al Qaeda, with some senior leaders objecting to the idea.
But Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders believed, correctly, that the first two steps of their plan would ensure the Taliban’s continuing support. The 9/11 Commission found that as Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda’s military chief at the time, Mohammed Atef, “deliberated” the 9/11 hijackings “earlier in the year,” they “would likely have remembered that Mullah Omar was dependent on them for the Massoud assassination and for vital support in the Taliban military operations.” And, while the commission’s sources were “not privy to the full scope of al Qaeda and Taliban planning,” bin Laden and Atef “probably would have known, at least,” that the “general Taliban offensive against the Northern Alliance” on September 10 “would rely on al Qaeda military support.”
The 9/11 Commission’s final report goes on to say that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the mastermind of 9/11, remembers Atef “telling him that al Qaeda had an agreement with the Taliban to eliminate Massoud, after which the Taliban would begin an offensive to take over [all of] Afghanistan.”
Mohammad Fazl’s cooperation with al Iraqi was, therefore, part of the plan KSM remembered.
As controversy over the deal for Sgt. Bergdahl has continued to swirl, current and former Obama administration officials have sought to draw a sharp distinction between the threat posed by the Taliban Five and al Qaeda.
“These five guys are not a threat to the United States,” former secretary of state Hillary Clinton said during an interview on NBC News last week. “They are a threat to the safety and security of Afghanistan and Pakistan. It’s up to those two countries to make the decision once and for all that these are threats to them. So I think we may be kind of missing the bigger picture here. We want to get an American home, whether they fell off the ship because they were drunk or they were pushed or they jumped, we try to rescue everybody.”
One of the five senior Taliban leaders transferred to Qatar in exchange for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl played a key role in al Qaeda’s plans leading up to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Mohammad Fazl, who served as the Taliban’s army chief of staff and deputy defense minister prior to his detention at Guantánamo, did not have a hand in planning the actual 9/11 hijackings. Along with a notorious al Qaeda leader, however, Fazl did help coordinate a military offensive against the enemies of the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan the day before. And Osama bin Laden viewed that September 10 offensive as an essential part of al Qaeda’s 9/11 plot.
The 9/11 Commission found that the hijackings in the United States on September 11, 2001, were the culmination of al Qaeda’s three-step plan. First, on September 9, 2001, al Qaeda assassinated Northern Alliance commander Ahmed Shah Massoud in a suicide bombing. Massoud’s death was a major gift to the Taliban because he was their chief rival and still controlled parts of the country. The assassination was also intended to weaken opposition to the Taliban and al Qaeda within Afghanistan before the United States could plan its retaliation for the most devastating terrorist attack in history. The Northern Alliance did, in fact, play a role in America’s response.
The following day, September 10, al Qaeda and the Taliban took their second step. A “delayed Taliban offensive against the Northern Alliance was apparently coordinated to begin as soon as [Massoud] was killed,” the 9/11 Commission found. Fazl and one of bin Laden’s chief lieutenants, Abdul Hadi al Iraqi, played key roles in this setup for 9/11. At the time, al Iraqi oversaw what al Qaeda called the Arab 55th Brigade, which was Osama bin Laden’s chief fighting force inside Afghanistan and fought side by side with Mullah Omar’s forces.
According to a leaked Joint Task Force Guantánamo (JTF-GTMO) threat assessment of Fazl, al Iraqi met with Fazl “on several occasions to include immediately following the assassination of [Massoud] in September 2001.” Al Iraqi “stated the Northern Alliance was demoralized after the assassination and [he] met with [Fazl] to immediately coordinate an attack with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance.”
Al Qaeda viewed both the assassination of Massoud and the offensive launched the following day as necessary components of the 9/11 plot. At first, Mullah Omar and other Taliban leaders were said to be wary of any spectacular attack against the United States, as it would likely draw fierce retaliation from the world’s lone superpower. (The 9/11 Commission did find “some scant indications” that Omar “may have been reconciled to the 9/11 attacks by the time they occurred.”) The plan to attack the United States was controversial even within al Qaeda, with some senior leaders objecting to the idea.
But Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders believed, correctly, that the first two steps of their plan would ensure the Taliban’s continuing support. The 9/11 Commission found that as Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda’s military chief at the time, Mohammed Atef, “deliberated” the 9/11 hijackings “earlier in the year,” they “would likely have remembered that Mullah Omar was dependent on them for the Massoud assassination and for vital support in the Taliban military operations.” And, while the commission’s sources were “not privy to the full scope of al Qaeda and Taliban planning,” bin Laden and Atef “probably would have known, at least,” that the “general Taliban offensive against the Northern Alliance” on September 10 “would rely on al Qaeda military support.”
The 9/11 Commission’s final report goes on to say that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the mastermind of 9/11, remembers Atef “telling him that al Qaeda had an agreement with the Taliban to eliminate Massoud, after which the Taliban would begin an offensive to take over [all of] Afghanistan.”
Mohammad Fazl’s cooperation with al Iraqi was, therefore, part of the plan KSM remembered.
As controversy over the deal for Sgt. Bergdahl has continued to swirl, current and former Obama administration officials have sought to draw a sharp distinction between the threat posed by the Taliban Five and al Qaeda.
“These five guys are not a threat to the United States,” former secretary of state Hillary Clinton said during an interview on NBC News last week. “They are a threat to the safety and security of Afghanistan and Pakistan. It’s up to those two countries to make the decision once and for all that these are threats to them. So I think we may be kind of missing the bigger picture here. We want to get an American home, whether they fell off the ship because they were drunk or they were pushed or they jumped, we try to rescue everybody.”
CAN INDIA'S MILITARY BE FIXED?
Gary Schmitt, Sadanand Dhume
American strategists are taken with the idea of India’s strategic potential: a large democracy with a blue-water navy and the world’s third-largest armed forces that happens to be jammed between an imploding Pakistan and an expansionist China. But a deeply dysfunctional Indian defense community has frustrated efforts to turn that potential into reality. Will the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi last month with the strongest mandate of any Indian leader in 30 years jumpstart much-needed reforms? The answer will help determine whether India begins to fulfill its vaunted potential as a U.S. strategic partner in Asia and beyond.
On the face of it, Modi’s election augurs well for India’s defense preparedness. On the campaign trail, Modi promised a strong India able to stand up to its adversaries. He deplored what he called the then-ruling Congress party’s lack of respect for soldiers, and promised to devote his government to long-overdue military modernization.
But the list of problems he faces is a long one. The Indian defense budget has declined to less than 2 percent of the country’s GDP, the lowest in five decades. This might be tolerable if the country’s security environment had gotten appreciably better in recent years—but it hasn’t. Though India hasn’t witnessed a major terrorist strike since the carnage in Mumbai in 2008, Pakistan remains a threat, and the prospect of terrorist attacks has not gone away. As the United States draws down its troops in the region, Afghan instability is likely to be of increasing concern, and India faces on land and at sea a rapidly rising military power in China, with which the country shares a disputed 2,500-mile border.
The challenges, however, run much deeper than a lack of resources. The procurement system is broken, corruption a constant problem, and tensions between the various military services and the civilian defense bureaucracy are serious and longstanding. Politically appointed defense ministers have had little time for—and, more important, little interest in—straightening out all that ails the Indian defense effort.
The last defense minister, A. K. Antony, was so worried that corruption associated with military procurement would tarnish his image that he brought India’s acquisition process to a virtual halt. At the slightest hint of scandal, purchases would be stalled and companies blacklisted until investigations could be completed. The result: tens of billions of dollars in new equipment not acquired, with existing platforms growing outdated and more expensive to maintain.
Indians themselves point to the history of multiple on-again, off-again attempts to procure aerial refuelers, transport aircraft, and light utility helicopters. For example, even though India’s air force is replete with older (in some cases, relatively ancient) fighter aircraft like the MiG-21, there seems little urgency in replacing them. After a drawn-out bidding process, the government finally opted in 2012 to buy 126 of Dassault’s Rafale aircraft for $11 billion, but it still hasn’t finalized the contract. As a result, the full complement of Rafales probably will not enter the Indian Air Force’s inventory until well into the next decade.
Similarly, before the turn of the century, plans were approved for India to acquire 24 new diesel-electric attack submarines, both to increase the size of the submarine fleet and to replace an aging fleet. Yet it’s possible that over the next year only 9 of the current fleet of 14 attack submarines will be operational, with the rest needing overhauls—a reality reinforced by repeated accidents onboard Indian Navy submarines, including the total loss, with crew, of a Russian-made submarine last August. Yet plans to build the new submarines have been delayed time and again. Inevitably, delays mean higher costs, and, with a budget dominated by personnel expenses, this means even fewer rupees to buy needed equipment.
Already, the army is facing shortages in ammunition, field artillery, night-vision capabilities, specialized counterterrorism equipment, and antitank weapons.
American strategists are taken with the idea of India’s strategic potential: a large democracy with a blue-water navy and the world’s third-largest armed forces that happens to be jammed between an imploding Pakistan and an expansionist China. But a deeply dysfunctional Indian defense community has frustrated efforts to turn that potential into reality. Will the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi last month with the strongest mandate of any Indian leader in 30 years jumpstart much-needed reforms? The answer will help determine whether India begins to fulfill its vaunted potential as a U.S. strategic partner in Asia and beyond.
On the face of it, Modi’s election augurs well for India’s defense preparedness. On the campaign trail, Modi promised a strong India able to stand up to its adversaries. He deplored what he called the then-ruling Congress party’s lack of respect for soldiers, and promised to devote his government to long-overdue military modernization.
But the list of problems he faces is a long one. The Indian defense budget has declined to less than 2 percent of the country’s GDP, the lowest in five decades. This might be tolerable if the country’s security environment had gotten appreciably better in recent years—but it hasn’t. Though India hasn’t witnessed a major terrorist strike since the carnage in Mumbai in 2008, Pakistan remains a threat, and the prospect of terrorist attacks has not gone away. As the United States draws down its troops in the region, Afghan instability is likely to be of increasing concern, and India faces on land and at sea a rapidly rising military power in China, with which the country shares a disputed 2,500-mile border.
The challenges, however, run much deeper than a lack of resources. The procurement system is broken, corruption a constant problem, and tensions between the various military services and the civilian defense bureaucracy are serious and longstanding. Politically appointed defense ministers have had little time for—and, more important, little interest in—straightening out all that ails the Indian defense effort.
The last defense minister, A. K. Antony, was so worried that corruption associated with military procurement would tarnish his image that he brought India’s acquisition process to a virtual halt. At the slightest hint of scandal, purchases would be stalled and companies blacklisted until investigations could be completed. The result: tens of billions of dollars in new equipment not acquired, with existing platforms growing outdated and more expensive to maintain.
Indians themselves point to the history of multiple on-again, off-again attempts to procure aerial refuelers, transport aircraft, and light utility helicopters. For example, even though India’s air force is replete with older (in some cases, relatively ancient) fighter aircraft like the MiG-21, there seems little urgency in replacing them. After a drawn-out bidding process, the government finally opted in 2012 to buy 126 of Dassault’s Rafale aircraft for $11 billion, but it still hasn’t finalized the contract. As a result, the full complement of Rafales probably will not enter the Indian Air Force’s inventory until well into the next decade.
Similarly, before the turn of the century, plans were approved for India to acquire 24 new diesel-electric attack submarines, both to increase the size of the submarine fleet and to replace an aging fleet. Yet it’s possible that over the next year only 9 of the current fleet of 14 attack submarines will be operational, with the rest needing overhauls—a reality reinforced by repeated accidents onboard Indian Navy submarines, including the total loss, with crew, of a Russian-made submarine last August. Yet plans to build the new submarines have been delayed time and again. Inevitably, delays mean higher costs, and, with a budget dominated by personnel expenses, this means even fewer rupees to buy needed equipment.
Already, the army is facing shortages in ammunition, field artillery, night-vision capabilities, specialized counterterrorism equipment, and antitank weapons.
THE IRANIAN REGIME'S MR. FIX IT
Lee Smith
Qassem Suleimani is apparently the most interesting man in the world. To judge by the profiles in major Western media outlets—including the New Yorker, BBC, and the Guardian—the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ external operations unit, the Quds Force, is the most feared and ruthless military strategist since Rommel. He’s also a fixer, a cleaner, like a figure out of a Quentin Tarantino film. Just last week, Suleimani was on call to help out a troubled client in Baghdad. After the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) overran Mosul, Suleimani landed with a cadre of Iranian advisers to lend a steady hand and reinforcements to Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki.
Some call Suleimani the Iranian proconsul in Iraq, but these days, Hajj Qassem, as he is known to friends and admirers, is everywhere around the Middle East. As he reportedly texted the American commander of coalition forces in Iraq in 2007: “General Petraeus, you should know that I, Qassem Suleimani, control policy for Iran with respect to Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, and Afghanistan.” And now there’s Syria, too, where Suleimani is gathering fighters from Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and Afghanistan, as well as Iranian troops from the IRGC and Basij to build a Shiite International to defend another Iranian ally, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.
Some say Hajj Qassem is Iran’s real powerbroker, and Hassan Rouhani is just the happy, so-called moderate, face of the clerical regime. Indeed, there are rumors floating around Shiite circles in Beirut that Suleimani recently attempted a coup against Rouhani, blocked at the last moment by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Maybe Suleimani really did try to topple Rouhani—it’s no secret he favored a rival, Tehran mayor Mohammad-Baqer Qalibaf, a fellow IRGC field commander from the war with Iraq whose son is believed to be married to Suleimani’s daughter. However, it’s just as likely that the rumors are the latest installment in an Iranian public relations blitz intended to brand Suleimani as the Middle East’s indispensable man. The campaign is directed at the Obama White House: If you want anything done in the Middle East, you’ll have to go through Iran and you’ll have to deal with Qassem Suleimani. If Rouhani and Javad Zarif are the regime’s moderates, Suleimani is its pit bull at the gate.
Suleimani is a serious person. “He’s considered a hero in Iran,” says Ali Alfoneh, an Iran expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “He defended Iran in the face of Iraqi invasion in the 1980s, fought the drug cartels close to the Afghan border in the 1990s, and is now defending the Shia against Sunni terrorists like ISIS.”
According to Alfoneh, Suleimani is one of the instruments the Islamic Republic has used to foment a permanent state of crisis in Iraq, making Iraqis, especially the Shiites, dependent on his good will. It seems the White House is equally eager to stay on his good side, says Alfoneh. “I’m sure Suleimani enjoys the fact that the United States government, which has formally designated him a terrorist, now depends on his help to restore security in Iraq and save Baghdad from ISIS.”
Not surprisingly, the Obama administration has swallowed the bait from Tehran. Last week the White House indicated that it wanted Iraq’s political parties to form a new government—a positive step insofar as Maliki is one of the key sources of Iraq’s problems, and his failures paved the way for the ISIS blitzkrieg through Mosul. However, the administration also let on that it would be working with the regional power that controls Maliki. “We are interested in communicating with Iran,” said Secretary of State John Kerry. So that “the Iranians know what we’re thinking, that we know what they’re thinking, and there is a sharing of information so people aren’t making mistakes.”
The White House believes it has no choice but to coordinate with Iran since there’s no getting around Tehran’s power on the ground. The administration has reportedly pursued the same policy in Lebanon: through the Lebanese Armed Forces, it has shared intelligence on Sunni extremists with Hezbollah, Tehran’s division in the eastern Mediterranean. Because Obama will not devote sufficient assets to stopping Sunni jihadists fighting from Beirut to Baghdad, the administration believes it has little choice but to work with the only actor with men on the ground that shares an interest in stopping groups like ISIS. Who else but Qassem Suleimani? According to his PR offensive, he sees everything and knows everything. Hajj Qassem is everywhere.
Qassem Suleimani is apparently the most interesting man in the world. To judge by the profiles in major Western media outlets—including the New Yorker, BBC, and the Guardian—the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ external operations unit, the Quds Force, is the most feared and ruthless military strategist since Rommel. He’s also a fixer, a cleaner, like a figure out of a Quentin Tarantino film. Just last week, Suleimani was on call to help out a troubled client in Baghdad. After the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) overran Mosul, Suleimani landed with a cadre of Iranian advisers to lend a steady hand and reinforcements to Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki.
Some call Suleimani the Iranian proconsul in Iraq, but these days, Hajj Qassem, as he is known to friends and admirers, is everywhere around the Middle East. As he reportedly texted the American commander of coalition forces in Iraq in 2007: “General Petraeus, you should know that I, Qassem Suleimani, control policy for Iran with respect to Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, and Afghanistan.” And now there’s Syria, too, where Suleimani is gathering fighters from Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and Afghanistan, as well as Iranian troops from the IRGC and Basij to build a Shiite International to defend another Iranian ally, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.
Some say Hajj Qassem is Iran’s real powerbroker, and Hassan Rouhani is just the happy, so-called moderate, face of the clerical regime. Indeed, there are rumors floating around Shiite circles in Beirut that Suleimani recently attempted a coup against Rouhani, blocked at the last moment by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Maybe Suleimani really did try to topple Rouhani—it’s no secret he favored a rival, Tehran mayor Mohammad-Baqer Qalibaf, a fellow IRGC field commander from the war with Iraq whose son is believed to be married to Suleimani’s daughter. However, it’s just as likely that the rumors are the latest installment in an Iranian public relations blitz intended to brand Suleimani as the Middle East’s indispensable man. The campaign is directed at the Obama White House: If you want anything done in the Middle East, you’ll have to go through Iran and you’ll have to deal with Qassem Suleimani. If Rouhani and Javad Zarif are the regime’s moderates, Suleimani is its pit bull at the gate.
Suleimani is a serious person. “He’s considered a hero in Iran,” says Ali Alfoneh, an Iran expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “He defended Iran in the face of Iraqi invasion in the 1980s, fought the drug cartels close to the Afghan border in the 1990s, and is now defending the Shia against Sunni terrorists like ISIS.”
According to Alfoneh, Suleimani is one of the instruments the Islamic Republic has used to foment a permanent state of crisis in Iraq, making Iraqis, especially the Shiites, dependent on his good will. It seems the White House is equally eager to stay on his good side, says Alfoneh. “I’m sure Suleimani enjoys the fact that the United States government, which has formally designated him a terrorist, now depends on his help to restore security in Iraq and save Baghdad from ISIS.”
Not surprisingly, the Obama administration has swallowed the bait from Tehran. Last week the White House indicated that it wanted Iraq’s political parties to form a new government—a positive step insofar as Maliki is one of the key sources of Iraq’s problems, and his failures paved the way for the ISIS blitzkrieg through Mosul. However, the administration also let on that it would be working with the regional power that controls Maliki. “We are interested in communicating with Iran,” said Secretary of State John Kerry. So that “the Iranians know what we’re thinking, that we know what they’re thinking, and there is a sharing of information so people aren’t making mistakes.”
The White House believes it has no choice but to coordinate with Iran since there’s no getting around Tehran’s power on the ground. The administration has reportedly pursued the same policy in Lebanon: through the Lebanese Armed Forces, it has shared intelligence on Sunni extremists with Hezbollah, Tehran’s division in the eastern Mediterranean. Because Obama will not devote sufficient assets to stopping Sunni jihadists fighting from Beirut to Baghdad, the administration believes it has little choice but to work with the only actor with men on the ground that shares an interest in stopping groups like ISIS. Who else but Qassem Suleimani? According to his PR offensive, he sees everything and knows everything. Hajj Qassem is everywhere.
MIRROR, MIRROR
Henrik Bering
In the history of art, self-portraiture constitutes a world of its own, presenting us with moods ranging from the lighthearted to the sordid. There is sheer delight in Rubens’s painting of himself and his first wife Isabella Brant in a bower of honeysuckle bliss; acute menace when Caravaggio decks himself out as Bacchus, looking like some exceedingly poisonous rent boy, and veering into grisliness when he lets the severed head of Goliath carry his own likeness. Self-mockery is on offer in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment (1536-41), in which the artist has given his own melancholy features to the flayed skin of St. Bartholomew. Edward Munch’s androgynous self-images are exercises in toe-curling exhibitionism.
Here, James Hall provides a lively cultural interpretation of the genre from the Middle Ages to today. But rather than provide a series of “greatest hits,” he is more concerned with the reasons why artists create self-portraits, pursuing themes such as the role of the self-portrait as a vehicle for self-promotion and self-exploration; its use as therapy; and sex and the self-portrait. Whereas a portrait painter often has to conform to the wishes of his client, the self-portrait leaves him free to do as he pleases.
Almost until the end of the 15th century, self-portraits were rare, notes Hall. The medieval artist might insert a vignette of himself in an illuminated manuscript, or include himself in a biblical crowd scene (he is the one who looks directly at us). But things change dramatically from 1490 onwards, when sculptors and masons started calling attention to themselves, as did painters such as Parmigianino, Raphael, and Giorgione in Italy and Dürer—the most prolific creator of self-images in the Renaissance—in Germany.
Known across Europe for his engravings and woodcuts, Dürer proved an expert in self-advertisement and status affirmation. No mere artisan he! One oil portrait shows him as a fashion plate, clad in the finest fabrics; another shows him as a Christ-like figure. In both, his hair gets special attention, hair being regarded as indicative of the brain activity below. This marks Dürer “not as a proto hippie, but a supremely fertile and versatile thinker,” writes Hall.
Common to Dürer and his Italian colleagues, Hall believes, is the fact that they subscribed to the notion of the child prodigy popular in the Renaissance: the idea that genius is something innate rather than acquired. They positively reveled in their youth and their gift. To an early drawing of himself, done at the age of 12, Dürer later proudly added, “This I drew myself from a mirror in the year 1484, when I was still a child.” To Dürer, a gifted artist’s quick sketch “on half a sheet of paper” or engraving on “a tiny piece of wood” will always beat the painting of a poor plodder who works “with the utmost diligence for a whole year.”
After this outburst of youthful exuberance, notes Hall, a shift occurs with Michelangelo and Titian. Decades before bestowing his own likeness onto St. Bartholomew, Michelangelo produced the first-ever self-cartoon sketch, next to a sonnet grumbling about the working conditions in the Sistine Chap-el. (As Hall notes, the ability to mock oneself is the hallmark of the supremely confident.) Titian, on the other hand, had the courage to portray himself in extreme old age, the first to do so. Of his two late self-portraits, the second shows Titian in a mood of “punitive piety,” with a faraway gaze and translucent, parchment-like skin; he is a man no longer of this world.
With Rembrandt, the genre reaches a high point, both as a vehicle for self-advertisement and for self-examination: One of every five of his productions is a self-portrait. In The Artist in his -Studio (ca. 1628), Rembrandt presents his credentials as a prodigy, a tiny figure “swallowed up by his voluminous working clothes and wide-brimmed hat, and dwarfed by the giant wooden easel with its elephantine legs.” In his etchings, he experiments with expressions and grim-aces, while his oils, featuring himself in fancy costumes, prove to costumers what he is capable of doing.
However, it is in the self-portraits produced in his last decade (which included his bankruptcy) that Rembrandt goes further than any of his predecessors in subjecting himself to intense scrutiny. No longer the hot name in art, his 1665 self-portrait with palette and brushes, and arm on hip, shows him magnificently defiant—the very coarseness of his style a taunt to smoother newcomers.
In the history of art, self-portraiture constitutes a world of its own, presenting us with moods ranging from the lighthearted to the sordid. There is sheer delight in Rubens’s painting of himself and his first wife Isabella Brant in a bower of honeysuckle bliss; acute menace when Caravaggio decks himself out as Bacchus, looking like some exceedingly poisonous rent boy, and veering into grisliness when he lets the severed head of Goliath carry his own likeness. Self-mockery is on offer in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment (1536-41), in which the artist has given his own melancholy features to the flayed skin of St. Bartholomew. Edward Munch’s androgynous self-images are exercises in toe-curling exhibitionism.
Here, James Hall provides a lively cultural interpretation of the genre from the Middle Ages to today. But rather than provide a series of “greatest hits,” he is more concerned with the reasons why artists create self-portraits, pursuing themes such as the role of the self-portrait as a vehicle for self-promotion and self-exploration; its use as therapy; and sex and the self-portrait. Whereas a portrait painter often has to conform to the wishes of his client, the self-portrait leaves him free to do as he pleases.
Almost until the end of the 15th century, self-portraits were rare, notes Hall. The medieval artist might insert a vignette of himself in an illuminated manuscript, or include himself in a biblical crowd scene (he is the one who looks directly at us). But things change dramatically from 1490 onwards, when sculptors and masons started calling attention to themselves, as did painters such as Parmigianino, Raphael, and Giorgione in Italy and Dürer—the most prolific creator of self-images in the Renaissance—in Germany.
Known across Europe for his engravings and woodcuts, Dürer proved an expert in self-advertisement and status affirmation. No mere artisan he! One oil portrait shows him as a fashion plate, clad in the finest fabrics; another shows him as a Christ-like figure. In both, his hair gets special attention, hair being regarded as indicative of the brain activity below. This marks Dürer “not as a proto hippie, but a supremely fertile and versatile thinker,” writes Hall.
Common to Dürer and his Italian colleagues, Hall believes, is the fact that they subscribed to the notion of the child prodigy popular in the Renaissance: the idea that genius is something innate rather than acquired. They positively reveled in their youth and their gift. To an early drawing of himself, done at the age of 12, Dürer later proudly added, “This I drew myself from a mirror in the year 1484, when I was still a child.” To Dürer, a gifted artist’s quick sketch “on half a sheet of paper” or engraving on “a tiny piece of wood” will always beat the painting of a poor plodder who works “with the utmost diligence for a whole year.”
After this outburst of youthful exuberance, notes Hall, a shift occurs with Michelangelo and Titian. Decades before bestowing his own likeness onto St. Bartholomew, Michelangelo produced the first-ever self-cartoon sketch, next to a sonnet grumbling about the working conditions in the Sistine Chap-el. (As Hall notes, the ability to mock oneself is the hallmark of the supremely confident.) Titian, on the other hand, had the courage to portray himself in extreme old age, the first to do so. Of his two late self-portraits, the second shows Titian in a mood of “punitive piety,” with a faraway gaze and translucent, parchment-like skin; he is a man no longer of this world.
With Rembrandt, the genre reaches a high point, both as a vehicle for self-advertisement and for self-examination: One of every five of his productions is a self-portrait. In The Artist in his -Studio (ca. 1628), Rembrandt presents his credentials as a prodigy, a tiny figure “swallowed up by his voluminous working clothes and wide-brimmed hat, and dwarfed by the giant wooden easel with its elephantine legs.” In his etchings, he experiments with expressions and grim-aces, while his oils, featuring himself in fancy costumes, prove to costumers what he is capable of doing.
However, it is in the self-portraits produced in his last decade (which included his bankruptcy) that Rembrandt goes further than any of his predecessors in subjecting himself to intense scrutiny. No longer the hot name in art, his 1665 self-portrait with palette and brushes, and arm on hip, shows him magnificently defiant—the very coarseness of his style a taunt to smoother newcomers.
IN DUBIOUS BATTLE
J. Harvie Wilkinson III
Back then, it was not known as World War I, for the obvious reason that the Second World War still lay in the future. It was simply the Great War, for the world had never seen anything like it.
We’re close to the centennial of the Guns of August, which has brought forth all sorts of discussions of the causes and consequences of the war. The focus of this book by Peter Hart, historian at the Imperial War Museum, is quite different: He sees the war through the eyes of those who fought it. The result is a riveting account from those on both sides of the conflict, those for whom the larger disquisitions on the meaning of the war yielded utterly to the daily struggle for survival.
The Great War featured an unusual number of highly literate soldiers for both the Allies (chiefly the Triple Entente of France, Britain, and Russia, and, much later, the United States) and the Central Powers (chiefly Germany and Austria-Hungary), who had no inkling of the inferno that awaited them. We know of the remarkable trio of war poets—Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, and Siegfried Sassoon—and we expect that generals would convey their accounts and impressions. But it is the insight and sensitivity of innumerable junior officers and enlisted men that bring home the terrors of bombardment, from which there seemed no exit, and the eternal presence of mud.
Sadly, the description of Lieutenant Richard Dixon of the 14th Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery, at the Third Battle of Ypres (1917) is not the worst:
All around us lay the dead, both friend and foe, half in, half out of the water-logged shell holes. Their hands and boots stuck out at us from the mud. Their rotting faces stared blindly at us from coverlets of mud; their decaying buttocks heaved themselves obscenely from the filth with which the shell bursts had smothered them. Skulls grinned at us; all around us stank unbelievably. These corpses were never buried, for it was impossible for us to retrieve them. They had lain, many of them, for weeks and months; they would lie and rot and disintegrate foully into the muck until they were an inescapable part of it to manure the harvests of a future peace-time Belgium.
The Great War marked the progression of precision killing. The weapons may seem quaint or primitive to us now, but what they presaged was ominous for mankind. The first German U-boats were often lethal, but above all they were cramped, with the bunks of some officers so small they lay only on their sides. The machine guns made a killing field of No Man’s Land; poison gases took aim at eyes, throats, and lungs: “We choked, spit, and coughed, my lungs felt as though they were being burnt out, and were going to burst. Red-hot needles were being thrust into my eyes.” The air war featured celebrated aces, such as Germany’s Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, and Canada’s William Barker, but the main initial use of planes was for reconnaissance—namely, to locate opposing artillery batteries. Indeed, it was those ever-more-massive artillery barrages that may have posed the greatest threat, as described by a German lieutenant:
The earth roared, trembled, rocked—this was followed by an utterly amazing crash and there, before us in a huge arc, kilometres long, was raised a curtain of fire about one hundred metres high. The scene was quite extraordinary; almost beyond description. It was like a thunderstorm magnified one thousand times!
The carnage of the Great War dwarfed any previous conflict, and the casualty figures are chillingly rounded-off here. Hart estimates that “just under 9,722,000 soldiers died through military action in the war.” Another 21 million were injured, many “scarred or maimed for life.” Germany alone lost two million soldiers; France almost a million-and-a-half. By contrast, the United States lost “only” 116,000. The Great War was hardly the first to take a heavy toll on civilians, but approximately 950,000 “died from direct military action” and almost six million more from “war-related famine and disease.” As the conflict wore on, the numbers mounted, to no apparent purpose or effect. An inch gained one day was often given back the next.
The seemingly senseless carnage understandably sparked a search for scapegoats, the most available of whom were inept commanders: The epithet of “lions led by donkeys” was meant to contrast the valor of the ordinary fighting men with the obtuseness of those who ordered them over the top. Hart attempts a modest rehabilitation of the reputations of several commanders, one of whom was the German general Erich von Falkenhayn.
Back then, it was not known as World War I, for the obvious reason that the Second World War still lay in the future. It was simply the Great War, for the world had never seen anything like it.
We’re close to the centennial of the Guns of August, which has brought forth all sorts of discussions of the causes and consequences of the war. The focus of this book by Peter Hart, historian at the Imperial War Museum, is quite different: He sees the war through the eyes of those who fought it. The result is a riveting account from those on both sides of the conflict, those for whom the larger disquisitions on the meaning of the war yielded utterly to the daily struggle for survival.
The Great War featured an unusual number of highly literate soldiers for both the Allies (chiefly the Triple Entente of France, Britain, and Russia, and, much later, the United States) and the Central Powers (chiefly Germany and Austria-Hungary), who had no inkling of the inferno that awaited them. We know of the remarkable trio of war poets—Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, and Siegfried Sassoon—and we expect that generals would convey their accounts and impressions. But it is the insight and sensitivity of innumerable junior officers and enlisted men that bring home the terrors of bombardment, from which there seemed no exit, and the eternal presence of mud.
Sadly, the description of Lieutenant Richard Dixon of the 14th Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery, at the Third Battle of Ypres (1917) is not the worst:
All around us lay the dead, both friend and foe, half in, half out of the water-logged shell holes. Their hands and boots stuck out at us from the mud. Their rotting faces stared blindly at us from coverlets of mud; their decaying buttocks heaved themselves obscenely from the filth with which the shell bursts had smothered them. Skulls grinned at us; all around us stank unbelievably. These corpses were never buried, for it was impossible for us to retrieve them. They had lain, many of them, for weeks and months; they would lie and rot and disintegrate foully into the muck until they were an inescapable part of it to manure the harvests of a future peace-time Belgium.
The Great War marked the progression of precision killing. The weapons may seem quaint or primitive to us now, but what they presaged was ominous for mankind. The first German U-boats were often lethal, but above all they were cramped, with the bunks of some officers so small they lay only on their sides. The machine guns made a killing field of No Man’s Land; poison gases took aim at eyes, throats, and lungs: “We choked, spit, and coughed, my lungs felt as though they were being burnt out, and were going to burst. Red-hot needles were being thrust into my eyes.” The air war featured celebrated aces, such as Germany’s Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, and Canada’s William Barker, but the main initial use of planes was for reconnaissance—namely, to locate opposing artillery batteries. Indeed, it was those ever-more-massive artillery barrages that may have posed the greatest threat, as described by a German lieutenant:
The earth roared, trembled, rocked—this was followed by an utterly amazing crash and there, before us in a huge arc, kilometres long, was raised a curtain of fire about one hundred metres high. The scene was quite extraordinary; almost beyond description. It was like a thunderstorm magnified one thousand times!
The carnage of the Great War dwarfed any previous conflict, and the casualty figures are chillingly rounded-off here. Hart estimates that “just under 9,722,000 soldiers died through military action in the war.” Another 21 million were injured, many “scarred or maimed for life.” Germany alone lost two million soldiers; France almost a million-and-a-half. By contrast, the United States lost “only” 116,000. The Great War was hardly the first to take a heavy toll on civilians, but approximately 950,000 “died from direct military action” and almost six million more from “war-related famine and disease.” As the conflict wore on, the numbers mounted, to no apparent purpose or effect. An inch gained one day was often given back the next.
The seemingly senseless carnage understandably sparked a search for scapegoats, the most available of whom were inept commanders: The epithet of “lions led by donkeys” was meant to contrast the valor of the ordinary fighting men with the obtuseness of those who ordered them over the top. Hart attempts a modest rehabilitation of the reputations of several commanders, one of whom was the German general Erich von Falkenhayn.
WHAT ABOUT THE BOOK?
Geoffrey Norman
Nobody has time to read these days. Everybody says so, anyway. So in the case of Hillary Clinton’s Hard Choices, is there any good reason to buy the book and read it? Not much, going by the reviews. None has called it a page turner and, at more than 600 of them, you’d like to have a reason to keep turning. Life is short, and there are many, many books still to read.
Maureen Dowd describes the book as “inert, a big yawn.” Others are kinder, but none is enthusiastic. There is no review that makes you think that you can buy this book and count on it to deliver the satisfactions enjoyed by literate people.
Now there is absolutely nothing contingent about this. Mrs. Clinton wasn’t broke any longer when she wrote the book. She wasn’t trying to turn out a bodice ripper to pay some bills in the fashion of William Faulkner when he wrote Sanctuary. She got close to a $14 million advance for this book. She could have found herself a little studio somewhere, shut down the phone and the email, splurged on a top-shelf coffeemaker and a comfortable desk chair and gone to work, making it her goal to write the kind of book that, in the contemporary argot, would “change people’s lives.” A book that an ordinary reader, not consumed by the politics of the moment, would find pleasure and enlightenment in reading.
She chose, manifestly, not to do that, and the choice says something about her. Nobody can write a good book as the result of merely having decided to. But one can make an effort not to write a bad book, and Mrs. Clinton is certainly intelligent enough to recognize flaws in a book that would keep it from being good, or great, and might even make it bad.
You don’t, for instance, write about how Canada “our northern neighbor is an indispensable partner.”
Readers hoping for a book that will be a kind of companion for many hours aren’t looking for the sort of thing they can get from any canned political speech. Which is to say, passages like this:
Ultimately, what happens in 2016 should be about what kind of future Americans want for themselves and their children — and grandchildren. I hope we choose inclusive politics and a common purpose to unleash the creativity, potential, and opportunity that makes America exceptional. That’s what all American people deserve.
Even great books include the occasional clunker. But an accumulation reveals either a tin ear or, worse, contempt for literary standards. If the author couldn’t even take the trouble to clean up this kind of mush, one thinks, why should I bother to keep up my end and read the damned thing?
And then there is the matter of proportion. You don’t include in the same autobiographical work a chapter on how much you love your mother and your daughter along with one on the controversial murder of an American ambassador who worked for you. You don’t do this, that is, unless your aim is not to write a good book but one that contains material that you can place in Vogue to soften your image along with something that will work in Politico and help “position” you for a coming political campaign.
Constructing (as opposed to writing) a book that can be excerpted in both Vogue and Politico will likely result in one that recalls the Winston Churchill line: “Pray remove this pudding. It has no theme.” Churchill had an actual pudding in mind, but the line can be applied to Hard Choices and to many less-celebrated books belonging to this unfortunate genre. In fact, Churchill himself provides the proof that it is not some iron law of nature that such books should be a bore and chore to read, that it is possible to write a political/historical memoir that succeeds as a book and even a work of literature.
This thought occurred to me during the week when all the talk was of Mrs. Clinton’s book. Why not, thought I, read an actual book that is right for the moment? This is the 100th summer since the Guns of August, and Churchill’s The World Crisis is still one of the indispensable books on that catastrophe. So I spent the week rereading the one-volume, abridged edition.
Nobody has time to read these days. Everybody says so, anyway. So in the case of Hillary Clinton’s Hard Choices, is there any good reason to buy the book and read it? Not much, going by the reviews. None has called it a page turner and, at more than 600 of them, you’d like to have a reason to keep turning. Life is short, and there are many, many books still to read.
Maureen Dowd describes the book as “inert, a big yawn.” Others are kinder, but none is enthusiastic. There is no review that makes you think that you can buy this book and count on it to deliver the satisfactions enjoyed by literate people.
Now there is absolutely nothing contingent about this. Mrs. Clinton wasn’t broke any longer when she wrote the book. She wasn’t trying to turn out a bodice ripper to pay some bills in the fashion of William Faulkner when he wrote Sanctuary. She got close to a $14 million advance for this book. She could have found herself a little studio somewhere, shut down the phone and the email, splurged on a top-shelf coffeemaker and a comfortable desk chair and gone to work, making it her goal to write the kind of book that, in the contemporary argot, would “change people’s lives.” A book that an ordinary reader, not consumed by the politics of the moment, would find pleasure and enlightenment in reading.
She chose, manifestly, not to do that, and the choice says something about her. Nobody can write a good book as the result of merely having decided to. But one can make an effort not to write a bad book, and Mrs. Clinton is certainly intelligent enough to recognize flaws in a book that would keep it from being good, or great, and might even make it bad.
You don’t, for instance, write about how Canada “our northern neighbor is an indispensable partner.”
Readers hoping for a book that will be a kind of companion for many hours aren’t looking for the sort of thing they can get from any canned political speech. Which is to say, passages like this:
Ultimately, what happens in 2016 should be about what kind of future Americans want for themselves and their children — and grandchildren. I hope we choose inclusive politics and a common purpose to unleash the creativity, potential, and opportunity that makes America exceptional. That’s what all American people deserve.
Even great books include the occasional clunker. But an accumulation reveals either a tin ear or, worse, contempt for literary standards. If the author couldn’t even take the trouble to clean up this kind of mush, one thinks, why should I bother to keep up my end and read the damned thing?
And then there is the matter of proportion. You don’t include in the same autobiographical work a chapter on how much you love your mother and your daughter along with one on the controversial murder of an American ambassador who worked for you. You don’t do this, that is, unless your aim is not to write a good book but one that contains material that you can place in Vogue to soften your image along with something that will work in Politico and help “position” you for a coming political campaign.
Constructing (as opposed to writing) a book that can be excerpted in both Vogue and Politico will likely result in one that recalls the Winston Churchill line: “Pray remove this pudding. It has no theme.” Churchill had an actual pudding in mind, but the line can be applied to Hard Choices and to many less-celebrated books belonging to this unfortunate genre. In fact, Churchill himself provides the proof that it is not some iron law of nature that such books should be a bore and chore to read, that it is possible to write a political/historical memoir that succeeds as a book and even a work of literature.
This thought occurred to me during the week when all the talk was of Mrs. Clinton’s book. Why not, thought I, read an actual book that is right for the moment? This is the 100th summer since the Guns of August, and Churchill’s The World Crisis is still one of the indispensable books on that catastrophe. So I spent the week rereading the one-volume, abridged edition.
FORBIDDEN THOUGHTS
Leslie Lenkowsky
In late April, a 70-year-old Chinese journalist, Gao Yu, was taken into custody, one of several human rights activists rounded up to keep them from observing the 25th anniversary of the massacre of student protesters by government troops in Tiananmen Square. Shortly afterwards, Gao appeared on television, confessing to a specific offense: leaking what the Chinese news agency Xinhua described as a “highly confidential document” to a foreign website.
“I admit that what I have done touched on legal issues and threatened national interests,” she said, according to the BBC. “My actions were very wrong.”
What had she revealed? Not the plans for a new Chinese warplane or cyberattack. Not even details about the real health of China’s economy or major industries. Rather, as her lawyer has all but acknowledged, the secret paper Gao made public was “Document Number 9,” issued a year earlier by the main administrative office of China’s Communist party. Entitled “Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere,” it demonstrates what the leadership of China regards as truly threatening: not the West’s economic or military might but its political and philosophical ideas.
Pronouncements such as this—the ninth issued in 2013—aim to instruct the party faithful throughout China on official doctrine as promulgated by the Central Committee and, importantly at that time, newly chosen President Xi Jinping. Like the others, Document Number 9 was meant to be discussed at local party meetings and inform party-run publications and websites, but was not for public consumption. It opens a window into what China’s normally secretive government officials are thinking, or at least want loyalists to think, which, thanks to the unfortunate Gao Yu, everyone can now know.
The communiqué focuses on seven “false ideological trends, positions, and activities” that the party leadership believes are spreading in the country and endangering “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” Foremost among them is “Western Constitutional democracy,” the idea that good governance requires a separation of powers, general elections, a multiparty system, an independent judiciary, and other features. According to Document Number 9, China’s system of government should reflect “Chinese characteristics.” It should place “the Party’s leadership” and “the People’s Democracy” ahead of the political and legal processes championed by the West.
Likewise, in the eyes of China’s leaders, advocating for “universal values” amounts to claiming “that the West’s value system defies time and space, transcends nation and class, and applies to all humanity.” Such arguments are “confusing and deceptive,” they contend, because China—and “Socialism”—should subscribe to fundamentally different values.
These include rejecting individual and economic freedom. Document Number 9 dismisses “promoting civil society” as based on the idea that “in the social sphere, individual rights are paramount and ought to be immune to obstruction by the state”; it pits “the Party against the masses.” Nor does “neoliberalism,” defined as relying on private property and markets to shape economic activity, fare any better. The “catastrophic consequences” that have occurred in “Latin America, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe” show its flaws, the authors write, and underscore the dangers of efforts “to weaken the government’s control of the national economy.”
Also disparaged is freedom of the press. It is an idea, says Document Number 9, which challenges “China’s principle that the media and publishing system should be subject to Party discipline.” Those who embrace it “gouge an opening through which to infiltrate our ideology.”
Writing about the past is suspect as well. “Historical nihilism,” which Document Number 9 defines as the repudiation of the “historical purpose” of the Chinese revolution, such as by rejecting “the scientific and guiding value of Mao Zedong thought,” is not only mistaken, but also “tantamount to denying the legitimacy of the CCP’s long-term political dominance.”
Finally, the communiqué makes clear that questioning public policies, even in the name of “reform” or of “opening,” is impermissible. Raising doubts about the direction or pace of the government’s current course will “disturb people’s existing consensus on important issues like which flag to raise, which road to take, which goals to pursue, etc.,” ultimately retarding China’s “stable progress.” Not least of all, Document Number 9 warns that this could encourage “Tibetan self-immolation,” “terrorist attacks in Xinjiang,” and the breakup of China along ethnic and religious lines, among other dire consequences.
In late April, a 70-year-old Chinese journalist, Gao Yu, was taken into custody, one of several human rights activists rounded up to keep them from observing the 25th anniversary of the massacre of student protesters by government troops in Tiananmen Square. Shortly afterwards, Gao appeared on television, confessing to a specific offense: leaking what the Chinese news agency Xinhua described as a “highly confidential document” to a foreign website.
“I admit that what I have done touched on legal issues and threatened national interests,” she said, according to the BBC. “My actions were very wrong.”
What had she revealed? Not the plans for a new Chinese warplane or cyberattack. Not even details about the real health of China’s economy or major industries. Rather, as her lawyer has all but acknowledged, the secret paper Gao made public was “Document Number 9,” issued a year earlier by the main administrative office of China’s Communist party. Entitled “Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere,” it demonstrates what the leadership of China regards as truly threatening: not the West’s economic or military might but its political and philosophical ideas.
Pronouncements such as this—the ninth issued in 2013—aim to instruct the party faithful throughout China on official doctrine as promulgated by the Central Committee and, importantly at that time, newly chosen President Xi Jinping. Like the others, Document Number 9 was meant to be discussed at local party meetings and inform party-run publications and websites, but was not for public consumption. It opens a window into what China’s normally secretive government officials are thinking, or at least want loyalists to think, which, thanks to the unfortunate Gao Yu, everyone can now know.
The communiqué focuses on seven “false ideological trends, positions, and activities” that the party leadership believes are spreading in the country and endangering “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” Foremost among them is “Western Constitutional democracy,” the idea that good governance requires a separation of powers, general elections, a multiparty system, an independent judiciary, and other features. According to Document Number 9, China’s system of government should reflect “Chinese characteristics.” It should place “the Party’s leadership” and “the People’s Democracy” ahead of the political and legal processes championed by the West.
Likewise, in the eyes of China’s leaders, advocating for “universal values” amounts to claiming “that the West’s value system defies time and space, transcends nation and class, and applies to all humanity.” Such arguments are “confusing and deceptive,” they contend, because China—and “Socialism”—should subscribe to fundamentally different values.
These include rejecting individual and economic freedom. Document Number 9 dismisses “promoting civil society” as based on the idea that “in the social sphere, individual rights are paramount and ought to be immune to obstruction by the state”; it pits “the Party against the masses.” Nor does “neoliberalism,” defined as relying on private property and markets to shape economic activity, fare any better. The “catastrophic consequences” that have occurred in “Latin America, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe” show its flaws, the authors write, and underscore the dangers of efforts “to weaken the government’s control of the national economy.”
Also disparaged is freedom of the press. It is an idea, says Document Number 9, which challenges “China’s principle that the media and publishing system should be subject to Party discipline.” Those who embrace it “gouge an opening through which to infiltrate our ideology.”
Writing about the past is suspect as well. “Historical nihilism,” which Document Number 9 defines as the repudiation of the “historical purpose” of the Chinese revolution, such as by rejecting “the scientific and guiding value of Mao Zedong thought,” is not only mistaken, but also “tantamount to denying the legitimacy of the CCP’s long-term political dominance.”
Finally, the communiqué makes clear that questioning public policies, even in the name of “reform” or of “opening,” is impermissible. Raising doubts about the direction or pace of the government’s current course will “disturb people’s existing consensus on important issues like which flag to raise, which road to take, which goals to pursue, etc.,” ultimately retarding China’s “stable progress.” Not least of all, Document Number 9 warns that this could encourage “Tibetan self-immolation,” “terrorist attacks in Xinjiang,” and the breakup of China along ethnic and religious lines, among other dire consequences.
BETWEEN IRAQ AND A HARD PLACE
David Devoss
They came from the west through the Syrian Desert, across the Euphrates River, and down off the Nineveh Plain. Mosul, Baiji, Tikrit, Samarra—cities held by the U.S. military just two and a half years before—fell almost without a fight, absorbed into the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a prospective terrorist caliphate based on sharia law and governed by Salafist militants who make even al Qaeda shudder.
For the moment, America’s $3 trillion attempt to plant a pluralist democracy in the heart of the Middle East lies in ruins. Trained and equipped at a cost of $25 billion, Iraq’s army is in disarray, the Humvees, tanks, and field artillery it inherited from the United States now in enemy hands. Al Anbar sheikhs like Mohammed Khamis Abu Risha who joined the Sunni Awakening in 2007 at the behest of Gen. David Petraeus are being hunted down and killed. Captured government officials who happen to be Shiite face the possibility of summary execution.
No armed foreign intervention will quell the enmity that divides Sunni and Shiites. In Saudi Arabia, Wahhabi disdain for Shiites is such that an inadvertent handshake requires ablutions. Pakistani Sunni disparage fervent Shiites with nicknames like “mosquitoes.” In Iraq, where the collision of the Persian and Arab worlds has left a 60/40 Shiite to Sunni divide, American options are limited. “The initial impulse is to take short-term military action, but the problems in Iraq are political,” says American Academy of Diplomacy president Ron Neumann, a former U.S. ambassador who served in Iraq with the Coalition Provisional Authority. “Sending in American troops will just redirect all the anger toward us.”
Much of the blame for the current chaos goes to Iraq’s 64-year-old premier, Nuri al-Maliki, a Shiite who came to power in 2006 after promising George W. Bush and U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad he would form a government of national reconciliation. After twice building coalitions with Sunni support, Maliki denied Sunni political parties the ministries he had promised. His biggest mistake, however, was dismissing from government service the former al Qaeda sympathizers Petraeus had employed at minimal expense during the surge.
A dour politician, Maliki is no man of the people. Instead of shaking hands with voters, he moves through a crowd head bowed, enveloped by a flying wedge of bodyguards with linked arms. “In return for military assistance, Maliki once again has promised to form an inclusive government, but I suspect he will break his promise,” says Marina Ottaway, a senior scholar of Middle East affairs at the Wilson Center. “Maliki has no credibility left. There can be no reconciliation as long as he heads the government.”
Iraq’s constitution requires Maliki, who has already served two terms as premier, to relinquish power. But there is little chance of that happening since last year cronies on Iraq’s Supreme Court voided that part of the constitution.
ISIS has no chance of taking over Iraq. The Shiites will fight to the death to protect the holy cities of Karbala and Najaf that lie south of Baghdad. With massive support from Iran, Maliki might even survive politically. Washington’s reasons for saving Maliki and befriending Iran are less compelling given the fact the United States has an alternative, alliance with a more prosperous and stable partner in northern Iraq’s Kurdish population.
Spend more than a few days in the Kurdish capital of Erbil and you’ll hear Kurds say, “We love America but it doesn’t love us.” From an American perspective, it is hard to see what’s not to love. The Kurds have a booming capitalist economy, a functioning court system, two political parties that manage to compromise on most issues, and a regulatory environment that favors Western investment. Though officially part of Iraq, the three Kurdish provinces function as a quasi-independent nation in that they collectively issue visas, control border crossings, and pursue a foreign policy independent of Baghdad. Though largely Sunni in orientation, the Kurds maintain friendly relations with Tehran’s Shiite government and close business ties with Ankara.
All this is possible because of oil, a commodity Washington fears might prompt Iraq’s Kurds to proclaim independence.
They came from the west through the Syrian Desert, across the Euphrates River, and down off the Nineveh Plain. Mosul, Baiji, Tikrit, Samarra—cities held by the U.S. military just two and a half years before—fell almost without a fight, absorbed into the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a prospective terrorist caliphate based on sharia law and governed by Salafist militants who make even al Qaeda shudder.
For the moment, America’s $3 trillion attempt to plant a pluralist democracy in the heart of the Middle East lies in ruins. Trained and equipped at a cost of $25 billion, Iraq’s army is in disarray, the Humvees, tanks, and field artillery it inherited from the United States now in enemy hands. Al Anbar sheikhs like Mohammed Khamis Abu Risha who joined the Sunni Awakening in 2007 at the behest of Gen. David Petraeus are being hunted down and killed. Captured government officials who happen to be Shiite face the possibility of summary execution.
No armed foreign intervention will quell the enmity that divides Sunni and Shiites. In Saudi Arabia, Wahhabi disdain for Shiites is such that an inadvertent handshake requires ablutions. Pakistani Sunni disparage fervent Shiites with nicknames like “mosquitoes.” In Iraq, where the collision of the Persian and Arab worlds has left a 60/40 Shiite to Sunni divide, American options are limited. “The initial impulse is to take short-term military action, but the problems in Iraq are political,” says American Academy of Diplomacy president Ron Neumann, a former U.S. ambassador who served in Iraq with the Coalition Provisional Authority. “Sending in American troops will just redirect all the anger toward us.”
Much of the blame for the current chaos goes to Iraq’s 64-year-old premier, Nuri al-Maliki, a Shiite who came to power in 2006 after promising George W. Bush and U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad he would form a government of national reconciliation. After twice building coalitions with Sunni support, Maliki denied Sunni political parties the ministries he had promised. His biggest mistake, however, was dismissing from government service the former al Qaeda sympathizers Petraeus had employed at minimal expense during the surge.
A dour politician, Maliki is no man of the people. Instead of shaking hands with voters, he moves through a crowd head bowed, enveloped by a flying wedge of bodyguards with linked arms. “In return for military assistance, Maliki once again has promised to form an inclusive government, but I suspect he will break his promise,” says Marina Ottaway, a senior scholar of Middle East affairs at the Wilson Center. “Maliki has no credibility left. There can be no reconciliation as long as he heads the government.”
Iraq’s constitution requires Maliki, who has already served two terms as premier, to relinquish power. But there is little chance of that happening since last year cronies on Iraq’s Supreme Court voided that part of the constitution.
ISIS has no chance of taking over Iraq. The Shiites will fight to the death to protect the holy cities of Karbala and Najaf that lie south of Baghdad. With massive support from Iran, Maliki might even survive politically. Washington’s reasons for saving Maliki and befriending Iran are less compelling given the fact the United States has an alternative, alliance with a more prosperous and stable partner in northern Iraq’s Kurdish population.
Spend more than a few days in the Kurdish capital of Erbil and you’ll hear Kurds say, “We love America but it doesn’t love us.” From an American perspective, it is hard to see what’s not to love. The Kurds have a booming capitalist economy, a functioning court system, two political parties that manage to compromise on most issues, and a regulatory environment that favors Western investment. Though officially part of Iraq, the three Kurdish provinces function as a quasi-independent nation in that they collectively issue visas, control border crossings, and pursue a foreign policy independent of Baghdad. Though largely Sunni in orientation, the Kurds maintain friendly relations with Tehran’s Shiite government and close business ties with Ankara.
All this is possible because of oil, a commodity Washington fears might prompt Iraq’s Kurds to proclaim independence.
THIS LEGAL IMMIGRANT WANTS THE OLD AMERICA
Michael Youssef
As we pause to celebrate the birth of this blessed nation, many among us are sad and even disgusted over what has happened to it.
Millions of Americans who have known “the old America”—the one they were born in and grew up in—feel a deep disappointment that their grandchildren will not grow up to know the country that valued morality and biblical ethics.
From the White House to the schoolhouse, we see forces that reject biblical values. From our government, we even see the outlawing of the name of Jesus from public prayers, especially from the military, which owes all victories to Him.
And there are also those, such as my family and me, who immigrated to this blessed land and long for the original America—the America as envisioned by the founding fathers.
I came to this country because, as a boy living under the tyranny of dictatorship and socialism, I longed to be free. I read the writings of America’s founders and dreamed of breathing the air of freedom—the air that was purchased with the blood of many American patriots.
That desire echoes the desire of the silent majority of millions of immigrants who legally came here, or were brought by their forebears. People who valued America and could never take it for granted because they had experienced oppressive political systems in their home countries.
In my article series, The Price of Liberty, I described what those millions of legal immigrants want. It is a refrain that goes something like this:
We want the America that feared God.
We want the America whose foundation was the Bible.
We want the America of which George Washington said: “It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible.”
We want the America of which Abraham Lincoln said: “The only assurance of our nation’s safety is to lay our foundation in morality and religion.”
We want the America of the Founding Fathers who said: “When the importance of religion is diminished … so is the effectiveness of government.”
We want the America of which the Supreme Court in 1844 said: “The Bible, and especially the New Testament [should] be read and taught as divine revelation in the [schools, otherwise] … where can the purest principles of morality be learned so clearly or so perfectly as from the New Testament?”
We want the America of which New York Supreme Court Chief Justice Kent said in 1811: “We are a Christian people, and the morality of the country is deeply engrafted upon Christianity, and not upon the doctrines or worship of those imposters [other religions].”
We want the America of which the Supreme Court of New York in 1811 also said: “Whatever strikes at the root of Christianity tends manifestly to the dissolution of the civil government … because it tends to corrupt the morals of the people, and to destroy good order.”
We want the America of which Daniel Webster said: “The principles of all genuine liberty and of wise laws and administrations, are to be drawn from the Bible and sustained by its authority. The man, therefore, who weakens or destroys the divine authority of that book may be an accessory to all of the public disorders which society is doomed to suffer.”
Today we are seeing Webster’s prophetic words come to life; we are witnessing all the “public disorders” of which we are now “doomed to suffer.”
This race to the bottom must stop. We want the old America back.
We want the America that reflects the beliefs of most of the country, not the vocal and belligerent minority. We want an America of those earlier courts, not the courts of the last fifty years that have been busy striking at the Christian cornerstone of our nation.
As we celebrate America’s birth, let us not become weary of praying and working for our Judeo-Christian foundation to be reestablished.
As we pause to celebrate the birth of this blessed nation, many among us are sad and even disgusted over what has happened to it.
Millions of Americans who have known “the old America”—the one they were born in and grew up in—feel a deep disappointment that their grandchildren will not grow up to know the country that valued morality and biblical ethics.
From the White House to the schoolhouse, we see forces that reject biblical values. From our government, we even see the outlawing of the name of Jesus from public prayers, especially from the military, which owes all victories to Him.
And there are also those, such as my family and me, who immigrated to this blessed land and long for the original America—the America as envisioned by the founding fathers.
I came to this country because, as a boy living under the tyranny of dictatorship and socialism, I longed to be free. I read the writings of America’s founders and dreamed of breathing the air of freedom—the air that was purchased with the blood of many American patriots.
That desire echoes the desire of the silent majority of millions of immigrants who legally came here, or were brought by their forebears. People who valued America and could never take it for granted because they had experienced oppressive political systems in their home countries.
In my article series, The Price of Liberty, I described what those millions of legal immigrants want. It is a refrain that goes something like this:
We want the America that feared God.
We want the America whose foundation was the Bible.
We want the America of which George Washington said: “It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible.”
We want the America of which Abraham Lincoln said: “The only assurance of our nation’s safety is to lay our foundation in morality and religion.”
We want the America of the Founding Fathers who said: “When the importance of religion is diminished … so is the effectiveness of government.”
We want the America of which the Supreme Court in 1844 said: “The Bible, and especially the New Testament [should] be read and taught as divine revelation in the [schools, otherwise] … where can the purest principles of morality be learned so clearly or so perfectly as from the New Testament?”
We want the America of which New York Supreme Court Chief Justice Kent said in 1811: “We are a Christian people, and the morality of the country is deeply engrafted upon Christianity, and not upon the doctrines or worship of those imposters [other religions].”
We want the America of which the Supreme Court of New York in 1811 also said: “Whatever strikes at the root of Christianity tends manifestly to the dissolution of the civil government … because it tends to corrupt the morals of the people, and to destroy good order.”
We want the America of which Daniel Webster said: “The principles of all genuine liberty and of wise laws and administrations, are to be drawn from the Bible and sustained by its authority. The man, therefore, who weakens or destroys the divine authority of that book may be an accessory to all of the public disorders which society is doomed to suffer.”
Today we are seeing Webster’s prophetic words come to life; we are witnessing all the “public disorders” of which we are now “doomed to suffer.”
This race to the bottom must stop. We want the old America back.
We want the America that reflects the beliefs of most of the country, not the vocal and belligerent minority. We want an America of those earlier courts, not the courts of the last fifty years that have been busy striking at the Christian cornerstone of our nation.
As we celebrate America’s birth, let us not become weary of praying and working for our Judeo-Christian foundation to be reestablished.
GOOGLE DECLARES WAR ON FIREARM INDUSTRY
Michael Schaus
Google is taking a Bloomberg inspired step toward “curbing gun violence”. Once again demonstrating the level of ignorance that is prevalent in liberal corporate settings, the software company has decided to expand their ban on firearm-related content. Breitbart reported:
According to Google Support's "Dangerous Products or Services" page, the company "[wants] to keep people safe both online and offline, so [they] won't allow the promotion of some products or services that cause damage, harm, or injury."
Right. Google (ya know, the company that tracks your every move online) is trying to keep us safe. God bless those left coast liberals who are suddenly embracing the manipulative power of big business. Of course Google seems woefully ignorant of the fact that such “dangerous” items, actually keep many people safe every day. . I understand it could be chalked up to a difference in corporate culture, but I would encourage Google to promote safety and concealed carry classes if they are serious about keeping people safe offline.
The tech giant also decided that such a ban would be ineffective if utilized exclusively against firearms… Which is why they have embraced the idea of expanding their policy to include accessories, ammunition, magazines, clips, scopes, attachments, slings, et al.
Also included is a ban on ads for "any part or component that's necessary to the function of a gun or intended for attachment to a gun." This covers "gun scopes, ammunition, ammunition clips or belts."
Whew… I know I feel safer, don’t you? I mean, clearly the lack of advertising on firearm-related accessories will cut down on all those Chicago drive bys. Right? Apparently, this is the culture of California Leftists and liberal corporatism… Guns are bad. The only use for a firearm is to promote inexplicable violence and oppression. Those who own, handle, or carry firearms are merely psychopaths waiting for an excuse to unleash a wave of bloody violence at unsuspecting victims…
Well, unless we’re talking about cops, or Bloomberg’s body guards. Those guys are obviously special. The rest of you commoners, however, aren’t responsible enough to be exposed to an advertisement for a hunting scope from Cabela’s while surfing the interwebs.
So, what’s the solution? Boycott Google?
I’m generally not a fan of boycotts. Besides, Google is a pretty intuitive and helpful product. I mean, sure, I find it kinda creepy when my phone alerts me to head out for work because there’s some traffic issues (I never told it where I work, or what route I like to take… It just picked up on those details while it spied on me through my android phone). But, overall, the company has opened the web to limitless possibilities. The dissemination of information is in a renaissance never before seen in human history; and companies like Google are largely responsible for the facilitation of such an environment.
And yet, Google manages to be that neighbor who has every tool you ever need – while still being the most obnoxious human being in the cul-de-sac. He might have that reverse-thread bolt, specialty vice grips, or that silly tool used to remove oil filters… but you just can’t quite get past his Obama bumper sticker and inappropriate political jokes about John Boehner (actually, some of those are kinda funny). So the question is, how much do you really need what Google has to offer?
Google has declared a war on gun owners, the firearm industry, and related self-defense products. Because, obviously, a defenseless population will be much safer, right? Bing, on the other hand, has no such restrictions. So, go ahead… Bing away. But don’t expect to cut Google out of your life completely.
Google is taking a Bloomberg inspired step toward “curbing gun violence”. Once again demonstrating the level of ignorance that is prevalent in liberal corporate settings, the software company has decided to expand their ban on firearm-related content. Breitbart reported:
According to Google Support's "Dangerous Products or Services" page, the company "[wants] to keep people safe both online and offline, so [they] won't allow the promotion of some products or services that cause damage, harm, or injury."
Right. Google (ya know, the company that tracks your every move online) is trying to keep us safe. God bless those left coast liberals who are suddenly embracing the manipulative power of big business. Of course Google seems woefully ignorant of the fact that such “dangerous” items, actually keep many people safe every day. . I understand it could be chalked up to a difference in corporate culture, but I would encourage Google to promote safety and concealed carry classes if they are serious about keeping people safe offline.
The tech giant also decided that such a ban would be ineffective if utilized exclusively against firearms… Which is why they have embraced the idea of expanding their policy to include accessories, ammunition, magazines, clips, scopes, attachments, slings, et al.
Also included is a ban on ads for "any part or component that's necessary to the function of a gun or intended for attachment to a gun." This covers "gun scopes, ammunition, ammunition clips or belts."
Whew… I know I feel safer, don’t you? I mean, clearly the lack of advertising on firearm-related accessories will cut down on all those Chicago drive bys. Right? Apparently, this is the culture of California Leftists and liberal corporatism… Guns are bad. The only use for a firearm is to promote inexplicable violence and oppression. Those who own, handle, or carry firearms are merely psychopaths waiting for an excuse to unleash a wave of bloody violence at unsuspecting victims…
Well, unless we’re talking about cops, or Bloomberg’s body guards. Those guys are obviously special. The rest of you commoners, however, aren’t responsible enough to be exposed to an advertisement for a hunting scope from Cabela’s while surfing the interwebs.
So, what’s the solution? Boycott Google?
I’m generally not a fan of boycotts. Besides, Google is a pretty intuitive and helpful product. I mean, sure, I find it kinda creepy when my phone alerts me to head out for work because there’s some traffic issues (I never told it where I work, or what route I like to take… It just picked up on those details while it spied on me through my android phone). But, overall, the company has opened the web to limitless possibilities. The dissemination of information is in a renaissance never before seen in human history; and companies like Google are largely responsible for the facilitation of such an environment.
And yet, Google manages to be that neighbor who has every tool you ever need – while still being the most obnoxious human being in the cul-de-sac. He might have that reverse-thread bolt, specialty vice grips, or that silly tool used to remove oil filters… but you just can’t quite get past his Obama bumper sticker and inappropriate political jokes about John Boehner (actually, some of those are kinda funny). So the question is, how much do you really need what Google has to offer?
Google has declared a war on gun owners, the firearm industry, and related self-defense products. Because, obviously, a defenseless population will be much safer, right? Bing, on the other hand, has no such restrictions. So, go ahead… Bing away. But don’t expect to cut Google out of your life completely.
OH! FOUNDING FATHERS
Terry Paulson
In Oh, God, that engaging and thought-provoking comedy, John Denver played the part of a grocery store manager who was visited by God in the form of George Burns, as a senior citizen with an attitude. His mission was to change the world.
Approaching July 4th, permit me to imagine a similar encounter with some Founding Fathers. After reading one of my columns, they come to help me do a better job of saving our country from debt, dependence and eventual tyranny.
Paulson: "Why are you coming to me? I just write a column. Why don't you show up in Washington at one of the presidential news conferences?"
Franklin: "They wouldn't listen. We have to reach the people. It was 'We the People' who made the difference in establishing this republic. They can do it again."
Jefferson: "Besides, we've been reading your columns. At times you get it right. We've come to add some weight to your writing. We want you to use our words, not yours."
Franklin: "We're good with words. The quotations you use will need to ring true with what we've already said. So let's start men!"
Adams: "The debt is out of control. Government is way too big...."
Franklin: "We saw what such policies can do. I saw what the out-of-control welfare system of King George did to England. Their system centered on 'a solemn general law made by the rich to subject their estates to a heavy tax for the support of the poor.' As a result, there was no country in the world in which the poor were more idle, dissolute, drunken, and insolent. In America, our system of government was committed to not making the poor easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. By offering a premium for the encouragement of idleness, the English system engendered an increase in poverty."
Jefferson: "If this continues, our democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not."
Madison: "If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, the powers of Congress would subvert the very foundation, the very nature of limited government established by the people of America."
Adams: "The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence."
Paulson: "You're talking about things that are no longer popular--God, property rights, limited government, not providing welfare. It's no longer equal rights; it's equal outcomes. Citizens today are owed a 'fair' salary and subsidized healthcare. There are more women on food stamps than women working full time. Our economic recovery is anemic because small businesses are over-regulated and over-taxed."
Jefferson: "I place economy among the first and more important virtues and public debt as the greatest of dangers. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt."
Paulson: "Our debt is over $17 trillion and growing, and that doesn't even cover the unfunded pension and entitlement debt that no one wants to face."
Franklin: "That's why we had to come."
Jefferson: "The principle of spending money to be paid by future generations under the name of funding is but swindling futurity on a large scale."
Paulson: "I wish more could be here to listen to you. I wish more even remembered history and the price you paid to give us a country like no other."
Adams: "You'll tell them what we've said in one of your columns?"
Paulson: "Certainly, but if they don't listen, would you visit them? Hearing your words reminds me what Ronald Reagan kept saying--our freedoms must be fought for and earned in every generation."
Jefferson: "I told you we should have brought Reagan with us."
Franklin: "Too young, and he was an actor for Poor Richard's sake!"
In Oh, God, that engaging and thought-provoking comedy, John Denver played the part of a grocery store manager who was visited by God in the form of George Burns, as a senior citizen with an attitude. His mission was to change the world.
Approaching July 4th, permit me to imagine a similar encounter with some Founding Fathers. After reading one of my columns, they come to help me do a better job of saving our country from debt, dependence and eventual tyranny.
Paulson: "Why are you coming to me? I just write a column. Why don't you show up in Washington at one of the presidential news conferences?"
Franklin: "They wouldn't listen. We have to reach the people. It was 'We the People' who made the difference in establishing this republic. They can do it again."
Jefferson: "Besides, we've been reading your columns. At times you get it right. We've come to add some weight to your writing. We want you to use our words, not yours."
Franklin: "We're good with words. The quotations you use will need to ring true with what we've already said. So let's start men!"
Adams: "The debt is out of control. Government is way too big...."
Franklin: "We saw what such policies can do. I saw what the out-of-control welfare system of King George did to England. Their system centered on 'a solemn general law made by the rich to subject their estates to a heavy tax for the support of the poor.' As a result, there was no country in the world in which the poor were more idle, dissolute, drunken, and insolent. In America, our system of government was committed to not making the poor easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. By offering a premium for the encouragement of idleness, the English system engendered an increase in poverty."
Jefferson: "If this continues, our democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not."
Madison: "If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, the powers of Congress would subvert the very foundation, the very nature of limited government established by the people of America."
Adams: "The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence."
Paulson: "You're talking about things that are no longer popular--God, property rights, limited government, not providing welfare. It's no longer equal rights; it's equal outcomes. Citizens today are owed a 'fair' salary and subsidized healthcare. There are more women on food stamps than women working full time. Our economic recovery is anemic because small businesses are over-regulated and over-taxed."
Jefferson: "I place economy among the first and more important virtues and public debt as the greatest of dangers. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt."
Paulson: "Our debt is over $17 trillion and growing, and that doesn't even cover the unfunded pension and entitlement debt that no one wants to face."
Franklin: "That's why we had to come."
Jefferson: "The principle of spending money to be paid by future generations under the name of funding is but swindling futurity on a large scale."
Paulson: "I wish more could be here to listen to you. I wish more even remembered history and the price you paid to give us a country like no other."
Adams: "You'll tell them what we've said in one of your columns?"
Paulson: "Certainly, but if they don't listen, would you visit them? Hearing your words reminds me what Ronald Reagan kept saying--our freedoms must be fought for and earned in every generation."
Jefferson: "I told you we should have brought Reagan with us."
Franklin: "Too young, and he was an actor for Poor Richard's sake!"
G'DDAM THE LIBERALS
John Ransom
Flattus wrote: It's funny to watch Cons attempt to portray this disaster in Iraq as Obama's issue. Sorry, no sale. Thinking Americans know whose war this is. But it's not surprising to see you run from it.From Ron Paul's column today, referring to Necons:
"They cannot admit they were wrong about the invasion being a ‘cakewalk’ that would pay for itself, so they want to blame last week's events on the 2011 US withdrawal from Iraq. But the trouble started with the 2003 invasion itself, not the 2011 troop withdrawal. Anyone who understands cause and effect should understand this."-- Welcome Our Newest Ally! Iran!
Dear Comrade Flattass,
Doctor Ron “Buy Gold at Any Price” Paul is an interesting man. Very smart too.
But he’s no historian. Or investor.
Half the time I don’t even think he’s sane.
Why is it that libertarians have given themselves over to a man that they treat more as Saint Paul than they do as just another man?
Because what "Saint" Paul has written about the Iraq war isn’t Gospel. It is even accurate.
The trouble in Iraq didn’t start in 2003, or in 1990—the First Gulf War—or with the toppling of the Shah of Iran in 1979. Or in operation “Ajax” in 1953 when we deposed the government of Iran and installed the Shah in its place.
Everything in history is part of what came before it.
I have no problem admitting that the Bush administration was wrong in portraying the war as a cakewalk. War should never be declared while dismissing “the many disappointments and many unpleasant surprises,” that Churchill warned was attendant upon any war. I said this at the time.
War rarely goes as one would wish.
As one Lt. General told me: “We had a plan. And it was almost like the purposefully [screwed] it up.”
If the second Bush administration made a long-lasting, salient case for American involvement in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, I don’t remember it.
But for Doctor Ron “Buy Gold at Any Price” Paul to sit back and say the THAT’S the problem in Iraq now, is either willful ignorance or lack of vision.
Here’s the problem in Iraq: They have ten percent of the world’s oil reserves. And there have been, in my lifetime, three powers tussling over the control of the region.
The first is the Soviet Union, popularly styled as “Russia” today.
The next is Islamic militants, who you can’t be rooting for—I mean you can be for them, but see the insanity defense about Doctor Ron “Buy Gold at Any Price” Paul above.
And finally there have been secular dictators, who from time to time have received support from the U.S.
Now you may argue that we should butt out of the Middle East, as Obama and Doctor Ron “Buy Gold at Any Price” Paul argue, saying: “Let them sort it out internally.”
But that ignores one reality you can’t get past: What is in the best interest of the United States of America?
My America is a great country. My America held fair and free elections in Iraq, a first in the Middle East outside of Israel. My America is a voice of peaceful—relatively speaking—change for Arabs who, just like you, covet freedom-- no matter what urban hipster doofuses like you say.
Is freedom just an American birthright that liberty snobs like you inherited from the blood bought by better men than you?
I don’t think so. I think freedom is inalienable.
That means it applies to Iraqis as it does to members of inconsequential third parties like libertarians, who too often just hide their mediocrity behind non-conformity.
Real reform is accomplished by staying and fighting.
There is only one right part of this debate.
If this world is to survive the next 100 years other countries would do better to imitate the United States—the totality of our national experience, not the last 20 years—than to stick to their outmoded, old fashioned concepts of global real-politik.
The worst misfortune to fall to Iraq was Saddam Hussein.
One might argue that invading Iraq to get rid of him was a mistake. But that doesn’t make leaving Iraq afterward right, either by logic or morality. Nor does it make it in the best interest of the United States.
I would like the rest of the world to enjoy the blessings that an old-fashioned butt whopping gave both Germany and Japan.
I want a world that looks more like America, not less.
That, not nuclear-free zones, or cutting carbon, or making marijuana legal, is how the next century will be decided.
And make no mistake: Withdrawing from the world won’t make it safer for us. It will just mean we have fewer allies, if any, when fight comes to your front door.
Or are you too busy reading that phony Ayn Rand to know this?
TG2711 wrote: you will never gain peace by dropping bombs or selling guns. -- Welcome Our Newest Ally! Iran!
Dear Comrade 2711,
History says that’s not true.
You are contending that great armies have fought and won, but peace just came accidentally after their victories?
That’s like saying you’ll never win a fist-fight by throwing a punch or defending yourself.
Why are liberals and libertarians so pathetically dumb?
Flattus wrote: Incoherent writing. And did you really think that "Swedish Bikini Model" line was funny? Really?-- Get Ready For Blood, Gore: 'Bear' Obama on the Loose
Dear Comrade Flattass,
Yes, I did think it was funny. And anyone who doesn’t think it’s funny is either: 1) a part of the Swedish Bikini Model lobby or 2) a Swedish Bikini Model sympathizer.
In either case you’re a fool and a tool of the Swedish Bikini Model conspiracy. Which by the way is real.
Anyone who tells you it’s not is a denier.
Maury Joseph wrote: Is to Politically Correct to INSULT Bears? --Get Ready For Blood, Gore: 'Bear' Obama on the Loose
Dear MJ,
No, it’s not. In a related note, in response to Obama the Chicago Bears have just renamed themselves the Chicago Injuns.
Soceress wrote: Hey, John, how dumb can these people be? They are the ones running the country.-- Media Gives Aid and Comfort to the Idiots
Dear Comrade Soceress,
As dumb as someone who stylizes herself a believer in magic spells perhaps?
The lesson now continues: History is littered with dumb rulers. In fact, a good ruler is a rare thing in history, not the “rule”.
Just because we elect them doesn’t make them less susceptible to the law of averages. Look at Obama as a reversion to the mean after a great man like Reagan.
ScrapIron wrote: Obama has presented to the senate, at least three budgets.
Now, I'm not saying these budgets had anything to do with reality, but the clown in chief at least did what he was supposed to do. -- Media Gives Aid and Comfort to the Idiots
Dear Brother Scrap,
I get your point, but this time, unfortunately, it’s at the top of your head.
I can do what Obama did. I can present a budget that will get no votes or won’t be voted on.
A president is known for getting legislation he wishes passed.That makes history.
The rest is just a work of historical fiction.
Jillocity wrote: hey John...there are actually those of us in CA (don't know about IL or MI) who actually care about what is happening to our Country...don't put us all in the same basket...-- Obama Gets GDP Bassackward
Dear Sister Jill,
I’m now a resident of California for one, whole week.
Yes, we moved the official HQ of Ransom Notes Radio and Townhall Finance to San Diego.
I don’t put you all in one basket.
Just most of you;-).
People have asked: “Hey, John, why you moving to California?” The answer is simple: You move to the sound of the guns.
DoctorRoy’s Greatest Misses: 1) Obama is a slightly left leaning Corporatist. 2) Well whenever I start to lose my perspective I know I can always fall back on the most trusted reporter in the business to help me get it back. 3) Yeah because things were so much better when the GOP was in charge. --Obama Losers
Dear Comrade Doctor,
1) So you agree with the Whole Foods CEO who said that Obama is basically a Fascist. That’s very progressive of you. You know, fascism and communism used to be thought of as the wave of the future. Thank God for Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan. And thank God for the United States of America.
2) You mean me, right Comrade?
3) Yeah, that whole 3.9 percent unemployment rate under Bush was sooooo hard. Seriously, Doctor: You gotta come up with something better than Bush did it too. Obama’s a freakin’ fascist. He’s against everything that old school liberals like you ought to hold dear. Give him up.
Ericynot wrote: Seems like if Ransom likes the word "presstitutes" so much, he could at least spell it correctly in his own headline.- Obama Losing It as ‘Press-titutes’ Flee
Dear Comrade Y,
Really? That’s all you have?
Going from having the greatest president since the Pliocene era, to typos? Doesn’t that strike you as an awful coming down?
Man I hope Soros pays you extra. Because material-wise you guys have to be working double time on message boards.
Rightmostofthetime wrote: Ransom generally doesn't fix mistakes, and usually gets defensive when you point them out. If he DOES fix the mistake, he will delete this thread. - Obama Losing It as ‘Press-titutes’ Flee
Dear Comrade WrongMostly,
I have not had to edit the pages for comments in over a year. We have a community editor for that. And I never delete comments except to annoy Hillinger and occasionally Comrade Y.
It makes them apoplectic.
It’s hilarious.
As to typos, eh, guilty. But truthfully I see it as a common fault. I see it on Huffington, Chicago Tribune, AP. And they all have copy editors. But still I would like to produce clean copy every time. I have some newer editorial methods that have cut down on the mistakes over the last year.
Don’t include this column though. ;-)
Hey: I'm moving.
More Freedom wrote: I think Ransom is losing it. Since when is not meddling with the military in other countries' civil wars and not creating enemies of half their population, "disengagement", not being a world leader, and "defeatist"? Isn't it more along the lines of minding one's own business? Isn't it leadership by example? Butting into others' conflicts with force is not a good example, and is not following the Golden Rule. It says it's OK for other countries to butt into our business. -- Obama Losing It as ‘Press-titutes’ Flee
Dear Comrade Freedom,
No, it actually doesn’t say that at all.
Since we let Hitler dismember Czechoslovakia and Austria we were temporarily shamed into taking responsibility for the freedom of others.
And to apply the Golden Rule here is immature.
The Golden Rule is a personal rule, not one that applies to countries.
And here’s why: Countries aren’t moral beings. They don’t know the difference between right and wrong. They only know what’s in their best interest.
And do you think that if somehow we disengaged from the rest of the world that countries wouldn’t seek to interfere in our affairs?
They would still. Anytime they wanted to.
That’s a fact.
Your argument is childish.
Dan107 wrote: You would think that the media would report on the logistics of how these children travelled across the breadth of Mexico to reach the U.S. Southern border. Who paid for this human cattle drive? Why didn't Mexico prevent them from crossing their border...? - - Obama Losing It as ‘Press-titutes’ Flee
Dear Brother Dan,
Reverend Wright said G@ddam America.
I say G@ddam Liberals.
They are the number one abusers of human rights ever.
They traffic in human beings just the same way a pimp does, getting them hooked and then defeated and demoralized. This is especially true with illegal immigration. Immigrants are here illegally for only one reason: Liberals from both parties wish for them to be here illegally.
Flattus wrote: It's funny to watch Cons attempt to portray this disaster in Iraq as Obama's issue. Sorry, no sale. Thinking Americans know whose war this is. But it's not surprising to see you run from it.From Ron Paul's column today, referring to Necons:
"They cannot admit they were wrong about the invasion being a ‘cakewalk’ that would pay for itself, so they want to blame last week's events on the 2011 US withdrawal from Iraq. But the trouble started with the 2003 invasion itself, not the 2011 troop withdrawal. Anyone who understands cause and effect should understand this."-- Welcome Our Newest Ally! Iran!
Dear Comrade Flattass,
Doctor Ron “Buy Gold at Any Price” Paul is an interesting man. Very smart too.
But he’s no historian. Or investor.
Half the time I don’t even think he’s sane.
Why is it that libertarians have given themselves over to a man that they treat more as Saint Paul than they do as just another man?
Because what "Saint" Paul has written about the Iraq war isn’t Gospel. It is even accurate.
The trouble in Iraq didn’t start in 2003, or in 1990—the First Gulf War—or with the toppling of the Shah of Iran in 1979. Or in operation “Ajax” in 1953 when we deposed the government of Iran and installed the Shah in its place.
Everything in history is part of what came before it.
I have no problem admitting that the Bush administration was wrong in portraying the war as a cakewalk. War should never be declared while dismissing “the many disappointments and many unpleasant surprises,” that Churchill warned was attendant upon any war. I said this at the time.
War rarely goes as one would wish.
As one Lt. General told me: “We had a plan. And it was almost like the purposefully [screwed] it up.”
If the second Bush administration made a long-lasting, salient case for American involvement in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, I don’t remember it.
But for Doctor Ron “Buy Gold at Any Price” Paul to sit back and say the THAT’S the problem in Iraq now, is either willful ignorance or lack of vision.
Here’s the problem in Iraq: They have ten percent of the world’s oil reserves. And there have been, in my lifetime, three powers tussling over the control of the region.
The first is the Soviet Union, popularly styled as “Russia” today.
The next is Islamic militants, who you can’t be rooting for—I mean you can be for them, but see the insanity defense about Doctor Ron “Buy Gold at Any Price” Paul above.
And finally there have been secular dictators, who from time to time have received support from the U.S.
Now you may argue that we should butt out of the Middle East, as Obama and Doctor Ron “Buy Gold at Any Price” Paul argue, saying: “Let them sort it out internally.”
But that ignores one reality you can’t get past: What is in the best interest of the United States of America?
My America is a great country. My America held fair and free elections in Iraq, a first in the Middle East outside of Israel. My America is a voice of peaceful—relatively speaking—change for Arabs who, just like you, covet freedom-- no matter what urban hipster doofuses like you say.
Is freedom just an American birthright that liberty snobs like you inherited from the blood bought by better men than you?
I don’t think so. I think freedom is inalienable.
That means it applies to Iraqis as it does to members of inconsequential third parties like libertarians, who too often just hide their mediocrity behind non-conformity.
Real reform is accomplished by staying and fighting.
There is only one right part of this debate.
If this world is to survive the next 100 years other countries would do better to imitate the United States—the totality of our national experience, not the last 20 years—than to stick to their outmoded, old fashioned concepts of global real-politik.
The worst misfortune to fall to Iraq was Saddam Hussein.
One might argue that invading Iraq to get rid of him was a mistake. But that doesn’t make leaving Iraq afterward right, either by logic or morality. Nor does it make it in the best interest of the United States.
I would like the rest of the world to enjoy the blessings that an old-fashioned butt whopping gave both Germany and Japan.
I want a world that looks more like America, not less.
That, not nuclear-free zones, or cutting carbon, or making marijuana legal, is how the next century will be decided.
And make no mistake: Withdrawing from the world won’t make it safer for us. It will just mean we have fewer allies, if any, when fight comes to your front door.
Or are you too busy reading that phony Ayn Rand to know this?
TG2711 wrote: you will never gain peace by dropping bombs or selling guns. -- Welcome Our Newest Ally! Iran!
Dear Comrade 2711,
History says that’s not true.
You are contending that great armies have fought and won, but peace just came accidentally after their victories?
That’s like saying you’ll never win a fist-fight by throwing a punch or defending yourself.
Why are liberals and libertarians so pathetically dumb?
Flattus wrote: Incoherent writing. And did you really think that "Swedish Bikini Model" line was funny? Really?-- Get Ready For Blood, Gore: 'Bear' Obama on the Loose
Dear Comrade Flattass,
Yes, I did think it was funny. And anyone who doesn’t think it’s funny is either: 1) a part of the Swedish Bikini Model lobby or 2) a Swedish Bikini Model sympathizer.
In either case you’re a fool and a tool of the Swedish Bikini Model conspiracy. Which by the way is real.
Anyone who tells you it’s not is a denier.
Maury Joseph wrote: Is to Politically Correct to INSULT Bears? --Get Ready For Blood, Gore: 'Bear' Obama on the Loose
Dear MJ,
No, it’s not. In a related note, in response to Obama the Chicago Bears have just renamed themselves the Chicago Injuns.
Soceress wrote: Hey, John, how dumb can these people be? They are the ones running the country.-- Media Gives Aid and Comfort to the Idiots
Dear Comrade Soceress,
As dumb as someone who stylizes herself a believer in magic spells perhaps?
The lesson now continues: History is littered with dumb rulers. In fact, a good ruler is a rare thing in history, not the “rule”.
Just because we elect them doesn’t make them less susceptible to the law of averages. Look at Obama as a reversion to the mean after a great man like Reagan.
ScrapIron wrote: Obama has presented to the senate, at least three budgets.
Now, I'm not saying these budgets had anything to do with reality, but the clown in chief at least did what he was supposed to do. -- Media Gives Aid and Comfort to the Idiots
Dear Brother Scrap,
I get your point, but this time, unfortunately, it’s at the top of your head.
I can do what Obama did. I can present a budget that will get no votes or won’t be voted on.
A president is known for getting legislation he wishes passed.That makes history.
The rest is just a work of historical fiction.
Jillocity wrote: hey John...there are actually those of us in CA (don't know about IL or MI) who actually care about what is happening to our Country...don't put us all in the same basket...-- Obama Gets GDP Bassackward
Dear Sister Jill,
I’m now a resident of California for one, whole week.
Yes, we moved the official HQ of Ransom Notes Radio and Townhall Finance to San Diego.
I don’t put you all in one basket.
Just most of you;-).
People have asked: “Hey, John, why you moving to California?” The answer is simple: You move to the sound of the guns.
DoctorRoy’s Greatest Misses: 1) Obama is a slightly left leaning Corporatist. 2) Well whenever I start to lose my perspective I know I can always fall back on the most trusted reporter in the business to help me get it back. 3) Yeah because things were so much better when the GOP was in charge. --Obama Losers
Dear Comrade Doctor,
1) So you agree with the Whole Foods CEO who said that Obama is basically a Fascist. That’s very progressive of you. You know, fascism and communism used to be thought of as the wave of the future. Thank God for Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan. And thank God for the United States of America.
2) You mean me, right Comrade?
3) Yeah, that whole 3.9 percent unemployment rate under Bush was sooooo hard. Seriously, Doctor: You gotta come up with something better than Bush did it too. Obama’s a freakin’ fascist. He’s against everything that old school liberals like you ought to hold dear. Give him up.
Ericynot wrote: Seems like if Ransom likes the word "presstitutes" so much, he could at least spell it correctly in his own headline.- Obama Losing It as ‘Press-titutes’ Flee
Dear Comrade Y,
Really? That’s all you have?
Going from having the greatest president since the Pliocene era, to typos? Doesn’t that strike you as an awful coming down?
Man I hope Soros pays you extra. Because material-wise you guys have to be working double time on message boards.
Rightmostofthetime wrote: Ransom generally doesn't fix mistakes, and usually gets defensive when you point them out. If he DOES fix the mistake, he will delete this thread. - Obama Losing It as ‘Press-titutes’ Flee
Dear Comrade WrongMostly,
I have not had to edit the pages for comments in over a year. We have a community editor for that. And I never delete comments except to annoy Hillinger and occasionally Comrade Y.
It makes them apoplectic.
It’s hilarious.
As to typos, eh, guilty. But truthfully I see it as a common fault. I see it on Huffington, Chicago Tribune, AP. And they all have copy editors. But still I would like to produce clean copy every time. I have some newer editorial methods that have cut down on the mistakes over the last year.
Don’t include this column though. ;-)
Hey: I'm moving.
More Freedom wrote: I think Ransom is losing it. Since when is not meddling with the military in other countries' civil wars and not creating enemies of half their population, "disengagement", not being a world leader, and "defeatist"? Isn't it more along the lines of minding one's own business? Isn't it leadership by example? Butting into others' conflicts with force is not a good example, and is not following the Golden Rule. It says it's OK for other countries to butt into our business. -- Obama Losing It as ‘Press-titutes’ Flee
Dear Comrade Freedom,
No, it actually doesn’t say that at all.
Since we let Hitler dismember Czechoslovakia and Austria we were temporarily shamed into taking responsibility for the freedom of others.
And to apply the Golden Rule here is immature.
The Golden Rule is a personal rule, not one that applies to countries.
And here’s why: Countries aren’t moral beings. They don’t know the difference between right and wrong. They only know what’s in their best interest.
And do you think that if somehow we disengaged from the rest of the world that countries wouldn’t seek to interfere in our affairs?
They would still. Anytime they wanted to.
That’s a fact.
Your argument is childish.
Dan107 wrote: You would think that the media would report on the logistics of how these children travelled across the breadth of Mexico to reach the U.S. Southern border. Who paid for this human cattle drive? Why didn't Mexico prevent them from crossing their border...? - - Obama Losing It as ‘Press-titutes’ Flee
Dear Brother Dan,
Reverend Wright said G@ddam America.
I say G@ddam Liberals.
They are the number one abusers of human rights ever.
They traffic in human beings just the same way a pimp does, getting them hooked and then defeated and demoralized. This is especially true with illegal immigration. Immigrants are here illegally for only one reason: Liberals from both parties wish for them to be here illegally.
28 Jun 2014
5 MUST-WATCH HAPPY RELATIONSHIP TIPS
It's like walking into a candy store. Every eye color, profession, height, geography, spirituality, sense of humor and passion wait for you when you log in to the site. In a way, it's a fantasy coming true – all you have to do is choose.
There's no longer a need to go out to a pub or the library and hope your perfect one walks through the door. You can decide in detail who to search for, up to the size of her or his shoe.
Yet once you meet away from the screen, reality sets in. How can you know if your date's a good fit?
1) Values
We all have guideposts to help us move through life and create a path we can be proud of and happy about. Consider which values are non-negotiable and which have wiggle room.
Some vegetarians, for example, lead happy lives with carnivores while others wouldn't go out on a date with them. Similarly, if you and your date have conflicting religious or political believes, you might face additional challenges. It doesn't mean the relationship won't work, yet it's definitely something to consider.
2) Sense of Humor
A sense of humor is one of the more diverse traits humanity has. People find different things funny and they bring up humor at all kinds of times.
A sense of humor can reflect how a person lives her or his life, how they treat others and themselves and what they value, so pay attention to your partner's sense of humor and to how she or he responds to yours.
3) The Way You Express Love
Some people like to talk and others like to show. Some view expressing love as buying each other elaborate gifts while others prefer simple, daily gestures. Some are romantics and others mix love with cynicism. Some goof around all the time and others need serious moments.
Think of how you'd like to express your love for your partner and how you'd like your partner to express love for you. You could teach each other how to treat you, but don't go into a relationship hoping you'll change them down the line.
4) Your Goals and Dreams
Whether you want to have kids, where you want to live and how much money you're comfortable having are just the beginning. Are you career-driven and your partner is not? Do you love the thrill of entrepreneurship while they need the security of a regular job? Are you all about self-growth and they don't deal well with change? Do you want to travel the world and live a nomadic lifestyle and your partner prefers the community that comes with setting roots?
You don't need to have identical goals and dreams for the relationship to last – and compromise is part of any relationship – yet consider in advance what you're willing to compromise and what you can't live without.
5) Your Relationships With Yourselves
How much you love yourself and invest in your own life is how much you'll be truly emotionally available to love another. Don't look to be someone's better half, but your own full person building a richer life with another full person.
Create a healthy relationship with your body, your mind and your soul, and choose someone who's creating a healthy relationship with her or himself. That's ingredient number one for a healthy relationship with each other.
TEMPTATION OF WISHFUL THINKING ON IRAN
Mona Charen
PARIS -- An estimated 50,000 Iranian exiles and supporters from Europe and North America are here to remind the world that no cooperation with the brutal, expansionist regime in Tehran can possibly advance Western interests.
This annual gathering of MeK (People's Mujahedin of Iran), an Iranian resistance group, was already scheduled. But it might have been called just to rebut Secretary of State John Kerry's comments about possible cooperation between the U.S. and Iran in Iraq. "I think we need to go step by step," Kerry mused, "and see what, in fact, might be a reality, but I wouldn't rule out anything that would be constructive to providing real stability, a respect for the constitution, a respect for the election process, and a respect for the ability of the Iraqi people to form a government that represents all of the interests of Iraq, not one sectarian group over another. It has to be inclusive, and that has been one of the great problems of the last few years."
The administration has walked back a bit from that flabbergasting comment, but the confusion it reflects is typical.
Does the Obama administration understand what it's dealing with in Iran?
The Weekly Standard reports that President Barack Obama's "spiritual adviser," Pastor Joel Hunter, recently traveled to Iran to discuss "religious tolerance" with the speaker of Iran's parliament, officials of Iran's Academy of Sciences, Christian and Jewish leaders, and grand ayatollahs in Qom. Hunter will brief Obama.
Who can object to talks, right? Dialogue promotes peace, doesn't it? Only if your partner has a semblance of integrity. Dialogue with brutal, vicious revolutionaries, who lie as a matter of policy, signals only an eagerness to deceive oneself, which is what is arguably happening now in Geneva, Switzerland.
The mullahs are practiced in deception. While Obama was ignoring Iraq, Tehran encouraged Nouri al-Maliki to oppress all opposition. The Sunnis, who had made common cause with the U.S. against al-Qaida, were forced out of government, arrested and sometimes murdered -- all while Washington issued bland endorsements of Maliki's inclusive reign.
Among Maliki's non-Sunni targets is a group of 3,000 Iranian ex-patriots, members of MeK, currently housed in a facility called (the irony was unintentional) Camp Liberty. MeK is the best-organized and largest domestic opposition to Iran's regime. Maliki's units have repeatedly entered the camp, and they have assassinated 52 people after handcuffing them. The fate of the remainder remains very much in doubt.
The whole world's got trouble. Why should this group compel particular concern? Because, as a letter to Obama signed by 30 prominent Americans details, these opponents of Iran's regime voluntarily disarmed and cooperated with U.S. forces starting in 2003. " ... The MeK worked hard to help protect the lives of our service members ... providing invaluable information about not only Iran's concealed nuclear enrichment activities, but also threats inside Iraq." Each MeK member was vetted by U.S. Forces and promised security.
The letter continues: "Over the last three years, while your administration was committed to keeping the residents secure ... a total of 135 have been murdered or died while being denied access to medical treatment ... In the pocket of each deceased resident was a Protected Person Status identity card."
The hand of the mullahs can be seen in a worldwide disinformation campaign to discredit the MeK. Though they stand for women's rights (one of the leaders is a woman), democracy, religious pluralism, free markets, freedom of expression, abolition of the death penalty, and separation of church and state, they have been tarred as "terrorists" and a cult.
In a carefully researched analysis of these old smears (the U.S. State Department listed MeK as a terrorist group until 2012), Lincoln Bloomfield writes, "A large part of what credentialed authorities in the U.S. have been saying about the MeK's past ... is either demonstrably untrue, factually unsupportable or misleading to the point of intellectual dishonesty." Human Rights Watch, Bloomfield argues, issued a report on MeK that relied on several sources who were secretly in the pay of Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security. HRW's conclusions were, in turn, relied upon by the RAND Corporation and State Department.
It's one deception among thousands -- starting with 20 years of denials that Iran is working on nuclear weapons. Let's ask again, as tens of thousands of Iranian exiles gather in Paris to plea for regime change: Does the Obama administration know what they're dealing with?
PARIS -- An estimated 50,000 Iranian exiles and supporters from Europe and North America are here to remind the world that no cooperation with the brutal, expansionist regime in Tehran can possibly advance Western interests.
This annual gathering of MeK (People's Mujahedin of Iran), an Iranian resistance group, was already scheduled. But it might have been called just to rebut Secretary of State John Kerry's comments about possible cooperation between the U.S. and Iran in Iraq. "I think we need to go step by step," Kerry mused, "and see what, in fact, might be a reality, but I wouldn't rule out anything that would be constructive to providing real stability, a respect for the constitution, a respect for the election process, and a respect for the ability of the Iraqi people to form a government that represents all of the interests of Iraq, not one sectarian group over another. It has to be inclusive, and that has been one of the great problems of the last few years."
The administration has walked back a bit from that flabbergasting comment, but the confusion it reflects is typical.
Does the Obama administration understand what it's dealing with in Iran?
The Weekly Standard reports that President Barack Obama's "spiritual adviser," Pastor Joel Hunter, recently traveled to Iran to discuss "religious tolerance" with the speaker of Iran's parliament, officials of Iran's Academy of Sciences, Christian and Jewish leaders, and grand ayatollahs in Qom. Hunter will brief Obama.
Who can object to talks, right? Dialogue promotes peace, doesn't it? Only if your partner has a semblance of integrity. Dialogue with brutal, vicious revolutionaries, who lie as a matter of policy, signals only an eagerness to deceive oneself, which is what is arguably happening now in Geneva, Switzerland.
The mullahs are practiced in deception. While Obama was ignoring Iraq, Tehran encouraged Nouri al-Maliki to oppress all opposition. The Sunnis, who had made common cause with the U.S. against al-Qaida, were forced out of government, arrested and sometimes murdered -- all while Washington issued bland endorsements of Maliki's inclusive reign.
Among Maliki's non-Sunni targets is a group of 3,000 Iranian ex-patriots, members of MeK, currently housed in a facility called (the irony was unintentional) Camp Liberty. MeK is the best-organized and largest domestic opposition to Iran's regime. Maliki's units have repeatedly entered the camp, and they have assassinated 52 people after handcuffing them. The fate of the remainder remains very much in doubt.
The whole world's got trouble. Why should this group compel particular concern? Because, as a letter to Obama signed by 30 prominent Americans details, these opponents of Iran's regime voluntarily disarmed and cooperated with U.S. forces starting in 2003. " ... The MeK worked hard to help protect the lives of our service members ... providing invaluable information about not only Iran's concealed nuclear enrichment activities, but also threats inside Iraq." Each MeK member was vetted by U.S. Forces and promised security.
The letter continues: "Over the last three years, while your administration was committed to keeping the residents secure ... a total of 135 have been murdered or died while being denied access to medical treatment ... In the pocket of each deceased resident was a Protected Person Status identity card."
The hand of the mullahs can be seen in a worldwide disinformation campaign to discredit the MeK. Though they stand for women's rights (one of the leaders is a woman), democracy, religious pluralism, free markets, freedom of expression, abolition of the death penalty, and separation of church and state, they have been tarred as "terrorists" and a cult.
In a carefully researched analysis of these old smears (the U.S. State Department listed MeK as a terrorist group until 2012), Lincoln Bloomfield writes, "A large part of what credentialed authorities in the U.S. have been saying about the MeK's past ... is either demonstrably untrue, factually unsupportable or misleading to the point of intellectual dishonesty." Human Rights Watch, Bloomfield argues, issued a report on MeK that relied on several sources who were secretly in the pay of Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security. HRW's conclusions were, in turn, relied upon by the RAND Corporation and State Department.
It's one deception among thousands -- starting with 20 years of denials that Iran is working on nuclear weapons. Let's ask again, as tens of thousands of Iranian exiles gather in Paris to plea for regime change: Does the Obama administration know what they're dealing with?
IRAQ AND IDEOLOGY
Jack Kerwick
That the vast majority of Republicans remain as committed as ever to a strong American military presence in Iraq has everything to do with the neoconservative ideology that dominates their party.
Unlike traditional conservatives, neoconservatives subordinate the contingencies of history and culture to such abstract universal “principles” as “human rights” and/or “Liberty”—principles in which they locate America’s unique, supra-historical origins. The latter, in turn, endows America with it special, indeed, messianic, mission to protect “Liberty”—to promote what neoconservatives call, “liberal democracy”—for peoples everywhere.
It is this ideological creed of theirs that accounts for why neoconservatives have always favored an American presence in Iraq.
And it is this creed that explains why neoconservatives favor the presence of the American military, not just in those places where “liberal democracy” is absent; but even in those places—like Japan, Germany, and South Korea—where it has been present for decades but is, presumably, insufficiently stable and in dire need of American soldiers to prop it up.
Let’s see how this ideology plays out in the current discussion over the disaster that is Iraq.
When President Obama declared that the war in Iraq was “over” in 2011, his neoconservative critics blasted him. Obama, being as much of an ideologue as anyone, had his own reasons for making this declaration: it was a pretext that gave him cover for making the politically advantageous decision to begin withdrawing American soldiers. Neoconservatives opposed Obama’s call, contending that there wasn’t any basis for his claim.
But now, it is they who insist that the war really was over, even if neoconservatives instead choose to speak of the war as having been “won” prior to the troop withdrawal. This semantics trickery, though, is unconvincing, for if victory had been achieved in Iraq, as we are now being told, then Obama was correct and the war was over.
However, if the war in Iraq had been won, then what would be the point in continuing to deploy more American lives and treasure to that region? To this, the neoconservative can respond easily enough: We remain in Iraq for the same reason that we’ve remained in Germany, Japan, South Korea, etc.: To insure that our victory is not lost.
Let’s us now spell out the implications of the neoconservative ideology.
First, the neoconservative is theoretically committed to expending American resources in blood, time, and treasure all around the globe and until the end of time. The belief that America exists for the sake of promoting and defending, not the liberties of Americans, but the abstraction of “Liberty,” the “Liberty” of Earthlings, necessarily leads to this conclusion.
Secondly, though he routinely rails against “Big Government,” the neoconservative is just as much a friend to it as are his enemies to his left. In fact, it is arguable that neoconservatives are actually more wedded to Big Government. The neoconservative vision, after all, requires an American military possessed of potentially limitless power. The military is government, and big military is Big Government.
Indeed, without the military, the (national) government would be but the proverbial paper tiger.
Thirdly, insofar as neoconservatives believe that “America” ought to fight for “Liberty” wherever around the globe it happens to be threatened, they believe that the American taxpayer—you and I—have a duty to work extra hours, to part with our hard earned dollars, to say nothing of parting with the lives of our sons and daughters, to defend the “Liberty” of non-Americans throughout the Earth.
The American citizen, the neoconservative would have us think, exists to sacrifice life, limb, and treasure for the citizens of the world.
But it’s critical to grasp that neoconservatives aren’t just telling Americans that this is what they ought to do.
Since the mission to fight for “Liberty” is a government enterprise that, like all other government exploits, is subsidized by citizens, neoconservatives are saying that this is what Americans must be compelled to do.
Finally, as long as “victory” requires a perpetual American military presence in the lands of those who the United States “defeated,” then there is no victory. Think about it: Suppose someone razes your old house and builds you a new one in its stead. Would you consider the job completed, a success, if the only way to keep your new house from collapsing is for the builder or his team of construction workers to move in with you and indefinitely prop it up? And wouldn’t it be that much more horrible of a deal if you knew that you would have to continue to pay them to live in and sustain your home?
This is the neoconservative ideology that underwrote the war in Iraq.
That the vast majority of Republicans remain as committed as ever to a strong American military presence in Iraq has everything to do with the neoconservative ideology that dominates their party.
Unlike traditional conservatives, neoconservatives subordinate the contingencies of history and culture to such abstract universal “principles” as “human rights” and/or “Liberty”—principles in which they locate America’s unique, supra-historical origins. The latter, in turn, endows America with it special, indeed, messianic, mission to protect “Liberty”—to promote what neoconservatives call, “liberal democracy”—for peoples everywhere.
It is this ideological creed of theirs that accounts for why neoconservatives have always favored an American presence in Iraq.
And it is this creed that explains why neoconservatives favor the presence of the American military, not just in those places where “liberal democracy” is absent; but even in those places—like Japan, Germany, and South Korea—where it has been present for decades but is, presumably, insufficiently stable and in dire need of American soldiers to prop it up.
Let’s see how this ideology plays out in the current discussion over the disaster that is Iraq.
When President Obama declared that the war in Iraq was “over” in 2011, his neoconservative critics blasted him. Obama, being as much of an ideologue as anyone, had his own reasons for making this declaration: it was a pretext that gave him cover for making the politically advantageous decision to begin withdrawing American soldiers. Neoconservatives opposed Obama’s call, contending that there wasn’t any basis for his claim.
But now, it is they who insist that the war really was over, even if neoconservatives instead choose to speak of the war as having been “won” prior to the troop withdrawal. This semantics trickery, though, is unconvincing, for if victory had been achieved in Iraq, as we are now being told, then Obama was correct and the war was over.
However, if the war in Iraq had been won, then what would be the point in continuing to deploy more American lives and treasure to that region? To this, the neoconservative can respond easily enough: We remain in Iraq for the same reason that we’ve remained in Germany, Japan, South Korea, etc.: To insure that our victory is not lost.
Let’s us now spell out the implications of the neoconservative ideology.
First, the neoconservative is theoretically committed to expending American resources in blood, time, and treasure all around the globe and until the end of time. The belief that America exists for the sake of promoting and defending, not the liberties of Americans, but the abstraction of “Liberty,” the “Liberty” of Earthlings, necessarily leads to this conclusion.
Secondly, though he routinely rails against “Big Government,” the neoconservative is just as much a friend to it as are his enemies to his left. In fact, it is arguable that neoconservatives are actually more wedded to Big Government. The neoconservative vision, after all, requires an American military possessed of potentially limitless power. The military is government, and big military is Big Government.
Indeed, without the military, the (national) government would be but the proverbial paper tiger.
Thirdly, insofar as neoconservatives believe that “America” ought to fight for “Liberty” wherever around the globe it happens to be threatened, they believe that the American taxpayer—you and I—have a duty to work extra hours, to part with our hard earned dollars, to say nothing of parting with the lives of our sons and daughters, to defend the “Liberty” of non-Americans throughout the Earth.
The American citizen, the neoconservative would have us think, exists to sacrifice life, limb, and treasure for the citizens of the world.
But it’s critical to grasp that neoconservatives aren’t just telling Americans that this is what they ought to do.
Since the mission to fight for “Liberty” is a government enterprise that, like all other government exploits, is subsidized by citizens, neoconservatives are saying that this is what Americans must be compelled to do.
Finally, as long as “victory” requires a perpetual American military presence in the lands of those who the United States “defeated,” then there is no victory. Think about it: Suppose someone razes your old house and builds you a new one in its stead. Would you consider the job completed, a success, if the only way to keep your new house from collapsing is for the builder or his team of construction workers to move in with you and indefinitely prop it up? And wouldn’t it be that much more horrible of a deal if you knew that you would have to continue to pay them to live in and sustain your home?
This is the neoconservative ideology that underwrote the war in Iraq.
BENGHAZI AND HILLARY
Bruce Bialosky
By now you must be pretty sick of reading and hearing about Hillary Clinton. Personally, I am ready for No Mas. But after I wrote my first column about Benghazi many readers wrote and asked me to promise I would not let the subject die. Since nothing has happened that has warranted dropping the subject I felt obligated to march on to find the facts. Hillary has now released her book, Hard Choices, with a 34 page chapter dedicated to the subject. I spent my hard earned money to find out if the Secretary of State answered any questions.
This is not the first time I have bought a Democratic Presidential candidate’s book (yes, she is running unless she continues to embarrass herself). My first adventure was reading Al Gore’s (ok, Vice-President) Earth in the Balance while walking around the Republican National Convention in 1992. Some thought that to be odd. But when Gore ran for President in 2000 the book was a blueprint of how to defeat the man in the election.
Reading the 34 page chapter you learn that Mrs. Clinton really cared about the people in her department and especially the ones that were killed that night. But more importantly does she answer questions about what happened before, during and after the attacks on the American Consulate in Benghazi.
On the fifth page of the chapter Clinton starts to describe the video that inflamed people “across the Middle East and North Africa.” She leans on this issue on numerous occasions throughout the chapter never divorcing her from making this a centerpiece of the uprising and attacks. She offers a defense of Susan Rice’s now famous news show statements the Sunday following the incidents and states the comments were “approved by the CIA.” But that has been disavowed by former Deputy Director of the CIA Michael Morell.
What is more important is the timeline of how an Ambassador was in a barely defendable consulate. Clinton does state she had been getting daily briefings about security matters. There is no description of any enhanced security plans that were communicated to embassies regarding the anniversary of 9/11. In fact, Clinton states the tumult regarding the video started on September 8th. If anyone was not worried with 9/11 coming up they certainly should have been after that. But Clinton then hangs the decision on Ambassador Chris Stevens to go to Benghazi. On page 389 she states “U.S. Ambassadors are not required to consult or seek approval from Washington when traveling within their countries, and rarely do. She goes on to describe his knowledge of the lawless situation in Benghazi, but he went there anyway. In addition, she delineates Steven’s requests for security upgrades which she was not alerted about.
To recap, there is no elaboration of special warnings regarding 9/11, no heightened concerns regarding tumult beginning on Sept. 8th, no one correlated the inadequate security that existed in Benghazi with this special situation and once the protests started next door in Egypt no one called the people in Benghazi and told them to get on a plane and get out of there back to Tripoli which was safer. Otherwise, there was near absolute chaos in supervision of the situation. This is not the “Fog of War.”
Clinton brings into the discussion the panel appointed to review what happened in Benghazi (Accountability Review Board –ARB) and she stated she implemented all of their proposals (24) prior to her departure from the State Department. The ARB questioned the funding level for the State Dept. which Clinton repeated on Page 409. She then enhanced that by saying “I spent four years making the case to Congress that adequately funding our diplomats and development experts was a national security priority.” Thus she laid at the feet of Congress the cause of insufficient security because of denied additional funding. There are two aspects here: 1) the State Department receives $48 billion already and 2) What government department does not want more money and a bigger share of the pie. But that does not explain why diplomats went to an insufficiently secured location during an already tumultuous time on the anniversary of the worst attack on American soil in our history. Congress was not at fault here.
On the second to last page (414) of the chapter Clinton addresses her presentation to Congress in January 2013 where she made her now famous statement “What difference at this point does it make?” She provides the total statement she made and stated the line above was taken out of context. She then attacks her opponents for politicizing the issue during the 2012 election. This brings up two points: 1) Is it not possible the people who were questioning this at the time did it because of policy and Clinton attacking them is actually the politicization of the issue and 2) She still apparently does not know what difference it makes. Though she mentions in the chapter some of the efforts made after 9/11 she never answered specifically or generally what efforts she made to secure other embassies and personnel in light of the protests in Egypt and attacks in Libya. Were the embassies in Tunisia, Morocco and other countries directed to be locked down? What specific instructions did Clinton as leader of the State Department do to secure her personnel throughout the world? We still don’t know and that is what difference it would have made.
Though others may present additional unanswered questions reading Mrs. Clinton dissertation I still am left without answers to the same basic questions. What were the intelligence reports telling the President and Clinton a week before the attacks? What specific instructions were given to State Department personnel worldwide in anticipation of 9-11-2012 to heightened security? Once Egypt erupted what instructions were given to personnel in neighboring countries? Once the attacks on Benghazi started what was done to secure embassy personnel in high-risk areas?
Clinton answers none of these questions and adds very little to the discussion. Without these answers we only have her statements that local personnel make their own decisions on where to be in their respective country and Congress did not fund the State Department sufficiently. Otherwise, I take responsibility, but not really.
By now you must be pretty sick of reading and hearing about Hillary Clinton. Personally, I am ready for No Mas. But after I wrote my first column about Benghazi many readers wrote and asked me to promise I would not let the subject die. Since nothing has happened that has warranted dropping the subject I felt obligated to march on to find the facts. Hillary has now released her book, Hard Choices, with a 34 page chapter dedicated to the subject. I spent my hard earned money to find out if the Secretary of State answered any questions.
This is not the first time I have bought a Democratic Presidential candidate’s book (yes, she is running unless she continues to embarrass herself). My first adventure was reading Al Gore’s (ok, Vice-President) Earth in the Balance while walking around the Republican National Convention in 1992. Some thought that to be odd. But when Gore ran for President in 2000 the book was a blueprint of how to defeat the man in the election.
Reading the 34 page chapter you learn that Mrs. Clinton really cared about the people in her department and especially the ones that were killed that night. But more importantly does she answer questions about what happened before, during and after the attacks on the American Consulate in Benghazi.
On the fifth page of the chapter Clinton starts to describe the video that inflamed people “across the Middle East and North Africa.” She leans on this issue on numerous occasions throughout the chapter never divorcing her from making this a centerpiece of the uprising and attacks. She offers a defense of Susan Rice’s now famous news show statements the Sunday following the incidents and states the comments were “approved by the CIA.” But that has been disavowed by former Deputy Director of the CIA Michael Morell.
What is more important is the timeline of how an Ambassador was in a barely defendable consulate. Clinton does state she had been getting daily briefings about security matters. There is no description of any enhanced security plans that were communicated to embassies regarding the anniversary of 9/11. In fact, Clinton states the tumult regarding the video started on September 8th. If anyone was not worried with 9/11 coming up they certainly should have been after that. But Clinton then hangs the decision on Ambassador Chris Stevens to go to Benghazi. On page 389 she states “U.S. Ambassadors are not required to consult or seek approval from Washington when traveling within their countries, and rarely do. She goes on to describe his knowledge of the lawless situation in Benghazi, but he went there anyway. In addition, she delineates Steven’s requests for security upgrades which she was not alerted about.
To recap, there is no elaboration of special warnings regarding 9/11, no heightened concerns regarding tumult beginning on Sept. 8th, no one correlated the inadequate security that existed in Benghazi with this special situation and once the protests started next door in Egypt no one called the people in Benghazi and told them to get on a plane and get out of there back to Tripoli which was safer. Otherwise, there was near absolute chaos in supervision of the situation. This is not the “Fog of War.”
Clinton brings into the discussion the panel appointed to review what happened in Benghazi (Accountability Review Board –ARB) and she stated she implemented all of their proposals (24) prior to her departure from the State Department. The ARB questioned the funding level for the State Dept. which Clinton repeated on Page 409. She then enhanced that by saying “I spent four years making the case to Congress that adequately funding our diplomats and development experts was a national security priority.” Thus she laid at the feet of Congress the cause of insufficient security because of denied additional funding. There are two aspects here: 1) the State Department receives $48 billion already and 2) What government department does not want more money and a bigger share of the pie. But that does not explain why diplomats went to an insufficiently secured location during an already tumultuous time on the anniversary of the worst attack on American soil in our history. Congress was not at fault here.
On the second to last page (414) of the chapter Clinton addresses her presentation to Congress in January 2013 where she made her now famous statement “What difference at this point does it make?” She provides the total statement she made and stated the line above was taken out of context. She then attacks her opponents for politicizing the issue during the 2012 election. This brings up two points: 1) Is it not possible the people who were questioning this at the time did it because of policy and Clinton attacking them is actually the politicization of the issue and 2) She still apparently does not know what difference it makes. Though she mentions in the chapter some of the efforts made after 9/11 she never answered specifically or generally what efforts she made to secure other embassies and personnel in light of the protests in Egypt and attacks in Libya. Were the embassies in Tunisia, Morocco and other countries directed to be locked down? What specific instructions did Clinton as leader of the State Department do to secure her personnel throughout the world? We still don’t know and that is what difference it would have made.
Though others may present additional unanswered questions reading Mrs. Clinton dissertation I still am left without answers to the same basic questions. What were the intelligence reports telling the President and Clinton a week before the attacks? What specific instructions were given to State Department personnel worldwide in anticipation of 9-11-2012 to heightened security? Once Egypt erupted what instructions were given to personnel in neighboring countries? Once the attacks on Benghazi started what was done to secure embassy personnel in high-risk areas?
Clinton answers none of these questions and adds very little to the discussion. Without these answers we only have her statements that local personnel make their own decisions on where to be in their respective country and Congress did not fund the State Department sufficiently. Otherwise, I take responsibility, but not really.
ANOTHER GHOST TOWN IN CHINA, A REPLICA OF MANHATTAN
Mike Shedlock
Malinvestment in China proceeds at a staggering pace. Technically, this growth adds to GDP, but eventually it will be written off.
Ghost cities, ghost malls, and empty train stations in China have been in the news for years. The world's largest mall is unoccupied and entire cities sit vacant.
We can now add another ghost city to the list, a big one. Bloomberg reports China Builds Its Own Manhattan -- Except It's a Ghost Town.
China’s project to build a replica Manhattan is taking shape against a backdrop of vacant office towers and unfinished hotels, underscoring the risks to a slowing economy from the nation’s unprecedented investment boom.
The skyscraper-filled skyline of the Conch Bay district in the northern port city of Tianjin has none of a metropolis’s bustle up close, with dirt-covered glass doors and construction on some edifices halted. The area’s failure to attract tenants since the first building was finished in 2010 bodes ill across the Hai River for the separate Yujiapu development, which is modeled on New York’s Manhattan and remains in progress.
The deserted area underscores the challenge facing China’s leaders in dealing with the fallout from a record credit-fueled investment spree while sustaining growth and jobs in the world’s second-biggest economy. A Tianjin local-government financing vehicle connected to the developments said revenue fell 68 percent in 2013 to an amount that’s less than one-third of debt due this year.
“There will have to be a reckoning,” said Stephen Green, head of Greater China research at Standard Chartered Plc in Hong Kong. Sales of bonds by local-government vehicles to repay bank loans are just “buying time,” he said. “The people will pay” for it through bank bailouts, recapitalization with public money or inflation.
Conch Bay showed few signs of life during a June 19 visit by Bloomberg reporters. Work on Glorious Oriental, a two-tower residential and office complex, had stopped, and at the north end of Conch Bay, the main building of the Country Garden Phoenix Hotel, billed as Asia’s largest hotel, was a deserted shell with no signs of any work under way.
Calls to Glorious Oriental’s Beijing and Tianjin offices went unanswered.
Wang Wei, a 34-year-old Tianjin resident, was driving through the area to check out property prices, finding them six times higher than what he’d be willing to pay. “I’ve seen a lot of reports about the area, but apparently it’s not a place fit for home -- at least for now,” said Wang. “No shops, no schools, no hospitals and no neighbors.”
Empty
Buildings stand in the Conch Bay district of Tianjin, China. Photographer: Steve Engle/Bloomberg
Stories like this show why it is extremely unlikely China will pass the US any time soon.
Chinese growth is enormously exaggerated, malinvestment abounds, prices are absurd, and shadow bank operations that funds these developments will eventually implode.
Malinvestment in China proceeds at a staggering pace. Technically, this growth adds to GDP, but eventually it will be written off.
Ghost cities, ghost malls, and empty train stations in China have been in the news for years. The world's largest mall is unoccupied and entire cities sit vacant.
We can now add another ghost city to the list, a big one. Bloomberg reports China Builds Its Own Manhattan -- Except It's a Ghost Town.
China’s project to build a replica Manhattan is taking shape against a backdrop of vacant office towers and unfinished hotels, underscoring the risks to a slowing economy from the nation’s unprecedented investment boom.
The skyscraper-filled skyline of the Conch Bay district in the northern port city of Tianjin has none of a metropolis’s bustle up close, with dirt-covered glass doors and construction on some edifices halted. The area’s failure to attract tenants since the first building was finished in 2010 bodes ill across the Hai River for the separate Yujiapu development, which is modeled on New York’s Manhattan and remains in progress.
The deserted area underscores the challenge facing China’s leaders in dealing with the fallout from a record credit-fueled investment spree while sustaining growth and jobs in the world’s second-biggest economy. A Tianjin local-government financing vehicle connected to the developments said revenue fell 68 percent in 2013 to an amount that’s less than one-third of debt due this year.
“There will have to be a reckoning,” said Stephen Green, head of Greater China research at Standard Chartered Plc in Hong Kong. Sales of bonds by local-government vehicles to repay bank loans are just “buying time,” he said. “The people will pay” for it through bank bailouts, recapitalization with public money or inflation.
Conch Bay showed few signs of life during a June 19 visit by Bloomberg reporters. Work on Glorious Oriental, a two-tower residential and office complex, had stopped, and at the north end of Conch Bay, the main building of the Country Garden Phoenix Hotel, billed as Asia’s largest hotel, was a deserted shell with no signs of any work under way.
Calls to Glorious Oriental’s Beijing and Tianjin offices went unanswered.
Wang Wei, a 34-year-old Tianjin resident, was driving through the area to check out property prices, finding them six times higher than what he’d be willing to pay. “I’ve seen a lot of reports about the area, but apparently it’s not a place fit for home -- at least for now,” said Wang. “No shops, no schools, no hospitals and no neighbors.”
Empty
Buildings stand in the Conch Bay district of Tianjin, China. Photographer: Steve Engle/Bloomberg
Stories like this show why it is extremely unlikely China will pass the US any time soon.
Chinese growth is enormously exaggerated, malinvestment abounds, prices are absurd, and shadow bank operations that funds these developments will eventually implode.
WW1 AND SECOND FALL OF MAN
Paul Kengor
On June 28, 1914, a Bosnian-Serb student named Gavrilo Princip killed Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, the duchess. It was the shot-heard-round-the-world, unleashing a series of events that by August 1914 embroiled Europe in war. That deadly summer unfolded 100 years ago, and the world truly was never the same.
Civilization was soon engaged in a horrific conflict marred by mechanized warfare previously unimaginable: tanks, subs, battleships, air power, machine guns with names like “the Devil’s paint brush,” and legions of poison gas—the largest-scale use of chemical weapons in history. Winding through all the agony were rotten, death-strewn trenches, an incomprehensible maze of thousands of miles of freezing, disease-ridden, and rat-infested tunnels where men subsisted below the earth. They rose from this hell only to be fed into a worse one—no man’s land, a dénouement with the human meat-grinder.
It was World War I, the “Great War.”
Ever since, professors have struggled to explain to students how the major powers became engulfed by this nightmare. I start my lectures on WWI with an hour on its causes. These ranged from colonial and tariff disputes to a complicated network of alliances that inexorably committed various countries to battle, beginning with Austria-Hungary, Serbia, Germany, and Russia.
Still, as I cover these causes with my students, they are confused, frustrated, unsatisfied. Where was the Pearl Harbor? Where were the concentration camps? Where was the Hitler-Stalin Pact? Who was the brutal dictator?
There was none. No such blatant evils precipitated this war.
It was a disastrously wasteful affair that Pope Benedict XV publicly declared an unjust war, a mad form of collective European suicide. The pontiff rightly judged that there were no salient moral issues dividing the combatants. These countries should not have been at war, let alone slaughtering their boys by the millions.
The moral calamity was obvious to all. Quite apart from the bishop of Rome, the acclaimed atheist-leftist intellectual Sidney Hook might have best summed up the catastrophe when he referred to World War I not as the “Great War,” or “War to End All Wars,” or the “Kaiser’s War,” or, in PresidentWoodrow Wilson’s famous line, the war to “make the world safe for democracy,” but as something considerably less inspiring: World War I was, said Hook mordantly, “the second fall of man.”
And so it was.
Religious metaphor best captures the gravity of this giant fall from grace. Historian Michael Hull evokes the image of O Cristo das Trincheiras, “The Christ of the Trenches.” This life-size statue of Jesus Christ hung with arms outstretched on a tall wooden cross was erected on the Western Front. Soiled, bullet-scarred, and, most of all, crucified, the French presented it to the government of Portugal after the war to memorialize the thousands of Portuguese who sacrificed themselves at the Battle of Flanders. It’s an appropriate symbol for the millions who gave their lives for this colossal sin.
Michael Hull maintains that World War I was, in a perverse way, arguably more horrible than World War II. How so? “The horrors of World War I,” writes Hull, “exceeded those of World War II in terms of the sheer futility of squandered lives.”
Moreover, the horror didn’t end. It simply begot more horror.
Here’s what the modern world should know about World War I: This wretched war, whose reasons still baffle, enabled Hitler in Germany and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. It helped lead to World War II and the Cold War. The famous British historian A.J.P. Taylor put it plainly, “The first war explains the second and, in fact, caused it, in so far as one event causes another.”
The bloody disaster would be a mere warm-up, the first of two worldwide wars, fostered by the “punitive peace” imposed upon the surrendering Germans at the unforgiving hands of the French and other Allied leaders at the Versailles Conference. That punishing peace did not produce a peaceful heart among the Germans, many of which mistakenly believed they had
won the war and surrendered only to agree to acceptable conditions of peace. Instead, the conditions at Versailles helped sow the seeds for Hitler’s rise.
The war not only permitted the cataclysm in Germany; it also enabled the fall of Czar Nicholas II in Russia. It’s difficult to imagine the Bolsheviks supplanting the Romanov dynasty without the intervention of WWI.
Ultimately, World War II far surpassed World War I’s carnage, and the Soviet global communist ideology killed even more still; both precipitated by a “Great War” in which no great moral issues were at stake.
World War I unleashed death, principally death. It was a result that Mr. Princip could have never imagined when he pulled that trigger 100 years ago.
On June 28, 1914, a Bosnian-Serb student named Gavrilo Princip killed Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, the duchess. It was the shot-heard-round-the-world, unleashing a series of events that by August 1914 embroiled Europe in war. That deadly summer unfolded 100 years ago, and the world truly was never the same.
Civilization was soon engaged in a horrific conflict marred by mechanized warfare previously unimaginable: tanks, subs, battleships, air power, machine guns with names like “the Devil’s paint brush,” and legions of poison gas—the largest-scale use of chemical weapons in history. Winding through all the agony were rotten, death-strewn trenches, an incomprehensible maze of thousands of miles of freezing, disease-ridden, and rat-infested tunnels where men subsisted below the earth. They rose from this hell only to be fed into a worse one—no man’s land, a dénouement with the human meat-grinder.
It was World War I, the “Great War.”
Ever since, professors have struggled to explain to students how the major powers became engulfed by this nightmare. I start my lectures on WWI with an hour on its causes. These ranged from colonial and tariff disputes to a complicated network of alliances that inexorably committed various countries to battle, beginning with Austria-Hungary, Serbia, Germany, and Russia.
Still, as I cover these causes with my students, they are confused, frustrated, unsatisfied. Where was the Pearl Harbor? Where were the concentration camps? Where was the Hitler-Stalin Pact? Who was the brutal dictator?
There was none. No such blatant evils precipitated this war.
It was a disastrously wasteful affair that Pope Benedict XV publicly declared an unjust war, a mad form of collective European suicide. The pontiff rightly judged that there were no salient moral issues dividing the combatants. These countries should not have been at war, let alone slaughtering their boys by the millions.
The moral calamity was obvious to all. Quite apart from the bishop of Rome, the acclaimed atheist-leftist intellectual Sidney Hook might have best summed up the catastrophe when he referred to World War I not as the “Great War,” or “War to End All Wars,” or the “Kaiser’s War,” or, in PresidentWoodrow Wilson’s famous line, the war to “make the world safe for democracy,” but as something considerably less inspiring: World War I was, said Hook mordantly, “the second fall of man.”
And so it was.
Religious metaphor best captures the gravity of this giant fall from grace. Historian Michael Hull evokes the image of O Cristo das Trincheiras, “The Christ of the Trenches.” This life-size statue of Jesus Christ hung with arms outstretched on a tall wooden cross was erected on the Western Front. Soiled, bullet-scarred, and, most of all, crucified, the French presented it to the government of Portugal after the war to memorialize the thousands of Portuguese who sacrificed themselves at the Battle of Flanders. It’s an appropriate symbol for the millions who gave their lives for this colossal sin.
Michael Hull maintains that World War I was, in a perverse way, arguably more horrible than World War II. How so? “The horrors of World War I,” writes Hull, “exceeded those of World War II in terms of the sheer futility of squandered lives.”
Moreover, the horror didn’t end. It simply begot more horror.
Here’s what the modern world should know about World War I: This wretched war, whose reasons still baffle, enabled Hitler in Germany and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. It helped lead to World War II and the Cold War. The famous British historian A.J.P. Taylor put it plainly, “The first war explains the second and, in fact, caused it, in so far as one event causes another.”
The bloody disaster would be a mere warm-up, the first of two worldwide wars, fostered by the “punitive peace” imposed upon the surrendering Germans at the unforgiving hands of the French and other Allied leaders at the Versailles Conference. That punishing peace did not produce a peaceful heart among the Germans, many of which mistakenly believed they had
won the war and surrendered only to agree to acceptable conditions of peace. Instead, the conditions at Versailles helped sow the seeds for Hitler’s rise.
The war not only permitted the cataclysm in Germany; it also enabled the fall of Czar Nicholas II in Russia. It’s difficult to imagine the Bolsheviks supplanting the Romanov dynasty without the intervention of WWI.
Ultimately, World War II far surpassed World War I’s carnage, and the Soviet global communist ideology killed even more still; both precipitated by a “Great War” in which no great moral issues were at stake.
World War I unleashed death, principally death. It was a result that Mr. Princip could have never imagined when he pulled that trigger 100 years ago.
THE DISASTROUS TENURE OF " OBAMA'S ENFORCER "
Ed Fuelner
I don’t know who the next U.S. attorney general will be. But I know I pity that person. Restoring the Justice Department’s reputation in the wake of Eric Holder’s tenure will take a lot of work.
You can find out just how big a task it will be in “Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department,” a new book by John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky. Even at a relatively slim 217 pages, it’s quite a bill of indictment.
It’s one thing to read about certain cases as they pop up in the news cycle -- an article about a civil-rights investigation here, a blog post about Operation Fast and Furious there. It’s another to assemble them in one place and get the big picture in one sitting.
Holder is the first attorney general in U.S. history to be held in contempt of Congress. Considering his behavior toward the legislative branch, it’s not surprising. He stonewalled, for example, when the Senate Judiciary Committee questioned him about the scandal that erupted when it was revealed that the IRS was targeting conservative organizations.
Or take the testimony he gave the House Judiciary Committee when asked about prosecuting the press over publishing classified material. Holder swore that he had never been involved in that or even thought about doing so.
Yet the committee subsequently learned that Holder had approved a search warrant for Fox News reporter James Rosen’s emails by “swearing to a federal court that Mr. Rosen was a co-conspirator in a national security leak investigation.”
How did Holder explain this gap between his answer and the truth when the committee asked about it? He didn’t. He refused to answer.
Then there’s the deplorable way the Civil Rights Division has been run under Holder and Thomas Perez, an assistant attorney general from 2009 to 2013.
In their chaper “The (Un)Civil Rights Division,” Fund and von Spakovsky detail numerous instances in which Holder and Perez “pursued a militant civil rights agenda intended to help Democrats win elections and implement …. a socialized America where racial, ethnic, and sexual quotas are required in everything from college admissions to public employment to school discipline.”
But Holder will probably be best known for overseeing Operation Fast and Furious, which put more than 2,000 guns into the hands of a Mexican drug cartel and led to the deaths of hundreds of Mexican citizens and a U.S. Border Patrol agent. When federal lawmakers began investigating, Holder again opted not to cooperate, but to cover up.
Any claim “that ATF ‘sanctioned’ or otherwise knowingly allowed the sale of assault weapons to a straw purchaser who then transported them to Mexico is false,” Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich wrote to Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) in February 2011. “ATF makes every effort to interdict weapons that have been purchased illegally and prevent their transportation into Mexico.”
But nine months later, after weeks of foot-dragging and attempts to find “dirt” on those who had blown the whistle on Fast and Furious, the Justice Department finally came clean. In November 2011, Holder admitted under oath that the gun-walking had, in fact, occurred. The February denial was rescinded.
To some observers, the idea of a truly ethical Justice Department is something of a pipe dream. As far as they’re concerned, the attorney general is nominated by a president who’s either Democrat or Republican, so we shouldn’t be surprised when he conducts business is a partisan manner.
Such a cynical view, though, is unfounded. Many fine attorneys general have served ethically defensible terms under both Republicans and Democrats. The tenures of Edwin Meese under Ronald Reagan and Griffin Bell under Jimmy Carter, for example, prove that the Justice Department can be run in an entirely independent, professional way.
Holder’s term as attorney general represents the other end of the spectrum: driven by politics, tainted by scandal and mired in corruption. The need for an attorney general that will, in fact, uphold the Constitution in a fair, impartial and ethical fashion has never been greater.
I don’t know who the next U.S. attorney general will be. But I know I pity that person. Restoring the Justice Department’s reputation in the wake of Eric Holder’s tenure will take a lot of work.
You can find out just how big a task it will be in “Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department,” a new book by John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky. Even at a relatively slim 217 pages, it’s quite a bill of indictment.
It’s one thing to read about certain cases as they pop up in the news cycle -- an article about a civil-rights investigation here, a blog post about Operation Fast and Furious there. It’s another to assemble them in one place and get the big picture in one sitting.
Holder is the first attorney general in U.S. history to be held in contempt of Congress. Considering his behavior toward the legislative branch, it’s not surprising. He stonewalled, for example, when the Senate Judiciary Committee questioned him about the scandal that erupted when it was revealed that the IRS was targeting conservative organizations.
Or take the testimony he gave the House Judiciary Committee when asked about prosecuting the press over publishing classified material. Holder swore that he had never been involved in that or even thought about doing so.
Yet the committee subsequently learned that Holder had approved a search warrant for Fox News reporter James Rosen’s emails by “swearing to a federal court that Mr. Rosen was a co-conspirator in a national security leak investigation.”
How did Holder explain this gap between his answer and the truth when the committee asked about it? He didn’t. He refused to answer.
Then there’s the deplorable way the Civil Rights Division has been run under Holder and Thomas Perez, an assistant attorney general from 2009 to 2013.
In their chaper “The (Un)Civil Rights Division,” Fund and von Spakovsky detail numerous instances in which Holder and Perez “pursued a militant civil rights agenda intended to help Democrats win elections and implement …. a socialized America where racial, ethnic, and sexual quotas are required in everything from college admissions to public employment to school discipline.”
But Holder will probably be best known for overseeing Operation Fast and Furious, which put more than 2,000 guns into the hands of a Mexican drug cartel and led to the deaths of hundreds of Mexican citizens and a U.S. Border Patrol agent. When federal lawmakers began investigating, Holder again opted not to cooperate, but to cover up.
Any claim “that ATF ‘sanctioned’ or otherwise knowingly allowed the sale of assault weapons to a straw purchaser who then transported them to Mexico is false,” Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich wrote to Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) in February 2011. “ATF makes every effort to interdict weapons that have been purchased illegally and prevent their transportation into Mexico.”
But nine months later, after weeks of foot-dragging and attempts to find “dirt” on those who had blown the whistle on Fast and Furious, the Justice Department finally came clean. In November 2011, Holder admitted under oath that the gun-walking had, in fact, occurred. The February denial was rescinded.
To some observers, the idea of a truly ethical Justice Department is something of a pipe dream. As far as they’re concerned, the attorney general is nominated by a president who’s either Democrat or Republican, so we shouldn’t be surprised when he conducts business is a partisan manner.
Such a cynical view, though, is unfounded. Many fine attorneys general have served ethically defensible terms under both Republicans and Democrats. The tenures of Edwin Meese under Ronald Reagan and Griffin Bell under Jimmy Carter, for example, prove that the Justice Department can be run in an entirely independent, professional way.
Holder’s term as attorney general represents the other end of the spectrum: driven by politics, tainted by scandal and mired in corruption. The need for an attorney general that will, in fact, uphold the Constitution in a fair, impartial and ethical fashion has never been greater.
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