RUTHFULLY YOURS

“It neither helps us nor hurts us, but exactly the opposite,” Mexican President Luis Echeverria is supposed to have said (“Ni nos benefica ni nos perjudica, sino todo lo contrario”). In the case of Iraq, as so often, it depends: the winner is the side best able to bear the burden of uncertainty. America should be the winner when our prospective enemies fight each other (as I argued in the February 2012 essay reposted below). In the language of option trading (see here), we should be long volatility, but instead are short volatility. That is because neither the Obama administration nor the Republican mainstream can admit that Iraq and Syria are not to be stabilized, and are stuck with the onus of apparent policy failure.

Iraq’s woes surely are good for the Russians and the Iranians. Russia just delivered five Sukhoi 25′s, their nimbler but less powerful competitor to our Warthog close-air-defense fighter (that’s the one the Pentagon proposes to eliminate), the first installment on a $500 million contract for a dozen of them. Russia also is selling $2 billion of arms, including attack helicopters, to Egypt, and with Saudi funding. The Iranians meanwhile have sent in special forces and armaments.

All of this makes our leadership in both parties look like idiots, and that is bad for America. Even those of us who think that our leadership are idiots cringe when it becomes obvious to the rest of the world. The American public by a margin of 71:22 thinks that the Iraq War wasn’t worth it. They are against any sort of intervention because there is no-one they trust to conduct intervention sensibly.

Putin is not smarter than we are. He is simply unburdened by the illusion that most of the countries in the region should or will succeed, and he is willing to stay one jump ahead of the game, maneuvering for advantage as opportunities emerge. We are fettered by Obama’s affirmative-action approach to the Muslim world as articulated in his July 2009 Cairo address and numerous subsequent statements, and the Republicans’ ideological belief that the mere form of parliamentary democracy fixes all problems.

The intrusion of reality benefits the likes of Putin, because Putin is a realist. It hurts us, because we refuse to accept reality. Our leaders live in ideological bubbles; they are incapable of considering the consequence of their errors, because they believe in their respective causes (the innate goodness of Islam or the innate propensity of people towards democracy) with religious intensity.

The U.S. needs to draw a line around its allies — the Gulf states and the kingdom of Jordan — and ensure that the ISIS problem is contained at their borders. What happens inside Iraq is not our concern, although we might want to quietly tweak this or that aspect of the facts on the ground. But it is pointless for another American to die in that miserable place. The Balkans, said Bismarck, wasn’t worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier. All the less so Mesopotamia.

What should we do in Iraq? Be the bad guy in the “Three Musketeers.”

You can tell a lot about a society by watching what kind of people it puts into positions of power and influence.

Thorbjørn Jagland is a former Prime Minister of Norway from the Norwegian Labour Party. Since 2009, he has been the Secretary General of the Council of Europe (CoE). He was reelected to this position for a second term, with the support of parliamentarians from across Europe, on June 24 2014.

The CoE was established in 1949. It is distinct from and less powerful than the European Union. However, it has a formalized cooperation with the EU on a range of issues, for instance those related to immigration. This cooperation has been strengthened under Jagland’s lead. The CoE further enjoys friendly relations with many Islamic organizations and has made combating so-called “Islamophobia” in Europe one of its stated priorities.

In addition to heading the Council of Europe, for years Mr. Jagland has also been the Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which awards the annual Nobel Peace Prize. Under his leadership, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in 2009 to Barack Hussein Obama, when he had only been US President for a few months. In 2012, Jagland and the Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize to the European Union (EU). The Socialist Jagland has for decades been a passionate supporter of supranational organizations such as the EU.

One of the three women who shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011, Tawakkol Karman from Yemen, has close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Norwegian Nobel Committee knew about this and thought it was fine. Jagland told reporters in Oslo that he disagrees with the widespread “perception” in the West that the Brotherhood is a threat to democracy. The very same man has warned repeatedly for years against the allegedly great dangers presented by “Islamophobia” and people who peacefully voice anti-Islamic viewpoints.

In Jagland’s view, being associated with the Muslim Brotherhood makes you a potential partner worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize. If, on the other hand, you peacefully oppose Islamic inroads into the Western world then that makes you virtually a threat to world peace.

On August 1 2013, Thorbjørn Jagland “attacked the Norwegian press for allowing the extremist blogger Peder ‘Fjordman’ Jensen to air his anti-Islamic views.” He warned against letting the ideology allegedly held by the mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik to enter the mainstream:

There is more bad news for moderate Muslims who deny any connection between Islam and terror and who insist on convincing the West that no one should interpret Quranic commandments to kill, behead, torture, terrorize, humiliate, belittle and never befriend the non-believer, as violent.

As I was watching an Arabic Aljazeerah TV show, which did not have a date, called “Sharia and Hayaa,” meaning Islamic law and life, the topic was “Dawaa Baina Al Tarhib Wal Targhib,” Arabic for “Preaching between Terror and Lure.” The word “dawaa” means preaching or spreading Islam. “Tarhib” is derived from the word “irhab” or terror, and “tarhib” means to instill terror. Incidentally, the Quran encourages Muslims to “instill terror through the hearts of unbelievers.” The word “targhib” means luring or making something attractive. I am sure Islamic apologists will dispute the interpretation since they never admit that the word “kill” in the Quran means “kill” anyway.

“Tarhib Wal TarghibI” is an Islamic doctrine that the West and many Muslims are unfamiliar with but that demonstrates yet another clear connection between Islam and terror. This doctrine promotes the use of two extreme tools to bring people and nations to submit to Islam. Such polar opposite and extreme techniques penetrate Islamic society from top to bottom; they are encouraged in child rearing, in the relationship between men and women, leaders and citizens, mosque preachers and the congregation, Arab media and the public, and even between Islamic nations and the West — the nations they wish to conquer or lure to Islam.

A Quranic verse (The Rock 49-50) was mentioned at the beginning of the show stating that Allah said: “tell my worshippers that I am the beneficent the merciful and my torture [Athab] is a painful one”; two opposite extreme descriptions of Allah, or more accurately Mohammed himself, that became the foundation of the contradictory doctrine of Islam.

It must be noted that Arabic Aljazeerah discusses Islam in a totally different light from English Aljazeerah, which is designed to lure Westerners to the idea that Islam is peaceful while defending terror as freedom fighting.

This doctrine is a summation of what the Quran is all about, terror and lure, and promotes such extremely but powerful and raw cultural attributes of Muslim society; shame and pride. Such a doctrine has also evolved from Mohammed’s character when he failed to peacefully evangelize through persuasion and “lure” and therefore had to flip tactics, going straight to pure terror. Thus his famous saying “I have been victorious through terror.”

If We Want to Beat Al Qaeda, We Have to Stop Arming It Posted By Daniel Greenfield

Obama’s call for $500 million to arm and train Syrian Jihadist fighters couldn’t have possibly come at a more inappropriate time as Al Qaeda in Iraq menaces both countries.

It wasn’t the Iraq War that made the Al Qaeda affiliate so dangerous. In 2008 it specialized in suicide bombings. It wasn’t marching on Baghdad with an army behind it.

The Arab Spring destabilized the region while money, weapons and recruits poured into Libya and Syria. Obama’s regime change war in Libya led not only to the takeover of entire Libyan cities by Al Qaeda, culminating in the murder of four Americans in Benghazi, but to an Al Qaeda affiliate seizing much of neighboring Mali. Libyan terror training camps also led to an attack on the Amenas gas plant in Algeria.

Three Americans were killed in that attack bringing the US death toll from Obama’s Libyan War up to seven.

But that was last year. This year it’s the Syrian Civil War that turned its local Al Qaeda affiliates into breakout Jihadi stars seizing entire cities and terrorizing the region.

Obama’s solution is to direct money intended for counterterrorism partnerships to terrorists in Syria.

This may be one of the worst ideas that he has ever come up with. Attempts to control the flow of weapons likely played a role in the Benghazi attacks. NATO forces enforcing an arms embargo on Libya had been told to ignore Qatari weapons shipments that were meant for “moderates”.

Instead they went to Al Qaeda.

Obama and Kerry, not to mention Graham and McCain, believe that weapons can be directed to “moderate” Syrian groups and that by arming the “good” terrorists, we’ll stop the “bad” terrorists.

But there are no “good” terrorists. Promises of delivering weapons only to “pre-vetted” groups are worth as much as Obama’s assurances that Al Qaeda was on the run and that ISIS is only a jayvee team.

The fixation of Israeli governments on “land for peace”, a policy that has resulted in the murder and maiming of more than 10,000 Jews, puzzles the pundits. They puzzle over the fact that regardless of which party or coalition of parties controls the government, the policy of land-for-peace continues, despite its obvious futility and fatal consequences.

They wonder what animates Israel’s ruling elites? Why do they continue to negotiate with terrorists, with Arabs or Muslims steeped in a fourteen- century religion driven by hatred of “infidels”…

[They] also wonder why the people of Israel, who exercise the franchise, tolerate their ruling elites? …why don’t the voters elect statesmen possessing enough courage, wisdom, and integrity to face the truth about the implacable nature of the enemy – statesmen who can pursue a strategy whose goal is to defeat the enemy? Why do the voters repeatedly elect governments that appease the enemy via the futile and fatal policy of land for peace?

– Prof. Paul Eidelberg, The Fixation of Israel’s Elites on “Land for Peace”, 2007.

If the proponents of the discredited land-for- peace principle and the two-state prescription for resolving the Israel-Arab conflict had any intellectual integrity, they would hang their heads in shame.

If the political discourse in Israel were conducted with decency and honesty; if substantive truth determined public stature in the country, these merchants of fraudulent, foolhardy fantasies would have been marginalized, consigned long ago to the enduring irrelevance, ignominy and commensurate ridicule they richly deserve.

Dramatic discontinuity in Zionist endeavor

We are now approaching almost a quarter- century since the fatal concoction of the noxious, Oslowian brew in the early 1990s, that culminated in the so-called “Declaration of Principles” (Oslo I) on the White House lawns in September 1993.

In effect, these events marked a dramatic discontinuity in the evolution of Zionism, fostering the previously spurned notion of Palestinian statehood as an acceptable – even preferred – policy option for the mainstream.

Not only did the event grossly distort the founding ethos of Zionism, it inverted its essence and the thrust of Zionism’s fundamental principles. What was once vaunted as virtue became vilified as vice.

Every society is ruled by a consensus. The consensus rarely comes from the bottom up. Usually it’s imposed from the top down.

The United States is not run by the voters. It’s not run by the people. It’s run by a consensus. That consensus is what the elites think is true. That consensus is not exactly the same among Democrats and Republicans, but it does overlap in significant ways.

The first point of the consensus is that bigger institutions are better because they are smarter. This isn’t limited just to government. It also encompasses the corporate world. And the merger of governments, corporations, academics and non-profits into one large conglomeration of consensus.

The movement of executives from the non-profit, to the political to the corporate spheres, in no particular order, is really how our society is run. Even when each group remains in its own sphere, they make interdependent decisions with companies and government institutions acting as executive leaders and treating non-profits and academics as the expert class.

Pull back and we’re run by a single giant corporation whose leadership is very complicated and competitive, but whose leaders come from a common culture and who call on the consensus for their ideas.

Using elections to shift that consensus is very difficult because at the top the consensus extends across both parties and much of the governing of the consensus is not subject to voter review.

You can elect Congressman Y to represent your interests. But the system isn’t run by Congressman Y. It is highly unlikely that Congressman Y will ever be president. Even if Congressman Y becomes a Senator, he will have to win over donors whose worldview is a product of the consensus. If he manages to make it to the Senate without accepting the consensus, his legislation, should any of it make it past the Consensus Senators, will then be dumped into a pile managed by Consensus regulators and Consensus Federal judges who will reject it if doesn’t meet the Consensus.

That’s the interdependency of the Consensus. It’s a single massive system made up of individuals who are diverse in demographics, but share the viewpoints of the Consensus or shut up about it.

Making the Consensus bigger has made American government and business extremely inefficient. It’s why we can’t seem to get anything done anymore and our only products that matter come from the occasional young visionary who challenges the system with a new company. But it also makes it very hard to beat.

Dr. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

In her Political Diary item on June 26, Allysia Finley wrote that California has “insane water rationing” policies and that Californians “pay dearly for their government’s green sanctimony.” She’s correct. And there’s another example: Santa Cruz, Mendocino and Marin counties—all of which boast politically correct, far-left politics—are among the local jurisdictions that have banned a proven technology that could conserve vast amounts of water.

The technology is genetic engineering performed with modern molecular techniques, sometimes referred to as genetic modification (GM) or gene-splicing, which enables plant breeders to make old crop plants do spectacular new things, including conserve water. Throughout the U.S. and in about 30 other countries, farmers are using genetically engineered crop varieties to produce higher yields with lower inputs and reduced impacts on the environment.

Because irrigation for agriculture accounts for roughly 70 percent of the world’s fresh water consumption, the introduction of plants that grow with less water would allow much of it to be freed up for other uses. Especially during drought conditions such as those found throughout California, even a small percentage reduction in the use of water for irrigation could result in huge benefits to farmers and consumers.

Plant biologists have identified genes that regulate water use and transferred them into important crop plants. These new varieties grow with smaller amounts of water or with lower-quality water, such as that which has been recycled or that is high in natural mineral salts. For example, Egyptian researchers showed a decade ago that by transferring a single gene from barley to wheat, the plants can tolerate reduced watering for a longer period of time. This new, drought-resistant variety requires only one-eighth as much irrigation as conventional wheat and in some deserts can be cultivated with rainfall alone.

One genetically engineered, drought resistant corn variety has been commercialized in the U.S., and many more are in advanced field testing. How successful they’ll be might depend on whether green activists and politicians have enough sense to come in out of the rain.

Hank Paulson endorses a carbon tax. But is he right this time?

The climate change industry always needs a fresh angle, and the latest is that carbon emissions are an economic threat akin to mortgage-backed securities before the financial panic. The analogy comes from Hank Paulson —and if he has spotted a bubble this time, we guess one out of two is an improvement on zero out of one.

With the travelling billionaire wilburys of Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg, the former Treasury Secretary put out a 197-page study last week that predicts the costs of a warming catastrophe. Their “Risky Business” project is meant to awaken the green conscience of business leaders, and President Obama’s endorsement was inevitable: Even George W. Bush’s money man agrees . . .

The report reads like a prospectus, except with years of “investments” in fossil fuels returning damage across industries and regions. The authors estimate storms along the eastern seaboard and Gulf of Mexico will cost $2 billion to $3.5 billion more, while they also look at so-called “tail risks,” or worst-case crises with a 1-in-100 chance of happening: New York City could be 6.8 feet underwater by century’s end, crops could wither in heat waves by 42%, and so forth.

Mr. Paulson’s particular contribution has been to summon the apparitions of the 2008 crash. He recently mused that his career in business and government taught him that “it is time to act before problems become too big to manage.” The “climate bubble,” as he puts it, is like the housing excesses that built up in the global financial markets and could lead to contagion.

CEOs might reasonably question Mr. Paulson’s skills as a risk manager, given that as Treasury chief he went along with the Beltway flow and assured the public that Fannie and Freddie were in good shape until it was too late. And are there even amateur investors who are unaware that climate change is a matter of some political interest? Many public companies already embed a proxy cost of carbon when they invest and disclose material risks that climate change may or may not pose to their balance sheets.

Following the recent kidnapping of three Israeli teens, Iron Dome anti-missile defenses are back in action again, with recognizable and welcome success. The specific event linkages are clear. When Palestinian terrorists in Gaza began to step up attacks against Israel, the Iron Dome capably intercepted those rockets that had been fired toward the Hof Ashkelon Regional Council in the south. Looking ahead, the IDF initially deployed anti-missile units in the coastal region near Ashdod in mid-June, then correctly anticipating that renewed terror rocket attacks upon Israel would be unleashed from Gaza.

But Gaza is not Iran. Their respective tactical and strategic threats to Israel are very different, and so, too, are the country’s required active defenses. Although a lower than 100% reliability of interception could be taken as more-or-less acceptable to Israel in the face of shorter-range and exclusively conventional rockets, a less-than-perfect level of reliability could not be tolerable following any nuclear missile attack from Iran. Such an attack is not yet technically possible, of course, but this current limitation on Iran’s offensive military power is apt to change in the next several years.

For Israel, in the altogether plausible case of a future Iranian long-range rocket attack bearing nuclear warheads, not even a single incoming missile could be allowed to reach its target. Significantly, however, at least for the moment, no operational Israeli system of active defense could hope to assure such a total level of protection. This means that while the Iron Dome, Arrow, and still in development David’s Sling (aka Magic Wand), can contribute mightily to Israel’s assorted and intersecting security postures, any such contribution would still remain less than perfect. It is also clear that no system of Israeli missile defense could be of any protective service against enemy acts of nuclear terrorism that would employ non-missile delivery systems. In essence, this limitation references such foreseeable delivery systems as commercial trucks and container ships.

Even now, Israel’s strategic options against a steadily nuclearizing Iran should not entirely exclude preemption, that is, a conspicuously final resort prerogative to launch suitably defensive first strikes. Under authoritative international law, if the nuclear danger posed by Iran were in any fashion potentially existential, and simultaneously “imminent in point of time,” such Israeli strikes could be justified as “anticipatory self-defense.” Going all the way back to an 1837 case known in jurisprudence as The Caroline, this particular sort of proper justification could be fully in line with customary international law.

I agree with Victor Sharpe about the Kurds but Israel, at the moment has no “unique responsibility” for anything other than defense of its people and its borders….rsk
Today the world clamors for a Palestinian Arab state but strangely turns its back upon Kurdish national independence and statehood.

There is a people who, like the Jews, can trace their ancestry in their homeland back thousands of years. They are the Kurds, and it is highly instructive to review their remarkable history in conjunction with that of the Jews. It is also necessary to review the historical injustices imposed upon them over the centuries by hostile neighbors and empires.

Even though it lives in a terrible neighborhood and desperately seeks friends, Israel cannot and must not evade its unique responsibility towards the Kurdish people, who also suffer from the depredations of their hostile neighbors. The Jewish state must not ignore the Kurds, who remain stateless and shunned by the world and who seek, at last, the historic justice they have craved for centuries but been denied – an independent, sovereign state of their own.

Fact: There has never existed in all of recorded history an independent sovereign nation called Palestine – and certainly not an Arab one. The term “Palestine” has always been the name of a geographical territory, such as Siberia or Patagonia. It has never been a state.

Fact: On the other hand, Kurdistan with a population over 30,000,000, has an ancient history and an enduring nationhood scattered throughout northwestern Iran, northern Iraq, Syria and Turkey.

There are some twenty Arab states throughout the Middle East and North Africa, yet a hostile world demands that another Arab state be created within the mere forty miles separating the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan – within the territories of Judea and Samaria; the very biblical and ancestral Jewish heartland.

If this hostile world has its way, Israel, a territory no larger than the tiny principality of Wales or the state of New Jersey, would be forced to share this sliver of land with a new and hostile Arab entity to be called Palestine. The Jewish state would see its present narrow waist further reduced to a suicidal nine to 15 miles in width – what an earlier Israeli statesman, Abba Eban, described as the Auschwitz borders