RUTHFULLY YOURS

President-elect Donald Trump is being faulted for supposedly appointing too many retired generals to cabinet-level jobs and “militarizing” the government.

Former lieutenant general Michael Flynn is slated to be national security adviser. Retired Marine general James Mattis has been nominated as defense secretary. Retired Marine general John Kelly is Trump’s nominee for secretary of homeland security. High-ranking officers such as General David Petraeus and Admiral Michael Rogers have been rumored for other positions in the Trump administration.

All are retired as well as seasoned veterans. They have been previously entrusted with the lives of thousands of soldiers, and they have traveled around the world and met many of the key leaders in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

Most of the criticism of the Flynn, Mattis, and Kelly nominations is politically created hysteria, like past contrived bouts of partisan frenzy over subjects such as the “war on women” or the “climate of hate.”

Why, after reaching a high military rank before retirement, should a nominee earn more scrutiny than an ex-banker, ex-politician or ex-lawyer?

Did anyone complain when Barack Obama appointed five retired generals and one retired admiral to either Cabinet posts or high-ranking positions in his administration? In fact, Flynn and Petraeus were first appointed to high office by Obama.

Under Obama, Petraeus became CIA director. Flynn served as Obama’s director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Retired general Eric Shinseki was head of the Department of Veterans Affairs. Retired general James Jones was national security adviser. Retired admiral Dennis Blair and retired general James Clapper served as successive directors of national intelligence.

Ronald Reagan also appointed a number of retired and acting generals to cabinet positions or other high offices, including Al Haig as secretary of state, Colin Powell (while on active duty) as national security adviser, and Vernon Walters as ambassador to the United Nations.

Retired generals and admirals as administration secretaries, officers, directors and advisers are nothing new. In the 20th century, most of the stars of the American effort in World War II later served in the executive branch.

President Harry Truman appointed General George Marshall (of Marshall Plan fame) secretary of state and, later, secretary of defense. General Omar Bradley was head of the Veterans Administration while still on active duty.

Dwight Eisenhower, without prior elected office, proved a most-effective Republican president.

The chief complaint about Trump’s appointments is that too many generals will mean too great a likelihood of war. Historical evidence points to the opposite conclusion. Generals were not the proverbial “best and brightest” who argued for military intervention in Vietnam, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, or the bombing of Libya in 2011.

In a famous example of a civilian-military paradox, President Bill Clinton’s ambassador to the United Nations, Madeline Albright, scolded Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell in 1993 for not being more eager to send troops into the Balkans. “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” Albright asked Powell.

Traditionally, retired generals and flag officers have no desire to see their own troops killed in what they see as optional wars abroad. Their occasional harangues about building up military power are predicated on notions of peace-through-strength deterrence: The more powerful the military is perceived abroad, the less likely it will be need to be used.

Kellyanne Conway, senior adviser to President-elect Donald Trump, said Monday that moving the United Stated embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to the country’s capital — Jerusalem — will be a top priority for the Trump administration.

Conway explained to conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that not only did Trump make it clear that would be a goal of his as president before the election, but he has talked about it several times since being elected president.

“That is very big priority for this president-elect, Donald Trump,” she said. “He made it very clear during the campaign, Hugh, and as president-elect I’ve heard him repeat it several times privately, if not publicly.”

Most nations do not have their Israeli embassies in Jerusalem. Rather, most countries currently have their embassies in or around the city of Tel Aviv, as most countries still do not recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Israel declared Jerusalem to be their capital city in 1949 after Britain finally left the area. Still, much of the land in Eastern Jerusalem, including many holy sites, remains under contention between Israel and the Palestinians.

Many past U.S. presidents, including Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, expressed a desire to move the American embassy to Jerusalem, but never quite followed through on their promises — something Conway said she doesn’t quite understand.

“It is something that our friend in Israel, a great friend in the Middle East, would appreciate and something that a lot of Jewish-Americans have expressed their preference for,” she told Hewitt. “It is a great move. It is an easy move to do based on how much he talked about that in the debates and in the sound bites.”

While the Trump transition team has high praise for Israel, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made clear on Sunday that the praise goes both ways.

During an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” that aired Sunday, Netanyahu said that he knows Trump “very well” and has high hopes of a very close and successful relationship with the U.S. under Trump’s administration — something he hasn’t had under President Barack Obama.

You can listen to audio of Conway’s comments with Hewitt here.

It’s in the nature of nation-states, especially those with pretensions to global influence, to insinuate themselves into the domestic operations of their neighbors near and far, and Vladimir Putin’s Russia has not exactly disguised its ambitions. Just ask the beleaguered residents of Ukraine and the Baltic states. According to the Washington Post, the CIA has concluded with “high confidence” that Russian interference in this year’s presidential election — primarily the thousands of e-mails leaked from the Democratic National Committee and others — was designed to boost Donald Trump’s electoral prospects, not merely to shake Americans’ faith in the integrity of their electoral system. If true — and that’s a big if as of now — Russia is more brazen than one might have thought.

Of course, interfering in an election by exposing sensitive information, as Russia seems to have done, and, say, tampering with Diebold machines are two different things — a distinction that Hillary Clinton partisans have conveniently forgotten. Since the report broke late last week, eminences such as Paul Krugman have called the election “tainted,” high-profile commentators have gone so far as to suggest we have a “revote,” and the Clinton campaign has announced that it supports a demand from ten presidential electors (among them Nancy Pelosi’s daughter) for an intelligence briefing in advance of the Electoral College’s December 19 vote. Needless to say, this is all part of the ongoing effort to find excuses for Clinton’s loss other than Hillary Clinton. Kremlin machinations make for a helpful addition to the list that also includes Madisonian republicanism, James Comey, and “fake news.”

Amid so much panic, it’s worth recalling precisely who has been responsible for America’s foreign policy vis-à-vis Russia for the last eight years. The president-elect is not the one who oversaw the Russian “reset,” or who allowed Russia to gobble up Crimea and invade Ukraine with impunity, or who enabled Putin to prop up the Assad regime in Syria, or who permitted American diplomats to be harassed in Moscow. It’s not Donald Trump who has created a nearly global safe space for Russian adventurism. Additionally, it’s not President-elect Trump and his secretary of state who exchanged classified communiqués over an unsecured e-mail server, and it was John Podesta, not Kellyanne Conway, whose password was . . . “p@ssw0rd.” High-ranking Democrats were laxer about data security than the average Apple store, and now they’re stunned that a foreign power may have exploited those vulnerabilities.

As anyone who’s ever done business with mainland China knows, a fool and his money (or time, or expertise) are soon parted. Contracts aren’t honored, owed monies aren’t paid, a man’s word is not his bond and a contract isn’t worth the pixels it’s printed on. So good for Donald Trump for putting the Red Chinese in their place, and openly flirting with our allies, the Taiwanese, by re-opening the door to a two-China policy:

US president-elect Donald Trump has questioned whether Washington should continue its one-China policy if Beijing does not make concessions on trade and other issues.

“I don’t know why we have to be bound by a one-China policy unless we make a deal with China having to do with other things, including trade,” Trump told Fox News Sunday in response to a question on his taking a phone call from Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen, a move which broke with decades of US diplomatic tradition. The one-China policy recognises that Taiwan is part of China, but the US has remained ambiguous on the issue.

Besides trade, Trump said China was not cooperating with the US on its handling of the yuan, on North Korea, and tensions in the South China Sea.

Even a cursory look at Chinese and Taiwanese history since the end of World War II shows how immoral and short-sighted the bullying “one-China” policy has been. It’s all founded in the communists’ inferiority-complex insistence to be recognized as the legitimate government of China, and therefore of the island of Taiwan, when the Republic of China government fled after its defeat by Mao in 1949.

Regarding Trump’s comment on the one-China policy, Renmin University international relations professor Pang Zhongying said the administration may play up the Taiwan issue, which could cause friction with Beijing. “It’s likely that Trump will use Taiwan to demand concessions from Beijing. The situation will be tricky,” he said. CONTINUE AT SITE

The consensus in Israel is that the relationship between the Jewish state and the United States is going to improve in a Trump administration, says former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Zalman Shoval.

On a recent visit to Washington, D.C., Shoval told me that he believes Donald Trump and his cabinet picks so far have a more “realistic” view of the Middle East than President Obama, who from his first days in office, “perhaps before, believed it was his calling to fix once and for all, all matters between the U.S. and the Arab and Muslim worlds, as expressed in his Cairo speech. … This gives Trump in the hearts and minds of more than a few Israelis a head-start.”

Shoval said he believes the issue of a Palestinian state — the objective of U.S. foreign policy over several administrations — has become less concerning than the regional and international threat posed by a nuclear Iran. He likes recent statements by secretary of defense-designate Gen. James Mattis about the way forward in dealing with an unstable Iran, believing Mattis recognizes that as important as it is to defeat ISIS, the real threat in the Middle East is Iran.

It’s not only the nuclear deal that bothers Shoval, though he believes Iran will eventually have a bomb, unless it is stopped. It is also bothersome that Iran continues with its terrorist activities, subsidizing anti-American and anti-Israel groups around the world because radical mullahs think their god has ordered them to do so. That makes any kind of diplomatic agreement with nations Iran regards as “infidels” impossible.

Even when the battle for Mosul is over and victory has been declared over that ISIS stronghold, Shoval believes, “what it really will mean is that the Iranians and the Shia are going to be the real victors. They will continue their attempts to build a territorial corridor all the way to the Mediterranean along with Hezbollah, which is not only a threat to Israel, but also something the so-called moderate Arab states look at with a great deal of concern.”

In his rant at the Saban Forum denouncing Israel for the lack of peace, John Forbes Kerry claimed that the Islamic terrorists who run Fatah are pacifists. “We have a leader of a not-perfect entity, the Fatah, who is committed to nonviolence.”

Here’s a sample of Fatah’s commitment to non-violence courtesy of Palestinian Media Watch.

The Fatah song emphasizes that Fatah’s “oath” is to destroy Israel, saying “free the state from the hands of the Zionists,” and that this will be done through violence, terror and killing:

“Slice open the enemy’s chest, slice it”
“Shoot the Dashka (machine gun) and the cannon”
“The Fatah man… fires the mortar and the machine gun”
“Strike, mortar, strike!”

And just in case there’s any ambiguity…

“I have no love other than the love of the rifle.”
“The sound of the rifles gives us joy”
“Bullets! Sing for us”

That’s real commitment to non-violence. Maybe Kerry should be the one to be committed.

In his 2016 State of the Union address, President Obama summarized his achievements. That same night, the White House issued a press release touting Obama’s accomplishments.

Now that he will be leaving, how well did these initiatives listed in the press release actually work out?

“Securing the historic Paris climate agreement.”

The accord was never submitted to Congress as a treaty. It will be ignored by President-elect Trump.

“Achieving the Iran nuclear deal.”

That “deal” was another effort to circumvent the treaty-ratifying authority of Congress. It has green-lighted Iranian aggression, and it probably ensured nuclear proliferation. Iran’s violations will cause the new Trump administration to either scrap the accord or send it to Congress for certain rejection.

“Securing the Trans-Pacific Partnership.”

Even Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton came out against this failed initiative. It has little support in Congress or among the public. Opposition to the TTP helped fuel the Trump victory.

“Reopening Cuba.”

The recent Miami celebration of the death of Fidel Castro, and Trump’s victory in Florida, are testimonies to the one-sided deal’s unpopularity. The United States got little in return for the Castro brothers’ propaganda coup.

“Destroying ISIL” and “dismantling al Qaeda.”

We are at last making some progress against some of these “jayvee” teams, as Obama once described the Islamic State. Neither group has been dismantled or destroyed. Despite the death of Osama bin Laden, the widespread reach of radical Islam into Europe and the United States remains largely unchecked.

“Ending combat missions in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

The Afghan war rages on. The precipitous withdrawal of all U.S. peacekeepers in 2011 from a quiet Iraq helped sow chaos in the rest of the Middle East. We are now sending more troops back into Iraq.

“Closing Guantanamo Bay.” The recent Miami celebration of the death of Fidel Castro, and Trump’s victory in Florida, are testimonies to the one-sided deal’s unpopularity. The United States got little in return for the Castro brothers’ propaganda coup.

“Destroying ISIL” and “dismantling al Qaeda.”

We are at last making some progress against some of these “jayvee” teams, as Obama once described the Islamic State. Neither group has been dismantled or destroyed. Despite the death of Osama bin Laden, the widespread reach of radical Islam into Europe and the United States remains largely unchecked.

“Ending combat missions in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

The Afghan war rages on. The precipitous withdrawal of all U.S. peacekeepers in 2011 from a quiet Iraq helped sow chaos in the rest of the Middle East. We are now sending more troops back into Iraq.