FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump’s Asia Trip Bolsters ‘America First’ The president projects American power after eight years of pathetic servility. Matthew Vadum

Posted By on November 13th, 2017

President Trump used his historic trip to Asian nations to bolster international resolve to combat North Korean nuclear adventurism and Islamic terrorism, as well as to promote his signature “America first” trade policies.

The tour was calculated to project American power after eight years of pathetic servility, weakness, and apology tours by President Obama, and, of course, to bolster Trump’s standing as a world leader, among other things. Despite some grumbling from Democrats like Nancy Pelosi who said the Chinese were likely laughing at Trump for treading lightly in China about that country’s trade imbalance with the U.S. after using strong rhetoric domestically, reviews have been generally positive. Trump was presidential, as pollsters like to say.

As he departed the U.S. on Nov. 3, the White House said Trump’s foreign trip, “the longest trip to Asia by an American president in more than a quarter century” to promote his counter-terrorism strategy “and reaffirm the importance of a free and open system where all independent nations are strong, sovereign, and free from the threats of terrorism, coercion, and nuclear war.”

In a nutshell, that is exactly what President Trump did overseas.

In Seoul, South Korea, Trump warned that “three of the largest aircraft carriers in the world” have been sent to the region in case North Korea refuses to make a deal on nuclear weapons. During his visit to Asia the media reported that the carriers USS Nimitz, USS Ronald Reagan, and USS Theodore Roosevelt, were conducting drills in the ocean near the Korean Peninsula.

“We have a nuclear submarine also positioned,” Trump said in a joint appearance with Republic of Korea President Moon Jae-in. “We have many things happening that we hope, we hope — in fact, I’ll go a step further, we hope to God we never have to use.”

In South Korea’s National Assembly, Trump offered a nuclear ultimatum of sorts to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, who has been taunting his neighbors and the U.S. by testing missiles in waters off Japan and not far from U.S. overseas territories.

“This is a very different administration than the United States has had in the past. Do not underestimate us. Do not try us. We will defend our common security, our shared prosperity, and our sacred liberty,” Trump said.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Cataclysm: Victor Davis Hanson’s The Second World Wars Hanson’s background as a classicist and historian of the ancient world enables him to place World War II in a broader historical context. By Mackubin Thomas Owens

Posted By on November 13th, 2017

I have always found Victor Davis Hanson to be one of the most insightful historians of warfare, whether he was specifically discussing ancient wars, as he did in The Western Way of War (1989) and A War Like No Other (2005), or addressing the broader question of Western civilization and war, as he did in Carnage and Culture (2001). In addition, he is a master of clear prose. His books are a pleasure to read.

Nonetheless, I was a little apprehensive when asked to review The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won (Basic, 720 pp., $40). I wondered whether perhaps this was a bridge too far, the case of a gifted historian’s addressing a topic beyond his acknowledged area of expertise (the Greeks and Romans). I had seen this before. Some years ago, I was invited to review a book on the American Civil War by the marvelous military historian John Keegan. To my great sorrow, this book by a man I greatly admired was dreadful. It pained me to write a negative review. In addition, I thought that the organization of the book — chapters focused on large issues rather than presenting a chronological narrative — might result in a disjointed account of the great struggle.

I needn’t have worried. The Second World Wars is an outstanding work of historical interpretation. It is not an operational history of the war: Hanson does not provide extended accounts of military campaigns. It focuses instead on the decisions about why, how, and where to fight the war, the diverse methods of warfare employed by the belligerents, and how the investments and strategies of each side led to victory or defeat.

Hanson observes that this great cataclysm of the 20th century began as a traditional series of border conflicts among European powers, the manifestations of an old story: better-prepared aggressive states’ launching surprise attacks against weaker neighbors. He writes that by the end of 1940, this familiar form of European fighting had achieved a “Caesarian or Napoleonic” scale, but within a year, these smaller conflicts had unexpectedly coalesced into a cataclysm for which the aggressors — the “Axis” of Germany, Italy, and Japan — were strategically and materially unprepared. “Advances in Western technology and industrialization, when married with both totalitarian zealotry and fully mobilized democratic states, also ensured that the expanded war would become lethal in a way never before seen.”

The title of the book reflects Hanson’s observations that this war was fought to an unprecedented degree in diverse geographic locales (Europe, Africa, South Asia, China, and the expanses of the Pacific Ocean) based on premises that seemed unrelated, and that it was fought in so many diverse and unfamiliar ways — not only on land and at sea but in the air and below the surface — while mobilizing the manpower and industrial might of modern states.

Hanson points to three events — Axis blunders all — that transformed the traditional European border wars of 1939–40 into the global conflict that we now call World War II or the Second World War: Germany’s invasion of its erstwhile partner, the Soviet Union, in June 1941; Japan’s attack on the United States in December 1941; and the subsequent decision of both Germany and Italy to declare war on the United States.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Reflections on Terrorism: What Causes? Whose Causes? By Angelo Codevilla part 3

Posted By on November 13th, 2017

Our national discourse has blinded itself to the fact that, although the world is full of terrorists, nearly all act on behalf of causes irrelevant to America. Nor do we try to explain how the causes of foreign states and their satellite groups have helped create the wave of terrorism that now washes over us. The following tries to provide that explanation.https://amgreatness.com/2017/11/11/reflections-on-terrorism-what-causes-whose-causes/

In a nutshell: Some states—for example, Cuba and the Soviet Union/Russia—use terrorism as an adjunct of foreign policy driven partly by ideology. For others, like Iran, terrorist groups such as Hezbollah are straightforward extensions of their apparatus. The Muslim world’s regimes use terrorism instead of open warfare. Politics-by-terrorism is the default mode of the Third World’s domestic politics as well. Saudi Arabia, the munificent mother house of Wahhabism, is in a particular category. Whenever states have used or fostered terrorist groups or motivated terrorists by ideology, they have set in motion people and events that have their own independent dynamics.

Some terrorism was explicitly crafted to go against America. The prime example is the Soviet Union’s Tricontinental Organization, which held its founding conference in Havana in 1965 under a banner of crossed submachine guns and was supported by a bureaucracy in Prague, which involved groups from around the world, including the then-aggressively secular Palestine Liberation Organization and some Islamist groups. The Latin American terrorist groups patronized by Cuba, including Colombia’s FARC, have notable anti-American roots.

But the anti-American focus of the Muslim world’s terrorism is a creature of circumstances, in which the United States itself has played a role. While Islam is foreign to and incompatible with America, there is nothing specifically anti-American about it. The Iranian revolution’s anti-American focus had nothing to do with Shia theology and everything with the fact that it was working against the American-allied Shah with the Soviet Union’s help.

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded to purge the Muslim world of Western influence. Its modern theorist, Sayyid Qutb, saw America as repugnant but he did not necessarily view it as an enemy. Aware of this, the State Department and CIA have bent U.S. policy backward to make friends with Islamists—all to no avail, because America continues to take part in maintaining that influence, sometimes by supporting its geopolitical allies, such as the Saudi monarchy. It was in support of the Saudis that the U.S. government stopped Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. After that, secular Saddam fostered all manner of terrorism against America, cleverly doing so in Islam’s name.

Willful Ignorance
The point here is the Muslim terrorists who were set in motion against America in Islam’s name on behalf of whomever and for whatever raison d’etat often merged religious reasons, secular reasons, and reasons of private interest seamlessly. The U.S. ruling class has never understood this. George W. Bush’s argument that U.S. troops in Iraq were fighting the terrorists there so we would not have to fight them here was willful ignorance.

Post-Saddam Iraq was overrun by terrorists, alright. But they were Sunni and Shia terrorists terrorizing to subdue each other’s communities. In 2003, they had nothing against America. The one out of four Iraqi Arabs who were Sunni, having ruled the Shia (and Kurds) brutally for their own benefit during and before the Saddam era, reacted to the Shia’s new assertiveness by trying to terrorize them into continuing their privileges.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Reflections on Terrorism: Idiots in Paradise By Angelo Codevilla

Posted By on November 13th, 2017

Every time some Muslim bombs, beheads, shoots, runs over, and otherwise terrorizes the likes of us in New York, Paris, London, Madrid, Boston, Barcelona, San Bernardino, or any other Western city, the Euro-American ruling class asks whether he acted in concert with international organizations. Decades ago, it asked about connections with states. It breathes a collective sigh of relief when, most of the time, it learns the terrorist had “self-radicalized,” mostly through the internet.https://amgreatness.com/2017/11/12/reflections-on-terrorism-idiots-in-paradise/

Thinking of such terrorists as “idiots”—unorganized, capable only of small harm—gives a false sense of safety. Why? Contemporary Euro-American society protects terrorists from those upon whom they prey, and provides all they need to kill and multiply. Given such a paradisiacal environment, terrorists need neither genius nor organization to wreak havoc. The idiots are not the “self-radicalized” terrorists, but the ones who think that their lack of obvious connections to international organizations makes us, somehow, less endangered.

To understand why the ubiquitous “terrorism-by-idiots” that we are now experiencing is inherently more dangerous than episodic acts on behalf of smart states, realize how this form of terrorism evolved from previous ones.

The Old, State-Sponsored Terror
When one state wages war on another by terrorism, it challenges the victim and focuses its collective response. Prudent practitioners of terrorism—the Soviet Union, Egypt under Gamal Nasser, Syria, contemporary Iran—have kept their sponsorship within the bounds of their Euro-American and Israeli victims’ tolerance. The Saudi government protects itself by touting opposition to terrorism, even as countless princelings are the world’s biggest financiers of violent Islamist ideology.

Over the past half-century, as the bounds of western societies’ tolerance stretched and the number of anti-Western terrorists multiplied, anti-Western terrorism acquired its own dynamic—what had been a tool of states, more or less calibrated to concrete state interests, morphed into a field of endeavor for groups ever more diverse and less dependent.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The U.S. Middle East Peace Plan? by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on November 13th, 2017

No American or European on the face of this earth could force a Palestinian leader to sign a peace treaty with Israel that would be rejected by an overwhelming majority of his people.

Trump’s “ultimate solution” may result in some Arab countries signing peace treaties with Israel. These countries anyway have no real conflict with Israel. Why should there not be peace between Israel and Kuwait? Why should there not be peace between Israel and Oman? Do any of the Arab countries have a territorial dispute with Israel? The only “problem” the Arab countries have with Israel is the one concerning the Palestinians.

The question remains: how will the Saudis and the rest of the international community respond to ongoing Palestinian rejectionism and intransigence?

Who said that Palestinians have no respect for Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Arab countries? They do.

Palestinians have respect for the money of their Arab brethren. The respect they lack is for the heads of the Arab states, and the regimes and royal families there.

It is important to take this into consideration in light of the growing talk about Saudi Arabia’s effort to help the Trump Administration market a comprehensive peace plan for the Middle East, the details of which remain beguilingly mysterious.

Last week, the Saudis unexpectedly summoned Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas to Riyadh for talks on Trump’s “ultimate solution” for the Israeli-Arab conflict, reportedly being promoted by Jared Kushner.

According to unconfirmed reports, the Saudis pressured Abbas to endorse the Trump Administration’s “peace plan.” Abbas was reportedly told that he had no choice but to accept the plan or resign. At this stage, it remains unclear how Abbas responded to the Saudi “ultimatum.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump Shines in Foreign Policy By James Lewis See note please

Posted By on November 13th, 2017

Alas, this is too optimistic…while Trump and Mattis are doing well, our homeland security is damaged by pockets of Isis enthusiasts, lack of a good immigration policy and a State Department that does not recognize the dangers of Radical Islam and jihad. They also ignore Africa and the spread of Islamic terror …..rsk
Remember ISIS? When Obama left office, it was still a growing network of eager sadistic killers, with secret sponsorship by Turkey, by some Gulf Arab regimes, the Wahhabi radicals, and by the Iranians. Today a lot of those boastful YouTube killers are just smoking splotches in the sand.

A single MOAB bomb was dropped on a mountain tunnel complex in Afghanistan, apparently a clean target with no “weddings” going on. The day afterwards the media said that 94 ISIS killers died, but that assumes that somebody had already cleaned up that collapsed tunnel structure; not a chance. So a hundred or more of the worst human beings since Hitler died in one big explosion.

Most important, the United States sent a strong signal of determination. Trump-Mattis announced a strategy of “surround and kill the enemy in place.” For mass-murdering criminals there will be no mercy.

The U.S. media just rolled its eyes and yawned, but the Muslim world got the message loud and clear. They’ve been wondering how long the United States, which was the winning power in the Cold War and the two world wars was going to come back to its senses. Well, the MOAB bombing wasn’t wish-washy, it wasn’t half-hearted and it didn’t signal cowardice and weakness. The United States was finally getting serious.

Obama would never even name the enemy, and most importantly, under Obama the United States lost the moral high ground against child-murdering sadists; we started to support Sunni killer cults in Syria.

If ISIS is just a minor nuisance, as Obama tried to tell us, that would make the genocides of history meaningless. But genocide is first-degree murder on an enormous scale. Murder with malice aforethought is punished for a good reason. The church killer in Tennessee the other day had a previous conviction for attacking a two-year-old baby, and he should have been put away for good. It would have saved many good and decent lives in Tennessee.

ISIS is just like that guy, except they think God wants them to kill babies.

Obama never, ever seemed to get that basic point of morality, nor did Hillary, nor did any other Democrat. Trump and Mattis obviously understand it, and Mattis has been subtly reminding Muslims that yes, they also have a moral code that prohibits baby killing (it depends on the religion of the baby). Since Mattis took over, DOD press releases constantly remind Muslims that baby-killing is the worst evil.

Obama seemed to take the side of the enemy, and Bush just called the whole thing “the War on Terror,” totally ignoring the monstrous doctrine that runs Al Qaida and ISIS and other jihad killer cults. American military who were on the ground in Syria and Afghanistan were tremendously demoralized by U.S. failure to cast this war in the proper moral terms. Mattis in particular emphasizes morality in war, a concept liberals can’t even imagine. You kill people because they are beyond evil. You don’t kill innocents. Somehow the Democrats can’t seem to remember that.

So Trump and Mattis have been effective against ISIS because they know they are doing the right thing. So do the rest of us. (But Hillary never seemed to get the point, either.)

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran builds military base in Syria, 30 miles from Israeli border

Posted By on November 13th, 2017

Iran’s military is establishing a permanent base inside Syria, just outside Damascus, BBC reported on Friday.

Citing a “Western intelligence source,” the report says that the Iranian military has taken over a compound at a site used by the Syrian army outside El-Kiswah, south of the Syrian capital and just a short 50 km from the border with Israel.

Satellite images of the purported site, commissioned by the BBC, appear to show construction activity at the site between January and October this year. The images show a series of two dozen large and low-rise buildings, likely for housing soldiers and vehicles.

The images do not reveal any signs of large or unconventional weaponry.

Independent analysis of the images says the facility is military in nature, but the BBC noted that it is impossible to independently verify the purpose of the site and the presence of the Iranian military.

Iran and its proxies have been supporting the Assad regime in the Syrian civil war and have deployed a force estimated at 500 Iranian army soldiers, 5,000 Hezbollah terrorists and several thousand guerrillas from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq.

As ISIS moves out, Iran moves in,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted last Sunday, following up on previous warnings.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Magnitude-7.3 Earthquake Jolts Iran-Iraq Border Epicenter sits about 19 miles outside the Iraqi city of Halabja

Posted By on November 13th, 2017

TEHRAN, Iran—A powerful earthquake shook the Iran-Iraq border late Sunday, killing at least 200 people and injuring nearly 1,700, state media there reported.

The government in Baghdad didn’t immediately disclose damage or casualties in Iraq.

The magnitude-7.3 quake was centered 19 miles outside the eastern Iraqi city of Halabja, according to the most recent measurements from the U.S. Geological Survey.

Iranian social media and news agencies showed images and videos of people fleeing their homes in the western Iranian province of Kermanshah.

The state-run IRNA news agency reported the increase in casualties early Monday and said rescue work was continuing overnight and would accelerate during the daytime.

The semiofficial ILNA news agency said at least 14 provinces in Iran had been affected by the earthquake.

Officials said schools in Kermanshah and Ilam provinces would be closed on Monday because of the tremor.

Iranian state TV also said Iraqi officials reported at least six people dead inside Iraq, along with more than 50 people injured in Sulaymaniyah province and about 150 in the city of Khanaquin.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

ObamaCare Tax Relief Killing the individual mandate can serve the cause of tax and health-care reform.

Posted By on November 13th, 2017

Republicans in Congress are plowing ahead on tax reform, and one obstacle is the complexity of Senate budget rules that limit how much taxes can be cut. The good news is that for once Washington’s fiscal fictions could be deployed to improve policy by repealing ObamaCare’s individual mandate as part of tax reform.

The Senate Finance Committee on Thursday released the details of its tax proposal, which includes a permanent 20% corporate rate and more. Senators Pat Toomey and Bob Corker cut a budget deal to allow for $1.5 trillion in net tax cuts over 10 years without accounting for faster economic growth (and more revenues) as a result of reform.

The trick is Senate procedure. The GOP is invoking a budget process that allows the party to pass the bill with 51 votes. But Republicans have to comply with the Senate’s Byrd Rule, which says the legislation can’t add to the deficit beyond the 10-year budget window starting in 2028. The Senate draft doesn’t meet this standard, so some parts of the bill may have to expire after a decade unless Republicans can fill the hole. It’s a shame this process pummels good policy.

Enter the idea of repealing ObamaCare’s individual mandate. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that dumping the mandate would “save” $338 billion over 10 years—and the savings continue in the following decades. The budget gnomes assume that if people are not forced to buy health insurance, fewer people will sign up for subsidies or Medicaid. The idea that millions of people will dump free health care is one oddity of CBO methods, but that’s an editorial for another day.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Individual Mandate Is The Worst Tax Ever It doesn’t even further the ACA’s core goal of helping people with pre-existing conditions get coverage. By Chris Pope

Posted By on November 13th, 2017

If you were deliberately trying to design the most arbitrary, painful and pointless tax possible, how would you go about it?

First, you would structure it to inflate the cost of an essential product. Then, you’d create exemptions so vast that only 5% of taxpayers were subject to it. You might even ensure that it hit people only when they were particularly vulnerable—like when they’d lost a job. Finally, you would use it to drive enrollment in entitlements, so that it increased the federal deficit by $338 billion.

In short, you would design something that looks very much like the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) has made headlines by suggesting that tax reform should include a repeal of the mandate—an annual tax of between $695 and $13,380 imposed on 6.5 million American households. In defense of the mandate, ObamaCare’s defenders have resorted to hyperbole and scare-mongering, probably because the penalty is so difficult to justify on the merits.

In most insurance markets, people seek coverage in proportion to the risk they expect to face, and insurers receive payment in proportion to the cost they expect to cover. This approach prevailed for nongroup health insurance in most states prior to ObamaCare. It produced stable markets with premiums of less than half what currently prevails on the exchanges, but often failed to ensure affordable coverage for individuals with major chronic conditions.

The ACA has reversed this situation, providing affordable coverage to individuals with pre-existing conditions, but yielding plans that are priced well above the needs of most Americans. The average annual premium was $5,712 in 2016, while median health-care spending was only $709 in 2014.

The individual mandate was intended to prevent the bulk of individuals from fleeing this unappealing arrangement. Its advocates have argued that the mandate reduces premiums on the exchanges, but this is only true to the extent that it pushes more cost-effective alternatives out of reach.

As a newly released Manhattan Institute Issue Brief demonstrates, the mandate is superfluous to the ACA’s core guarantee of affordable coverage for individuals with pre-existing conditions. In fact, it is subject to so many exemptions that recent studies have failed to discern any impact of the mandate on the proportion of Americans who are uninsured.

The ACA’s guarantee of affordable insurance to low-income individuals and those with pre-existing conditions is due entirely to the law’s subsidy provisions. These expand automatically to whatever level insurers need in order to bring a plan to market, which limits premiums and out-of-pocket costs as a share of income. This principle holds regardless of the ratio of healthy to sick enrollees in the exchange.CONTINUE AT SITE