RUTHFULLY YOURS

Continual warfare in the Middle East, a nuclear Iran, electromagnetic-pulse weapons, emerging pathogens, and terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction variously threaten the United States, some with catastrophe on a scale we have not experienced since the Civil War. Nevertheless, these are phenomena that bloom and fade, and that, with redirection and augmentation of resources we possess, we are equipped to face, given the wit and will to do so.

But underlying the surface chaos that dominates the news cycle are the currents that lead to world war. In governance by tweet, these are insufficiently addressed for being insufficiently immediate. And yet, more than anything else, how we approach the strength of the American military, the nuclear calculus, China, and Russia will determine the security, prosperity, honor, and at long range even the sovereignty and existence of this country.

THE AMERICAN WAY OF WAR
Upon our will to provide for defense, all else rests. Without it, even the most brilliant innovations and trenchant strategies will not suffice. In one form or another, the American way of war and of the deterrence of war has always been reliance on surplus. Even as we barely survived the winter of Valley Forge, we enjoyed immense and forgiving strategic depth, the 3,000-mile barrier of the Atlantic, and the great forests that would later give birth to the Navy. In the Civil War, the North’s burgeoning industrial and demographic powers meshed with the infancy of America’s technological ascendance to presage superiority in mass industrial — and then scientific — 20th-century warfare. The way we fight is that we do not stint. Subtract the monumental preparations, cripple the defense industrial base, and we will fail to deter wars that we will then go on to lose.

When the New York Times on Tuesday became the third major publication to run a report on Marco Rubio’s spending habits and financial struggles, the Rubio campaign didn’t quibble with any of the specifics.

Instead, his team did something unorthodox: They decided not to directly refute charges that the freshman senator is a reckless spender, has drowned in debt, and has engaged in questionable financial practices. Rubio spokesman Alex Conant suggested that they’re not even a liability but rather an asset, because the senator’s financial struggles, which he’s spoken about often on the campaign trail, make him a more relatable candidate. The attacks, they say, even make Rubio look like a victim of snot-nosed elites.

An Associated Press article on Saturday detailed Rubio’s sale of a Tallahassee home that had, for a time, fallen into foreclosure. He sold it in recent weeks for $18,000 less than the original purchase price. The AP headline: “Real Estate Dealings Have Hampered Rubio’s Finances.” Well, Conant says, Rubio can “relate to what middle-class Americans are going through.”

The fight against Islamic State needs more than 450 advisers.

President Obama all but admitted on Wednesday that his strategy against the Islamic State is failing by ordering an additional 450 U.S. military advisers to join the 3,500 already in Iraq. Alas, this looks like more of the half-hearted incrementalism that hasn’t worked so far.

The new troops won’t be used as spotters to call in airstrikes against Islamic State, much less join Iraqis at the front lines. Apache helicopters won’t provide air cover for Iraqi soldiers. There won’t be additional special forces to conduct raids against high-value targets. The highest ranking U.S. military officer will remain a mere two-star general.

Instead, the additional advisers will buttress Mr. Obama’s current strategy at the margins by putting Iraqi troops and Sunni tribesmen through a basic training course of between two and four weeks. This may be enough to show recruits how to march in drill and maintain and fire a AK-47.

Benjamin Balint’s column is a review of a book….Teaching Plato in Palestine By Carlos Fraenkel whose author is “a student of medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy who now teaches at McGill University in Montreal. Balint who lives in Israel has taught at ” Al Quds University whose president is Sari Nusseibeh. It is an affront to Israel and the fact that Bard University has a program there tells one all one needs to know about how Bard’s students are taught Middle Eastern History…..rsk

One afternoon last year, I returned home from a “great books” seminar that I taught to Palestinian students at Bard College’s liberal-arts program at Al Quds University in Jerusalem. I mentioned to a friend that the classroom discussion on Plato’s “Republic” had been interrupted by a militant rally staged outside our building by students from the Islamic Jihad faction shouting into loudspeakers. “Back from Syracuse?” he asked.

Professors and historians urged opposition to the College Board’s new curriculum for teaching AP U.S. History.

The memory hole, a creation of George Orwell’s novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” was a mechanism for separating a society’s disapproved ideas from its dominant ideas. The unfavored ideas disappeared, Orwell wrote, “on a current of warm air” into furnaces.

In the U.S., the memory-sorting machine may be the College Board’s final revision of the Advanced Placement examination for U.S. history, to be released later this summer.

The people responsible for the new AP curriculum really, really hate it when anyone says what they are doing to U.S. history is tendentious and destructive. In April, the nine authors of the “curriculum framework” published a relatively brief open letter to rebut “uninformed criticisms” of the revision.

A private school field trip to a sex shop in my hometown of Minneapolis, Minnesota, made national news recently. This scandal from America’s heartland is merely a harbinger of worse to come as the insanity of same-sex “marriage” (SSM) spreads across the world.

Starri Hedges, the director of the small Gaia Democratic School with 25 students (including several described by the school as transgender), took pupils as young as 11 to Smitten Kitten as a conclusion to the school’s sex education curriculum. “Everything deemed pornographic was off limits to the students, though sex toys and other products were visible,” Hedges later explained to reporters. “The sexual health aspect, there is no right age for all kids,” Hedges said, as some “students…are already going through puberty at 10 or 11.” “It was certainly the first time we have taken that kind of field trip and it will probably be our last, which I feel bad [about] because the kids had so much fun,” Hedges added.

The following letter (sent via iPhone) is from Marilyn T., a teacher. She has worked in the greater New York City area for many years and wants everyone to know how debased and crazy our classrooms have become. She sums it up this way: “NYC is lost. Totally.”

Every American should be keenly concerned about understanding and saving New York City, because your own city is probably using the same bad methods and heading toward the same level of failure.

The letter:

Rather than choose what works in our schools, we are often using poorly designed programs in order to meet some philosophical ideal. Cohesive Curriculum is now the buzz. Unfortunately too often our administration chooses weak programs because of the philosophical ideal rather than the efficacy of the program.

Presently the administration spent thousands on a reading program which throws sight-words and phonics at the students simultaneously. Mixing these two at equal strength can set students years behind because sight-word instruction confuses decoding instruction. Rather a seamless program that is phonetic, systematic and explicit is best.

In a stunning blow to Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has lost its parliamentary majority for the first time in over 13 years. By curtailing Erdogan’s power, the results of the general election held last Sunday (June 7) are likely – at long last – to have some positive repercussions for the Greater Middle East.

Erdogan had hoped to obtain a two-thirds legislative supermajority, which would enable him to push through a new constitution that would create an executive presidency and make him de iure, as well as de facto, Turkey’s autocrat with sweeping powers which would have made the U.S. presidency look weak by comparison. His by now openly Islamist AKP, which has governed Turkey since February 2002, went along with his plan. In view of Erdogan’s victory in the presidential election less than a year ago with 52 percent of the vote in the first round, and the AKP’s ability to steadily increase its share of the vote in three consecutive elections, the party’s top brass initially assumed the AKP would be able to gain the 400 seats which Erdogan boldly promised at the beginning of the campaign. Some weeks later he lowered his expectations to 330 seats, the number necessary to hold a referendum on the constitutional amendment he wanted. In the final fortnight of the campaign he remained confident that the AKP would get at least 276 seats needed to form a single-party government for the fourth time.

China continues transfer through its own territory, nuclear weapons technology involving both North Korea and Iran.

In April, North Korea launched a ballistic missile from a submerged platform. The North Korean underwater launch test was closely related to the further development of a missile-firing submarine capable of hitting the U.S. — “a first step,” according to Uzi Rubin, “in achieving a very serious and dangerous new military capability… it will take many years to build up the missile defenses, so we had better use the time wisely.”

Although the Chinese profess to be against nuclear proliferation, documented evidence illustrates just the opposite — as a means of asserting Chinese hegemony, complicating American security policy and undermining American influence in the region.

Unfortunately, no matter how attractive a strategy of diplomatically ending North Korea’s nuclear program might look, it is painfully at odds with China’s established record of supporting nuclear proliferation with such collapsed or rogue states as Iran, Syria, Pakistan, North Korea and Libya.

The Guardian has published, before this, praise for several North Korean films, including A Flower Girl. But North Korea is one of the world’s most repressive and dangerous states, governed by a regime that might even make the Ayatollahs of Iran hesitate. So why no letters in The Guardian boycotting their films? Oh, I forgot, nobody ever calls for a boycott of North Korea or any really repressive state.

The activists never march against Saudi Arabia, which has just confirmed the sentence of a blogger, Raif Badawi, to a flogging of 1000 lashes, “very harshly” as the flogging order read, as a punishment for writing thoughts such as, “My commitment is… to reject any oppression in the name of religion… a goal we will reach in a peaceful and law-abiding way.” They never march against Qatar, Iran, North Korea, China, Russia or Sudan.

To uphold human rights by supporting a murderous terrorist state, while condemning a democracy forced to defend itself against outside forces bent on its destruction — do any of these writers know what free speech or human rights are about, what democracy means or what international law consists of? One suspects not.