RUTHFULLY YOURS

History teaches us that nations must always respond vigorously to an enemy’s challenge, a lesson the U.S. should remember in Syria.

President Obama, responding to widespread criticisms that his handling of the Syrian chemical weapons crisis was clumsy and ad hoc, said, “I’m less concerned about style points, I’m much more concerned about getting the policy right.” For the president and many politicians in both parties, problems, whether domestic or foreign, are about policy solutions; perceptions of the policy or its implementation, what Obama calls “style,” are irrelevant. As he said about Syria, “The chemical weapons issue is a problem. I want that problem dealt with.”

This idea that foreign policy crises are about finding and applying the right objective formula in order to solve problems, just as one does in engineering or mathematics, is a peculiarly modern prejudice. For most of history, those who thought about the rivalries and conflicts among great powers knew that the subjective perceptions that states and leaders develop about one another, and the prestige they granted or refused, rational or not, are critically important factors in the relations among states and must be taken into account during a crisis. And the most important perception that creates prestige is of a state’s power and willingness to use it.

The great Athenian historian of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides, recognized this critical factor in state relations. In his history, he has an Athenian ambassador catalogue the causes of state behavior towards rivals and enemies: fear, honor, and interest. Fear we can understand, and “interest,” in the sense of material or territorial gains, will not surprise us. “Honor,” however, we might dismiss as an archaic relic from our less enlightened past, when people lacked knowledge of the psychological, sociological, ideological, and environmental springs of behavior that we believe we possess.

On Saturday night a Palestinian terrorist snuck into the Israeli community of Psagot, north of Jerusalem and near Ramallah, and either shot or stabbed a nine-year-old girl, Noam Glick. Noam was rushed to hospital in Jerusalem and, fortunately, is in stable condition.

The terrorist, however, melted back into the Palestinian population and has not yet been apprehended, and the attack was part of a pattern.

In the Jewish year that ended on the Rosh Hashanah holiday on September 4, a single Israeli was killed in a Palestinian terror attack, though there were scores of potentially lethal rock- and firebomb-throwing incidents and kidnapping attempts, as well as some thwarted suicide bombings.

In the new year, however, two Israelis have already been killed by Palestinian terror: 20-year-old Sgt. Tomer Hazan on September 20 and 20-year-old St.-Sgt. Maj. Gal (Gabriel) Kobi on September 22.

While Hazan’s killer was quickly apprehended, the sniper whose bullet killed Kobi is yet to be found.

Meanwhile it was reported on Friday that terror attacks of all kinds rose “dramatically” in September, with a total of 133 (including, again, large numbers of rock- and firebomb-throwing incidents) compared to 68 in August.

It was last July 29 that the new round of ostensible Israeli-Palestinian peace talks was launched in Washington. It took months of heavy pressure on both sides by the new secretary of state, John Kerry, to reach that outcome.

The clincher was U.S. and Israeli acquiescence to the demand of Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas that the talks be accompanied by Israel’s phased release of 104 “pre-Oslo” (pre-1993) terrorists, including convicted murderers of men, women, and children. The first batch of 26 were released on August 13.

JUST BECAUSE IT’S PHONY, DOESN’T MEAN IT CAN’T BE MADE PHONIER

Way back in January, when it emerged that Beyoncé had treated us to the first ever lip-synched national anthem at a presidential inauguration, I suggested in this space that this strange pseudo-performance embodied the decay of America’s political institutions from the real thing into mere simulacrum. But that applies to government “crises,” too — such as the Obamacare “rollout,” the debt “ceiling,” and the federal “shutdown,” to name only the three current railroad tracks to which the virtuous damsel of Big Government has been simultaneously tied by evil mustache-twirling Republicans.

This week’s “shutdown” of government, for example, suffers (at least for those of us curious to see it reduced to Somali levels) from the awkward fact that the overwhelming majority of the government is not shut down at all. Indeed, much of it cannot be shut down. Which is the real problem facing America. “Mandatory spending” (Social Security, Medicare, et al.) is authorized in perpetuity — or, at any rate, until total societal collapse. If you throw in the interest payments on the debt, that means two-thirds of the federal budget is beyond the control of Congress’s so-called federal budget process. That’s why you’re reading government “shutdown” stories about the PandaCam at the Washington Zoo and the First Lady’s ghost-Tweeters being furloughed.

Nevertheless, just because it’s a phony crisis doesn’t mean it can’t be made even phonier. The perfect symbol of the shutdown-simulacrum so far has been the World War II Memorial. This is an open-air facility on the National Mall — that’s to say, an area of grass with a monument at the center. By comparison with, say, the IRS, the National Parks Service is not usually one of the more controversial government agencies. But, come “shutdown,” they’re reborn as the shock troops of the punitive bureaucracy. Thus, they decided to close down an unfenced open-air site — which oddly enough requires more personnel to shut than it would to keep it open.

Today, the heavy burden of taxes is clearly a major drag on our country’s economy. The U.S. now has the highest corporate tax rates in the industrialized world. In 1913, the total number of pages in the tax code was only 400. Today, it’s 73,954.

Amid all the attention paid to the government shutdown — more of a “slimdown,” as 83 percent of the government remains open — few people noticed that last Friday, October 4, marked the 100th anniversary of the federal income tax. The size and intrusiveness of the federal government that is at the heart of today’s shutdown would never have been possible without the income tax.

For a century and a quarter, the United States avoided an income tax. Thomas Jefferson warned against such “internal” taxes, saying that under the British they had “filled our land with officers and opened our doors to their intrusions.” Until the early 20th century, a small federal government relied on import duties and taxes on alcohol and tobacco for most of its revenue.

Congress passed an income tax to fund the Civil War in 1862 but allowed it to expire a decade later. In 1894, it passed another — a 2 percent flat-rate income tax that kicked in at today’s equivalent of $110,000. It was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court because it was not apportioned among the states, as the U.S. Constitution required.

Then, during the Progressive era, supporters of the tax passed the 16th Amendment, giving Congress the power to tax income, and in 1913 Congress approved a tax with a series of rates ranging from 2 to 7 percent. But high personal exemptions meant that fewer than one out of every 50 Americans owed any tax at all.

The Egyptian military’s recent removal from office of Egyptian President Mohammad Morsi “was not a coup,” judged the former United States Air Force lieutenant colonel and Middle East expert Rick Francona, but rather the “people rising up.” Francona spoke at Washington, DC’s National Press Club during an October 1, 2013, panel featuring national security experts who had just completed a three-day visit on behalf of the Westminster Institute. The panel expressed dismay that the United States was not properly responding to developments in country described by Westminster Institute executive director Katherine Gorka as “pivotal” to American interests in the region.

Retired United States Army Major General Paul E. Vallely referenced a popular Egyptian understanding of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood (MB) government’s fall as a “second revolution” following the “first revolution” ousting Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. Katherine’s husband, counterinsurgency expert Sebastian Gorka, noted that a petition presented to Morsi calling for early elections had gathered 22 million signatures. Subsequently an estimated 33 million had taken to the streets to call for Morsi’s removal in early July 2013 in a country of 85 million.

Vallely’s army colleague, the former colonel and military commentator Ken Allard, discussed a popular Egyptian perception of MB as “terrorists” given their treatment of women and minorities. Francona in particular cited anti-Christian violence by MB supporters that destroyed 1,000 Christian homes after Morsi fell. Allard likewise discussed the delegation’s meeting with the Coptic Church’s Pope Tawadros II, a man “who watched his churches burn.” Many Egyptians additionally felt that the MB in power merely “governed for themselves,” Sebastian Gorka related.

As a result, the Egyptian military commander General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi spoke of a “civil war” absent Morsi’s removal in a meeting with Gorka and the other panelists. This was particularly true given that there was “no impeachment vehicle” in the old Egyptian constitution, as Vallely noted, a provision now contemplated for a new constitution. The “Egyptians are more united in” supporting the military’s actions “than we might think,” Francona judged. Everyone with whom the delegation spoke similarly surprised Sebastian Gorka because they “sounded like they were coordinating their message” but were not.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obamas-disarmed-diplomacy?f=puball

In the past month, Americans have been led to believe that President Obama has achieved diplomatic breakthroughs with Syria and Iran, thereby avoiding looming conflicts with those two rogue states. If the result being promised is not exactly “peace in our time,” the White House certainly is encouraging the notion that its robust threats of military action against these allied enemies brought them to the negotiating table.

Regrettably, this proposition does not stand up to scrutiny. Far from a Reaganesque policy of “peace through strength” and the practice of what historian Henry Nau calls “armed diplomacy” that it has made successful in the past, Team Obama is engaged in disarmed diplomacy. The results will, predictably, be disappointing and probably quite dangerous.

For example, with help from his Russian protectors, Syrian dictator Bashir Assad has now bought himself protection against any strike the United States might still be capable of mounting by promising to eliminate his chemical stockpiles. No amount of officially professed U.S. “skepticism” or watered-down UN resolutions can obscure an unhappy fact: Assad’s regime is not owning up to all of its arsenal of weapons of mass destruction – which includes not only more chemical weapons than it has declared, but untold quantities of deadly biological weapons, as well.
Meanwhile, as international inspectors – not a few of whom will be Russians who can be expected to run interference for their client – prepare for the hazardous, if not impossible, job of finding and eliminating all of what the Syrians have squirreled away, Assad will have a free hand to fight his Islamist and other enemies at home with conventional means. Obama’s arming of Assad’s foes, and ours, inside Syria will probably simply ensure that civil war goes murderously on for quite some time.

The recent revelation that New York City mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio supported Nicaragua’s Sandinista military government in the 1980s is a reminder of the high cost Latin America pays for being the playground of the American left. It should also further enlighten New Yorkers as to the politics of the man who is the front runner in the race.

The ideas of the hard left don’t sell very well in the U.S., so collectivists take them south of the Rio Grande where they believe the ground is more fertile. Their arrogant paternalism ignores the rights of the people they pretend to redeem.

By 1988, when Mr. de Blasio went to Nicaragua to do social work in support of the Marxist revolutionary cause, the Sandinistas had been running the country for almost a decade. Their brutality was well-documented. Mr. de Blasio, who also did fundraising for supporters of the military government, either didn’t know about Sandinista repression or he didn’t care.

It’s hard to believe it was the former. My requests for comment from his campaign went unanswered. In an interview with a New York radio station last month, however, some hints emerged when he was asked about his decision to honeymoon in Cuba in 1994. Mr. de Blasio said that he doesn’t excuse the “undemocratic” regime, but he also argued that it has accomplished “some good things” like “in health care.”

Let’s pretend that’s not generations-old Castro propaganda—even though every independent report from the island describes a health-care system that has completely collapsed and cannot even provide basics like bandages and aspirin. The larger problem is that Mr. de Blasio’s remarks suggest that there is a trade-off between freedom and doctor visits. Should jailing and torturing dissidents, stealing property and terrorizing generations of Cubans be considered less horrific because they have annual physicals? Apparently.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304626104579119123262765740.html?mod=opinion_newsreel
The Path to Defeating the al-Shabaab Terrorists
The jihadists who struck my country should be fought militarily but also financially. Let’s work together.

The weekend brought encouraging news in the international fight against Islamic terrorism, news that was particularly welcome in Kenya, the country I lead. American commandos in Libya seized Abu Anas, a suspect in the 1998 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. In Somalia, U.S. Navy SEALs targeted a senior leader of al-Shabaab, the al Qaeda-affiliated group responsible for the horrific recent attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi. The raid in Somalia was reportedly abandoned, to avoid harming civilians, before the al-Shabaab leader could be captured. Some al-Shabaab members were killed, but it wasn’t immediately clear whether the targeted senior leader was among the casualties.

All of us who strive to fight Islamic militancy should applaud these efforts. In particular, it is clear after the Westgate attack that the world must unite as never before in the fight against the spread of violence by al-Shabaab outside Somalia.

Before the Islamist militants’ attack in Nairobi, the Kenyan military along with our partners in an African Union force last year successfully removed al-Shabaab from Kismayo, a coastal town in Somalia, allowing the democratically elected Somali government to take control. This port was a crucial source of money for the terrorists, who extorted legitimate traders. Yet al-Shabaab was still able to strike Nairobi, the business heart of East Africa, where Africans, Americans, Europeans and Asians live side by side. Al-Shabaab appears to be shifting from a strategy of insurgency to sporadic terrorist attacks both within and beyond Somalia’s borders.

As I vowed last week in the wake of the attack, Kenyan troops will remain in Somalia to defend the government until al-Shabaab no longer poses a threat to its future and to regional security. But countries in Africa and beyond who might be targeted by al-Shabaab’s exported terrorism must consider what else should be done to combat the group. Why do young men and women join al-Shabaab and its wider networks? How can we cut off funding for this terror organization?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304906704579113830197914224.html?mod=opinion_newsreel The Supreme Court re-opens for business this week, and one of its first cases is a splendid opportunity to restore the First Amendment as a bulwark of free political speech. The result in McCutcheon v. FEC will likely hang on whether Chief Justice John Roberts has the courage of his constitutional convictions and is […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324110404578630561814823892.html?mod=opinion_newsreel THE SUPREME COURT WILL RULE: On Oct. 16, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on a claim brought by husband and wife Brian and Kerri Kaley. The Kaleys are asking the high court to answer a serious and hotly contested question in the federal criminal justice system: Does the Constitution allow federal prosecutors […]