RUTHFULLY YOURS

As one would expect, the Israeli media took great interest in Netanyahu’s speech at the United Nations Security Council. In the Arabic media, the situation is more complex: the morning after Netanyahu’s speech, lines from the speech were cited, even in banner headlines, but Netanyahu’s words – despite their importance to the listeners in Israel, Teheran and the White House – were seen in a wider context in the Arab media, because of the complexity of the way the global picture appears to the Arab world, which is naturally centered around itself.

The newspaper “al-Quds al-Arabi”, which is published in London, devoted its main headline of the morning following the speech to Israel’s options: “Netanyahu: We are ready to act to prevent Iran from having nuclear arms”. The newspaper also added later in the article: “The Iranian-American rapprochement worries the Gulf countries”. The connection that the newspaper makes between Netanyahu’s pronouncements about Israel’s willingness to act and the fears of the Gulf countries creates the impression that the last hope of the Gulf countries – since they have given up on the Americans – is that Netanyahu will deal with the Iranian nuclear program.

But Netanyahu’s words are put into the wider context of Israeli relations with the United states: indeed, the White House is leading a policy of appeasement and negotiations with Iran, but on the other hand, Obama’s statement that “all options are on the table and the United States will demand actions, not only words” is also emphasized. This statement is intended to calm the Israelis and tone down Netanyahu’s explicit threats toward Iran. Therefore, it is not at all clear if the United States will indeed support Israeli military action if such action is carried out without the prior agreement of the White House.

  http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4009/delegitimizing-judeo-christian-civilization The Koran and the Hadith both testify to the supposed deceit of the Jewish leaders, who allegedly hid the truth about Islam from their followers. According to the claim, if it were not for the ambition and disingenuous nature of these leaders, Islam would have been accepted by the mass of the Christian […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4006/iran-peace-dripping-nuclear-lamb They ignore the words of the Ayatollah Khamenei, who defined statesmanship as fraud and deceit hidden in smiles, and then sent Rouhani off to negotiate with the West. There are people who actually think that the Iranians, who spent so much on their nuclear bomb project, will actually give it up and abandon their […]

Forty years ago, Israel experienced the most devastating war in its modern history. Israel not only suffered its worst casualties during the Yom Kippur War, but actually came close to being destroyed with Defense Minister Moshe Dayan warning that “The Third Temple is falling.”

To understand the lessons of the Yom Kippur War, it is important to understand the three key elements that led to it. These are Muslim deceptiveness, American diplomatic pressure and Israeli complacency.

Egypt had lulled Israel into complacency by faking a crisis. Before the Yom Kippur War everyone “knew” that Egypt’s air force was defunct and that its military was no threat because of an arms dispute with the Soviet Union.

While there was a dispute, one of many, with the Arab powers demanding more and better weapons, the claims of weakness were a façade. During the Six-Day War, Israel had faced overwhelming odds. Now it seemed to be facing a weakened Egypt under a “moderate” leader whose ties with his Soviet allies appeared to be fraying.

Israel was warned to avoid any provocative responses to Egyptian military preparations or it would be considered the aggressor. A preemptive strike, the move that had won the Six Day War, was out of the question. Instead Israel could only react to overt aggression while letting an enemy force that was larger than it make its preparations for war and dictate the terms of battle.

Israel had beaten Egypt before. That meant that even though Egypt had twice as many soldiers and the combined Arab attack forces had nearly twice as many tanks, Israel was considered the stronger party. And just like today, it was expected to show restraint against a “weak” Muslim enemy.

That put Israel into a box that it has never managed to get out of. Since then, the Muslim side has learned to appear weaker to maintain freedom of action. Using terrorists as proxy armies under the cover of a phony Palestinian nationalism inflicted severe damage on Israel using a “weaker” enemy.

Before the Yom Kippur War, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had made it obvious that he wanted Israel to take a beating to score points with Muslim leaders.

In his book, King’s Counsel, Jack O’Connell, a close advisor to King Hussein of Jordan, describes Kissinger meeting with Egypt’s National Security Advisor and telling him that, “If you want us to intervene with Israel, you’ll have to create a crisis. We only deal in crisis management. You’ll have to ‘spill some blood.’”

Kissinger then tried to keep President Nixon out of the loop, delaying notifying him that the war had started and trying to keep him from returning to Washington. Nixon had told Kissinger from the start that he had to “squeeze the old woman” (Golda Meir) because “we can’t have a hundred million Arabs hating us.” But Kissinger was going far beyond anything Nixon wanted.

The arms shipment that helped stabilize the Israeli counterattack was delayed by Kissinger, but finally pushed through by Alexander Haig while Kissinger was still trying to calculate a “sweet spot” that would prevent Israel from either being destroyed or winning a major victory.

The goal was to beef up the self-esteem of Muslim countries which had lost wars to Israel while using the Jewish State as leverage to force them into a relationship with the United States.

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.