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June 2017

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

America Needs a Post-ISIS Strategy The U.S. should recognize Iran and Russia as adversaries—and that Iraq isn’t a friend.By John Bolton

By on June 29th, 2017

The headlines out of Syria are eye-catching: There are signs the Assad government may be planning another chemical attack. American pilots have struck forces threatening our allies and shot down a Syrian plane and Iranian-made drones. The probability of direct military confrontation between the U.S. and Russia has risen. Yet the coverage of these incidents and the tactical responses that have been suggested obscure the broader story: The slow-moving campaign against Islamic State is finally nearing its conclusion—yet major, long-range strategic issues remain unresolved.

The real issue isn’t tactical. It is instead the lack of American strategic thinking about the Middle East after Islamic State. Its defeat will leave a regional political vacuum that must be filled somehow. Instead of reflexively repeating President Obama’s errors, the Trump administration should undertake an “agonizing reappraisal,” in the style of John Foster Dulles, to avoid squandering the victory on the ground.

First, the U.S. ought to abandon or substantially reduce its military support for Iraq’s current government. Despite retaining a tripartite veneer of Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Shiite Arabs, the capital is dominated by Shiites loyal to Iran. Today Iraq resembles Eastern Europe in the late 1940s, as the Soviet anaconda tightened its hold. Extending Baghdad’s political and military control into areas retaken from ISIS simply advances Tehran’s power. This cannot be in America’s interest.

Iraq’s Kurds have de facto independence and are on the verge of declaring it de jure. They fight ISIS to facilitate the creation of a greater Kurdistan. Nonetheless, the Kurds, especially in Syria and Turkey, are hardly monolithic. Not all see the U.S. favorably. In Syria, Kurdish forces fighting ISIS are linked to the Marxist PKK in Turkey. They pose a real threat to Turkey’s territorial integrity, even if it may seem less troubling now that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s plans have turned so profoundly contrary to the secular, Western-oriented vision of Kemal Atatürk.

Second, the U.S. should press Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf monarchies for more troops and material assistance in fighting ISIS. America has carried too much of the burden for too long in trying to forge Syria’s opposition into an effective force. Yet even today the opposition could charitably be called “diverse.” It includes undeniably terrorist elements that are often hard to distinguish from the “moderates” the U.S. supports. Getting fresh contributions from Arab allies would rebalance the opposition, which is especially critical if the U.S. turns away, as it should, from reliance on the Iraqi forces dominated by Tehran.

Third, the Trump administration must take a clear-eyed view of Russia’s intervention. The Syrian mixing bowl is where confrontation between American and Russian forces looms. Why is Russia active in this conflict? Because it is aiding its allies: Syria’s President Bashar Assad and Iran’s ayatollahs. Undeniably, Russia is on the wrong side. But Mr. Obama, blind to reality, believed Washington and Moscow shared a common interest in easing the Assad regime out of power. The Trump administration’s new thinking should be oriented toward a clear objective: pushing back these Iranian and Russian gains.

Start with Iran. Tehran is trying to cement an arc of control from its own territory, through Baghdad-controlled Iraq and Mr. Assad’s Syria, to Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon. This would set the stage for the region’s next potential conflict: Iran’s Shiite coalition versus a Saudi-led Sunni alliance.

The U.S.-led coalition, enhanced as suggested above, needs to thwart Iran’s ambitions as ISIS falls. Securing increased forces and financial backing from the regional Arab governments is essential. Their stakes are as high as ours—despite the contretemps between Qatar and Saudi Arabia (and others)—but their participation has lagged. The U.S. has mistakenly filled the gap with Iraqi government forces and Shiite militias. CONTINUE AT SITE

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MEDIA Comments turned off

THE MEDIA WILL DO ANYTHING TO BASH TRUMP- AND NOW THEY’RE HURTING: MICHAEL GOODWIN

By on June 29th, 2017

It was many years ago, but the memory lingers of the first time I was embarrassed to be a journalist. It was a steamy summer afternoon and reporters and photographers were shoehorned into a small Manhattan apartment for a civic group’s announcement.

As we waited, a photographer wearing a “Press” card in his battered fedora picked up a bud vase from a table, pulled out the rose and drank the water in one gulp.

The hostess was horrified and shrieked, “What are you doing?” He looked at her as if she were nuts and said simply, “It’s hot in here and I’m thirsty.”

I laugh now at the outlandishness of the photographer’s behavior, but at the time I cringed and wondered: Do I really want to be a journalist and end up like that?

America should be so lucky now. Bad manners are the least of it.

In the sixth month of Donald Trump’s presidency, we are witnessing an unprecedented meltdown of much of the media. Standards have been tossed overboard in a frenzy to bring down the president.

Trump, like all presidents, deserves coverage that is skeptical and tough, but also fair. That’s not what he’s getting.

What started as bias against him has become a cancer that is consuming the best and brightest. In rough biblical justice, media attempts to destroy the president are boomeranging and leaving their reputations in tatters.

He accuses them of publishing fake news, and they respond with such blind hatred that they end up publishing fake news. That’ll show him.

CNN is suffering an especially bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, even trying to make a virtue of its hostility to the president. In doing so, executives conveniently confuse animus with professional skepticism, and cite growing audiences as proof of their good judgment.

The bottom line matters, and there is certainly an audience for hating Trump all the time. But facts and fairness separate major news organizations from any other business looking to make a buck, and a commitment to them creates credibility and public trust.

That’s how CNN sold itself for years — boring but trustworthy. Now it’s boring and untrustworthy.

For all its bravado, the network might be having doubts about its course. Its apology for and retraction of a story connecting a Trump associate to a Russia investment fund, and the resignation of three journalists involved, suggest the network fears it has lost control of its own agenda. It also issued a special edict barring all Russia coverage without approval from top bosses.
SEE ALSO
CNN faced $100M lawsuit over botched Russia story
CNN faced $100M lawsuit over botched Russia story

That’s hardly a solution to a problem that starts at the top. The secret recording of a CNN producer by James O’Keefe’s

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Vocational Ed, Reborn Making high-quality career training central to American schooling Steven Malanga

By on June 29th, 2017

At a dinner for Silicon Valley executives in early 2011, President Barack Obama asked Apple CEO Steve Jobs what it would take to bring iPhone manufacturing back to America. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” the typically blunt Apple cofounder told the president. Examining Jobs’s claim, the New York Times looked at Apple’s vast Chinese operations and found that workers there not only worked for less than Americans did; more of them were skilled. To oversee production and guide some 200,000 assembly-line workers, Apple, for instance, needed 8,700 industrial engineers—positions that required more than a high school diploma but less than a full college degree. While abundant in China, these kinds of employees are harder to find in the United States. “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need,” an unnamed Apple executive told the Times.

That’s a refrain that more and more American business executives are uttering these days. Even as politicians argue over how to create or keep “good jobs” in the U.S., a recent National Federation of Independent Businesses survey reported that the percentage of small businesses saying that they get no or few qualified applicants for available jobs has hit a 17-year high. Studies estimate that hundreds of thousands of positions in manufacturing firms went unfilled, even during the post-financial-crisis downturn and subsequent weak recovery, because of the lack of skilled workers. “Open manufacturing jobs are at an all-time high,” the former CEO of Siemens USA, the industrial giant, observed in December.

Much of the problem, say business leaders and employment experts, is an educational failure. Career and technical training in the U.S. hasn’t evolved to keep up with the transformation of the modern economy—with many schools even slashing funding for vocational education. Worse, parents, guidance counselors, and even politicians keep pushing students to enter four-year college programs that provide no clear paths to employment. Meantime, jobs in traditional blue-collar trades—from manufacturing to automobile repair—have grown more sophisticated and demanding. A huge gap between job seekers’ skills and employers’ needs has resulted.

The good news is that some visionary businesses, educators, and nonprofit funders are intensifying efforts to revamp and upgrade career education—twenty-first-century vocational education—in the United States. The obstacles to such efforts are many, including school officials’ reluctance to partner with industry and lingering prejudices against vocational schooling. But for the rising number of students participating in programs that tailor education to career goals—programs that emphasize work-related experience and teach to the high standards necessary for modern jobs—the payoff has been impressive. Now the challenge is to build on those successes to ignite a broader cultural change that makes high-quality career training central to American education.

Congress may have had good intentions in 1917 when it passed the Smith-Hughes National Vocational Education Act to promote vocational training in agriculture, industry, and trades. But the law, which required any student receiving trade-skill instruction with federal funds to spend at least half of his time in vocational training, tended to cut off vocational training from public school education. Career education eventually developed into something that teachers and guidance counselors encouraged students of low academic achievement to pursue. Though the robust post–World War II American economy provided many of these students with a solid middle-income living, vocational school became stigmatized. That stigmatization only intensified as American industrial jobs, battered by global competition and automation, started to disappear during the early 1980s, making four-year college seem for many the surest route to better jobs and higher earnings. Policymakers reinforced the message with subsidized student loans and other initiatives that sought to make college readily available to all.

Unfortunately, many students wound up enrolling in four-year colleges who weren’t suited for it, and the results haven’t been pretty. These days, only 55 percent of college students graduate within six years, leaving many with no degree and dismal job prospects. Meanwhile, student-loan debt has swelled to a monstrous $1.3 trillion.

Many of the students would have been better off receiving some kind of vocational training. Both as candidate and now as president, Donald Trump has tapped into widespread blue-collar discontent with his call to overhaul free-trade agreements to keep jobs from heading overseas. The reality, though, is that plenty of good-paying jobs are already available for properly trained workers. These positions typically fall into a category known as middle-skilled, meaning that they require some postsecondary education—for instance, a certified apprenticeship or a two-year associate’s degree from a community college—but not necessarily four years of university. These jobs are found in health care, information technology, manufacturing, and construction, among other fields. According to a 2013 Brookings Institution study, more than half of all jobs in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) do not demand four-year degrees—and they pay an average annual salary above $50,000. Further, while high-paying STEM jobs requiring advanced degrees do cluster in a few major urban centers, plentiful middle-skilled jobs—ranging from cybersecurity specialist and web designer to robotics engineer and industrial-engineer technician—are dispersed throughout most American metropolitan areas, making them within geographical reach of most Americans.

Yet many of those jobs go unfilled. A 2011 survey by the consulting firm Deloitte and the Advanced Manufacturing Institute found that more than eight out of ten manufacturing firms reported a shortage of high-skilled workers—at a time when unemployment nationwide was above 8 percent. (By one estimate, some 1.5 million manufacturing jobs that America has added since the 2008 recession have been for workers with more than a high school education.) Even though the U.S. is graduating some 3 million high school students every year, nearly half of whom will enter the job market instead of continuing school, an estimated 1 million middle-skilled jobs in all fields remain unfilled.

A 2011 survey found that more than eight out of ten manufacturing firms reported a shortage of high-skilled workers.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Neil Gorsuch’s Good Start In his short time on the Supreme Court, the new justice has already found his voice.John O. McGinnis

By on June 29th, 2017

Neil Gorsuch has spent only a fraction of a term as a Supreme Court justice, but few justices have had a more promising start. He has shown himself a careful textualist in reading statutes, a serious originalist in interpreting the Constitution, and an adherent of judicial restraint—and he has done all this with an engaging style that will allow him to reach over the heads of Court watchers and critics to the people. He seems an ideal schoolmaster for the American republic—a jurist whose every opinion is a lucid primer on the civics of our governance.

His first majority opinion in Henson v. Santander Consumer USA was a superb exercise in meticulous analysis of statutory text. The question at hand was whether a law designed to regulate debt collectors applied to a bank that had a bought a debt and tried to collect on it. By its terms, the statute covers those “who regularly collect debts . . . owed or due . . . another.” The bank argued that it was collecting the debt of its own, not of another, since it had purchased the debt. The debtor seized on the past tense of the term “owed” and contended that the debt was another’s because it had been previously “owed” to the party from which the bank bought it. Gorsuch showed the debtor’s argument did not follow from ordinary language because the past tense is often used to describe the present state of a thing, as when one refers to “burnt toast or a fallen branch.” Moreover, he observed that the word “due” was obviously meant only to cover debt that was currently due. Thus, Gorsuch held that to rule for the debtor “we would have to suppose Congress set two words cheek by jowl in the same phrase but meant them to speak to entirely different periods of time. All without leaving any clue.”

His first concurrence, written in Maslenjak v. United States, objected to the majority opinion in the case because it went further than necessary. Here, the issue was whether a statute that made it a crime to lie during a naturalization proceeding covered only lies that caused the government to grant citizenship. Gorsuch agreed with the majority that causation was required, and thus that the lower court must be reversed because of a jury instruction that did not require such proof. But he complained that the Court’s majority then proceeded to craft instructions on the contours of the jury instruction on causation. Gorsuch correctly argued that the better course was to permit lower courts to decide on these details after briefing on the precise questions. The essence of judicial restraint is judicial modesty: the Supreme Court should decide no more than is strictly necessary because it is likely to make mistakes on matters that are not directly before it.

Gorsuch also signaled that he will be an originalist and a strong ally of Justice Clarence Thomas. In Weaver v. Massachusetts, in which a majority of the Court assumed that the right to a public trial extends to jury selection, Gorsuch joined Thomas in demanding that that assumption be tested against the original understanding in a future case. In dissent from the Court’s refusal in Peruta v. California to take a case on the Second Amendment, Gorsuch again joined Thomas in arguing that the lower court had ignored the history surrounding the amendment, which shows that the right to bear arms includes the right to carry them publicly.

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FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

U.S. Syria Policy: Incoherent, Reckless By:Srdja Trifkovic

By on June 29th, 2017

The United States is in danger of descending into the Syrian quagmire. There are clear signs of mission creep devoid of logic or strategic rationale. It is not too late yet to step away from the brink. This would require swift action by President Donald Trump to rein in the war party before it takes America into yet another unwinnable and costly Middle Eastern war. And yet the President is said to have displayed relative indifference to the subject of Syria as the crisis escalated, focusing his attention instead on various domestic issues.

On June 27, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley tweeted that “[a]ny further attacks done to the people of Syria will be blamed on Assad, but also on Russia & Iran who support him killing his own people.” A day earlier the White House issued an ominous warning to Syria’s president against launching another chemical assault (“A heavy price will be paid”), and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson presented a similar message to Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov.

Such statements provide direct inducement to terrorists to stage false-flag attacks which would be used to invite large-scale U.S. intervention. For example, over 80 people died in a suspected chemical weapons attack in Khan Sheikhoun last April 4. The U.S. immediately blamed the incident on government forces, with no proof, and used it as pretext to launch the missile strike on the morning of 7 April against the Shayrat Airbase controlled by the Syrian government. This was the first unilateral military action by the United States targeting Syrian government forces since the civil war started in 2011. President Trump declared shortly thereafter that it is “in this vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons.”

Cui bono? The Syrian government has no motive to use chemical weapons against civilians. It is winning the war, contrary to most expectations. The jihadist opposition, by contrast, is desperate for America to come to its rescue. Early prospects looked bright after former President Barack Obama recklessly drew a “red line” in 2012. He declared that he would intervene if “we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.” The predictable result was a massive sarin nerve gas attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta in August 2013. As Seymour Hersh and others have subsequently established on the basis of documents obtained from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Nusra Front—the Syrian affiliate of al Qaeda—had access to the nerve agent and carried out the attack.

To his credit Obama refrained from ordering an all-out attack on Assad’s forces. His then-Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, was able to dissuade the President—according to a recently published book by the German Middle East expert Michael Lüders—after a British military laboratory established that the gas traces found at Ghouta were of a different chemical composition to the type Syrian army had. Furthermore, the attack took place while UN weapons inspectors were in Syria, on Assad’s invitation. He is an energetic, even ruthless man, but he is not stupid or insane.

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ANTI-SEMITISM, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Cyberwarfare Is On by Rachel Ehrenfeld

By on June 29th, 2017

The latest and most damaging attacks, which have supposedly originated in Ukraine, are said to be using a variant of the code “Eternal Blue,” which reportedly was stolen from the National Security Agency (NSA). This malware was allegedly designed to take control over or destroy computers running an older Microsoft Windows program without leaving any known detectable trace. Demand for a ransom of $300 in Bitcoins appears on the screen, but paying the ransom, as done with last month’s WannaCry attack does not guarantee the computer hard-drive was not corrupted. The special features of this cyber-weapon allow it to access all your information, including whatever has been stored on a cloud.

The ongoing attack, dubbed Petya or GoldenEye (apparently named after Ian Fleming’s inspired 1995 James Bond film of the same name), has shut down the computers of large domestic and international corporations around the world, including the second largest pharma company in the U.S., Merck, Russia’s largest oil company, Rosneft, Ukraine’s State power distribution company, airports, transportation companies, banks and hospitals.

GoldenEye is also wrecking havoc in the operations of the world’s biggest cargo and freight carrier company, the Danish Maersk Line, which operates 590 containers from 374 offices in around the world. “Last year Maersk shipped approximately 12 million containers around the globe, making 46,000 port calls in 343 ports in 121 countries.” Delays in arrival and departure of Maersk container ships are also disrupting ground transportation and have already upset delivery of products. The longer the computers are down, the greater the confusion and damages.

The more attacks, the more advice from cyber security companies could be found online – if you can turn on your computer. The more attacks, the larger the budgets allocated to future attacks. But as we are witnessing, again and again, the majority of cybersecurity advisors seem to be lagging behind, unable to prevent the next attack.

Golan Ben-Oni, the CIO at IDT, the New Jersey-based international telecommunication company seems to have been the first to identify the footprints of GoldeEye, the current cyber-weapon last April. “The World isn’t ready” for this kind of cyber attack, Mr. Ben-Oni warned in the New York Times. “Time is burning…This is really a war,” he said. And five days after the paper run his story, the world was hit with “GoldenEye.” Alas, the prevailing attitude, especially in the U.S. seems to reject the notion of preparing for the unknown.

The damage and cost of recovering from attacks, even less destructive the GoldenEye, are impossible to measure, if only because there are so many accumulative unknown and hidden elements that are difficult to track.

Ian Fleming, the former British naval intelligence officer, realized early on that the capability to launch modern warfare is not limited to nations, but that well-funded rogue individuals or groups have the potential to launch devastating attacks on whichever target they choose, the kind his hero, Bond, succeeded defeating.

Today’s cyber warfare, as Fleming predicted seven decades ago, is not limited to nations. Chinese, Russian, Iranian and North Korean hackers sometimes compete with and sometimes are joined by global criminal and terrorist groups. All these perpetrators are sometimes assisted by rogue insiders who are willing to sell out their nation’s or employer’s secrets.

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