RUTHFULLY YOURS

A ‘third way’ approach to state-building gets a one-way ticket to trouble.

Salam Fayyad was once seen as a bright hope for peace in the Middle East. By the time he became prime minister of the Palestinian Authority in 2007, Mr. Fayyad had already earned credentials in the West as a World Bank technocrat. During his six years as a reformist prime minister, per capita GDP among Palestinians in the West Bank rose by 222%. Perceptions of Palestinian government corruption, as measured by Transparency International, also dropped dramatically.

No wonder David Welch, a former assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs, once called Mr. Fayyad’s administration “the best Palestinian Authority government in history.” President Obama praised him as “a true partner.”

In 2013 Mr. Fayyad resigned as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority after a series of policy disagreements with PA President Mahmoud Abbas—who is now serving the 11th year of his elected four-year term. Mr. Fayyad’s anticorruption crusade did not last beyond his tenure. But he has continued to press for reform. That may help explain why he is in legal trouble today, over a development organization he founded.

In “The Music Man,” Meredith Willson’s great musical, super salesman Harold Hill talks the townspeople of River City, Iowa, into buying trombones, bassoons and drums to form a boys’ band. Then, after the people of River City have committed belief and money to him, he’ll skip town.

Donald Trump is America’s Music Man, and the United States is his River City. Unlike the original, the Trump version isn’t going to have a happy ending.

Like Professor Harold Hill, Donald Trump must know it’s all a fabulous scam. How else to explain that on June 4—just before his presidential announcement—the Donald came to Mason City, Iowa, Meredith Willson’s hometown and the model for River City. And where did Donald Trump address Mason City’s locals? In Music Man Square.

Donations to family foundation increased after secretary of state’s involvement in tax case

A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts.

If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court.

Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS, an outcome that drew criticism from some lawmakers who wanted a more extensive crackdown.

As the majority-European-minority-African experiment that made America disappears into a Third World maelstrom of population-replacement and culture-eradication, the question, as we approach 2016, is whether there remains enough patriotism — love of country that is also openly declarable — to try to save it.

There is, alas, little good news. Yes, Trump, the man with the mouth who has at least blurted out the all-important message about borders, illegal aliens and sovereignty, has been surging on that message. This is evidence of rebellion in the land, and rebellion is good. It comes from a vestigial survival instinct; also from the bitter life experience that the GOP Establishment is a serial abuser of good conservatives and always will be.

Still, we have yet to hear Trump “clarify” his position on amnesty, which he appears to favor.

Venona intercepts indicate that Soviet GRU officer/State Department official Alger Hiss was awarded the USSR Order of the Red Star (above) after the Yalta conference.

—Readers of the often-perverse National Review will have noticed that FDR biographer and convicted felon Conrad Black has opened an extended firefight with Angelo Codevilla over Codevilla’s review-essay in the Claremont Review of Books about Henry Kissinger’s recent book.

Codevilla notes:

My review’s one and only reference to Conrad Black was to quote his praise of Kissinger’s book: “brilliantly conceived and executed . . . even by Henry Kissinger’s very high standards.” Black construes this as an “attack” on him, of “extreme belligerence.” Who am I to disagree?

Who, indeed. But such galactic departures from reality are quite routine for Black.

The “War on Terror” continues 14 years after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. Looking back further, it is more than 22 years since terrorists from the Middle East carried out deadly terror attacks at CIA Headquarters in Virginia (January 25, 1993) and the World Trade Center, in New York City, just one month later (February 26, 1993).
Make no mistake. We are at war with a vicious and insidious enemy that wants nothing less than the utter destruction of our nation and our way of life. They have committed unthinkable atrocities and undoubtedly will continue to slaughter, by the most barbaric means possible, anyone who stands in the way of their goals.

The purpose of my article is to ask a derivative of the fundamental question that was posed repeatedly in the 1976 movie thriller, Marathon Man: “Is it safe?” We must now ask, “Are we safe?” It begs the question that has a direct bearing on our security: “Have our leaders learned the lessons that history should have taught them?”

A remarkable four minutes of video has emerged from Secretary of State Kerry’s testimony before the Senate. It shows the Secretary squirming under the questioning of Senator Cotton on what the agile Arkansan calls the “two secret side deals” between the International Atomic Energy Agency and Iran. They are related to inspections of the Iranian regime. The video shows the two leaders of the American negotiating team — Mr. Kerry and Secretary Moniz of the energy department — stating that they don’t know who, if anyone, has read these two secret agreements.

This is a choice moment for those who remember the first of President Wilson’s “Fourteen Points.” Those were the Fourteen Points for ending World War One. The Fourteenth was the infamous League of Nations, the idea of a world government. But the First Point, the number one point of principle on which all foreign policy in the age of democracy was going to rest, the opening article in the drive that was eventually to spawn the United Nations, this number one article was “open covenants.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu learned that U.S. Secretary of State will be making a trip to the Middle East to sell the Iran deal, but is skipping Israel.

Kerry will be visiting Egypt and Qatar and other Gulf State representatives, but won’t stop in the Jewish State, which until recently was considered America’s closest ally in the Middle East.

The Prime Minister’s response to the snub was, “Really, Kerry has no reason to come here.”

Expanding upon that response, Netanyahu said of the Iran deal, “This deal has nothing to do with us. We are not influenced by this deal at all. We aren’t partners at the table, we are a meal on the menu.”

Dictators who receive help from America are getting away without any pressure to reform.

Forty years ago this week the Helsinki Final Act, a diplomatic masterpiece, showed how it could be done. It helped to defuse the Cold War, appeared to give the Soviet bloc the security it craved but, by setting up a mechanism to scrutinise human rights, gave legitimacy to dissident groups who started to subvert communism from within. “If you open that Pandora’s Box, you never know what Trojan’ horses will jump out,” as the former foreign secretary Ernie Bevin once had it.

Phoenix, the name of a cabaret in post-war Berlin, serves additional duty as a metaphor for the protagonist’s rebirth and for the beginning of Germany’s national resurgence. Nina Hoss plays Nelly, a Jewish concentration camp survivor whose face was shot and shattered and whose post-war plastic surgery has rendered her difficult to recognize. This is a plot point that pivots the movie’s action and character revelations and unfortunately, it’s too unbelievable to sustain the set-up. Nelly reconnects with her husband who, believing her dead, doesn’t recognize her, even though her face shows all the surgical bruises and scars that suggest exactly what has happened to her. He hatches a scheme to dress and style her as if she were the “real” Nelly so that the two of them can claim the money owed her by the German government. During this crash coaching, it becomes clear that this woman has not only uncannily mastered Nelly’s handwriting but miraculously, fits into Nelly’s shoes. This last Cinderella factor is too over the top for us to continue suspending credulity in the husband’s failure to see the obvious. Imagine the prince, upon seeing Cinderella’s foot glide effortlessly into the glass slipper, simply scratching his head and saying “that’s strange.” It takes the most obvious symbol of the camps for the husband to have his “aha” moment which comes at the movie’s end.