RUTHFULLY YOURS

The most egregious case of fecklessness has been on Syria. Doubts about American dependability were raised far and wide.

American foreign policy is in troubling disarray. The result is unwelcome news for the world, which largely depends upon the United States to promote order in the absence of any other country able and willing to do so. And it is bad for the U.S., which cannot insulate itself from the world.

The concept that should inform American foreign policy is one that the Obama administration proposed in its first term: the pivot or rebalancing toward Asia, with decreasing emphasis on the Middle East. What has been missing is the commitment and discipline to implement this change in policy. President Obama’s four-country Asian tour in recent days was a start, but it hardly made up for years of paying little heed to his own professed foreign-policy goals.

This judgment may appear odd—at first glance the Obama administration does seem to have been moving away from the Middle East. U.S. combat forces are no longer in Iraq, and the number of U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan (now below 40,000) will soon be 10,000 or fewer. Yet the administration continues to articulate ambitious political goals in the region. The default U.S. policy option in the Middle East seems to be regime change, consisting of repeated calls for authoritarian leaders to leave power. First it was Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, then Moammar Gadhafi in Libya, followed by Bashar Assad in Syria.

Yet history shows that ousting leaders can be difficult, and even when it is not, it can be extremely hard to bring about a stable, alternative authority that is better for American preferences. The result is that the U.S. often finds itself with an uncomfortable choice: Either it must back off its declared goals, which makes America look weak and encourages widespread defiance, or it has to make good on its aims, which requires enormous investments in blood, treasure and time.

The Obama administration has largely opted for the former, i.e., feckless approach. The most egregious case is Syria, where the president and others declared that “Assad must go” only to do little to bring about his departure. Military support of opposition elements judged to be acceptable has been minimal. Worse, President Obama avoided using force in the wake of clear chemical-weapons use by the Syrian government, a decision that raised doubts far and wide about American dependability and damaged what little confidence and potential the non-jihadist opposition possessed. It is only a matter of time before the U.S. will likely have to swallow the bitter pill of tolerating Assad while supporting acceptable opposition elements against the jihadists.

Everyone who has followed this story has always suspected that blaming the YouTube video was a political ploy. It was obvious, actually, just as it remains obvious why Hillary Clinton did everything she possibly could to keep any notion of accountability for her own decisions at arm’s length. That’s political, too. She has a crown to run for in 2016. It won’t do to have her negligence that resulted in four dead Americans become a speedbump on her path to power. Why let a little thing like incompetence stand in the way of ambition?

Emails sent by senior White House adviser Ben Rhodes to other top administration officials reveal an effort to insulate President Barack Obama from the attacks that killed four Americans.

Rhodes sent this email to top White House officials such as David Plouffe and Jay Carney just a day before National Security Adviser Susan Rice made her infamous Sunday news show appearances to discuss the attack.

The “goal,” according to these emails, was “to underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure or policy.”

The “goal,” therefore, was to lie convincingly enough to get the president re-elected. It takes a special coldness to tell that lie with the bodies of the dead in coffins behind you. Hillary Clinton managed that without a trace of a conscience to slow her down.

Rice came under fierce criticism following her appearances on television after she adhered to these talking points and blamed the attack on a little-watched Internet video.

The newly released internal White House e-mails show that Rice’s orders came from top Obama administration communications officials.

I didn’t know how right I was when I wrote on September 29, 2012 “Benghazi Worse then Watergate [1].”

With the release of new emails it is spectacularly worse — so bad in fact that it has made a full investigation with an impeachment trial necessary for the protection of our republic.

From the Washington Free Beacon [2]:

Previously unreleased internal Obama administration emails show that a coordinated effort was made in the days following the Benghazi terror attacks to portray the incident as “rooted in [an] Internet video, and not [in] a broader failure or policy.”

Emails [3] sent by senior White House adviser Ben Rhodes to other top administration officials reveal an effort to insulate President Barack Obama from the attacks that killed four Americans.

Rhodes sent this email to top White House officials such as David Plouffe and Jay Carney just a day before National Security Adviser Susan Rice made her infamous Sunday news show appearances to discuss the attack.

The “goal,” according to these emails, was “to underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure or policy.”

The levels of criminality involved in this are mind-boggling. Everyone from Ben Rhodes to Hillary Clinton to Jay Carney to Susan Rice to Mike Morell to Barack Obama and on and on must explain themselves minute-by-minute. American “liberals” and their media consorts should search their souls. People died here.

No amount of evidence will convince liberals that they were wrong. Evidence abounds, to be sure: Appeasement invites aggression. Handouts increase dependency. Coddling terror-states like Iran elicits megalomania. Big government stifles the economy. They don’t care. Really.

John Kerry romanced Basher Assad and Vanity Fair published a fawning profile of the Assad family, while the Obama administration secretly courted Iran. As a result we have in Syria the worst humanitarian catastrophe in the Arab world in modern times. Algeria racked up more casualties during the independence war of 1954-1962 and the civil war of 1991-2002, to be sure, but the casualties are coming faster in Syria and the displacement of immiserated civilians is greater. Do you hear liberals wringing their hands and asking, “Where did we go wrong?” They don’t, and they won’t. Ditto the disaster in Libya, which is turning into a Petri dish for terrorists post-Qaddafi. It doesn’t matter. Being in love with yourself means never having to say you’re sorry.

In the one part of the Middle East where nothing bad is happening or likely to happen–namely Israel–liberals are in full-tilt panic, with John Kerry warning that Israel will turn into an apartheid state. It’s not just Kerry, who is a national embarrassment, but the whole liberal world that thinks this way. In reality, Israel’s booming economy is enriching Israeli as well as Palestinian Arabs, to the extent that the kleptocratic Palestinian Authority lets them do business. There is no urgency at all to Israel’s situation–not, at least, where the Palestinians are concerned. Iran is another story.

Why don’t liberals seem to notice the catastrophic consequences of their policies, and why to they imagine imminent horrors where none exist? If you corner a liberal and point to a disaster that followed upon his policy, at very most he will say–with a tear in the eye and a quivering upper lip–”We did the right thing.”

The pristine natural world has been gone for a long time; get used to it.

Nearly all of the earthworms in New England and the upper Midwest were inadvertently imported from Europe. The American earthworms were wiped out by the last Ice Age. That’s why when European colonists first got here, many forest floors were covered in deep drifts of wet leaves. The wild horses of the American West may be no less invasive than the Asian carp advancing on the Great Lakes. Most species of the tumbleweed, icon of the Old West, are actually from Russia or Asia.

The notion that America was “wild” when Europeans found it is more than a little racist; it assumes that Indians didn’t act like humans everywhere else did by changing their environment. Native Americans weren’t Ur-hippies taking only photos — or I guess drawings — and leaving only footprints. They cultivated plants, cleared forests with extensive burning to boost the population of desired animals, and otherwise altered the landscape in ways that may have seemed natural to newcomers but were nonetheless profound. As biologist Charles Kay observes, “Native Americans were the ultimate keystone species, and their removal has completely altered ecosystems . . . throughout North America.”

Kay goes on to note that when we set aside a “wilderness” and then let “nature take its course,” we aren’t preserving “some remnant of the past.” We are instead creating “conditions that have not existed for the last 10,000 years.”

And even then, these supposedly wild places aren’t truly wild. That’s because to the extent they are preserved in their seemingly natural state, it is by humanity’s will. Also, the remaining wild animals in those places are often the ones we decided should live or didn’t accidentally kill. And the plants and animals that ate — or were eaten by — those creatures have never been the same. Without humans, the evolution of dogs, cows, pigs, and chickens wouldn’t have proceeded the way it has.

The wild environment isn’t just about trees and bears and other forms of charismatic mega flora and fauna. I heard Bill Gates on NPR the other day talking about the great strides his foundation has made against malaria and how we may be on the brink of actually eradicating polio forever. Diseases play a huge part of any natural ecosystem, and we’ve been trying to drive them to extinction for centuries.

In other words, we pick and choose all the time what should be “wild” and what shouldn’t.

With Europeans intrigued by America’s unexpected success, Alexis de Tocqueville carried out an in-depth study of the new nation in the 1830s. He was quite impressed with our divided government, which featured the separation of powers.

This structure made it difficult for any one branch — executive, judicial, or legislative — to acquire too much power and run roughshod over the other branches and the will of the American people. Unfortunately, today we are witnessing a largely unchecked executive branch issuing decrees that circumvent Congress while facing only tepid resistance.

In civilian life, when a contract is entered into by two parties, and it is subsequently discovered that one side knowingly presented false promises in order to consummate the deal, a legitimate lawsuit can be initiated on the basis of fraud. The Affordable Care Act is a prime example of such a contract, in the form of a bill that never would have been passed if it had been revealed that millions of people would lose the health insurance with which they were satisfied and that they might not be able to keep their doctors (after being promised they would be able to do so).

Nevertheless, this massive case of fraud has not been legally challenged by the legislative branch, leaving one to wonder why.

We hear a great deal about “Chicago-style politics.” It is nothing more than a euphemism for political corruption, including bullying, blackmail, and bribery. These pressures can be just as easily applied to national political figures as to local politicians.

Courage can be quite difficult to find when the threat of exposure hangs over one’s head. In an age when Big Brother is capable of watching everything we do, it is not hard to imagine a scenario in which large numbers of public servants are silenced or subdued by secretive threats.

I have had an opportunity to witness firsthand how the blackmail threat operates. Several years ago, while I was in the operating room, I received a call from one of the legal offices at Johns Hopkins University informing me that the state of Florida was trying to attach my wages for child support.

In recent decades a new trend of Holocaust trivialization has developed. While not quite as obscene as Holocaust Deniers claiming that the Holocaust was all some sort of hoax, these fabricators are morally the next best thing. They claim that the Holocaust of Jews by the Nazis may have been quite horrific but it pales in magnitude when compared with the “other Holocausts” of even greater dimensions. And increasingly the “other Holocaust” to which they point is the “genocide” of Africans in the slave trade.

After all, argue the “other Holocaust” propagandists, in World War II there were “only” six million Jews murdered, but a far larger number of Africans were murdered as part and parcel of the slave trade. Such pseudo-historic nonsense has been repeated so often that it is finding its way into mainstream textbooks and media. Even Israeli leftist columnists are citing the “African Holocaust,” illustrated by one column I cited earlier this week by a radical hater of his own country.

The “African Holocaust Lobby” likes to toss out numbers purportedly estimating the population killed during the African slave trade, starting at around 10 million and often going as high as 60 million. This allows the Holocaust trivializers to dismiss demands that the Jewish Shoah be commemorated, since it was “only one sixth” the magnitude of the “African genocide.”

The “60 million” number appears to have been originally invented by American Afrofascists, militant black racists and race hucksters. The number however has been repeated so often that it is showing up in books and media. Consider “Critical Pedagogy and Cognition: An Introduction to a Postformal Educational Psychology,” written by a psychologist, Curry Malott, Springer Publishers, 2011. Malott is no historian and certainly no demographer, yet he speaks about 60 million Africans killed in the “slave trade genocide.” A more widely cited book referring to the “60 million” is one by a pseudo-historian at the University of Hawaii, one David Stannard, Professor of American Studies, in his book American Holocaust (published 1992 by Oxford University Press). He estimates a 75-80% mortality rate in slave trade transit to come up with his number.

So what are we to make of all this? Let us begin by pointing out how absurd the claims about a 60 million victim African genocide are. The number not only exceeds the total number of Africans enslaved (not just those sold in the American colonies and then the US) by a factor of six. Indeed, the 60 million number exceeds the entire population of sub-Sahara Africa in the 18th century, when the slave trade was at its height. In Concise Economic History of the World by R. Cameron, it is estimated that the entire population of the African continent in 1800 was about 90 million people, but a large portion of those were non-black people living in the Arab areas of North Africa. That leaves the entire sub-Saharan population at less than the fictional 60 million “genocide victims” supposedly murdered in the slave trade.

Yesterday was April 29, the US deadline for the Israeli-Palestinian talks that began nine months ago. Instead of marking the achievement of a peace agreement as planned, the deadline passed with the talks dead—for now, at least.

They were officially suspended by Israel last week after Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah signed a unity pact with Hamas, the explicitly jihadist-terrorist group now running Gaza. The Obama administration has given Israel’s response to that move lukewarm, tentative support.

Where things will go from here is not certain; the present state of affairs raises some questions.

First, is the Fatah-Hamas agreement authentic, and will it really lead to a Palestinian unity government? If one goes according to precedent—three previous Fatah-Hamas unity deals in 2007, 2011, and 2012, each of which collapsed quickly—then the chances are not high.

Among Israeli Arab-affairs commentators, Khaled Abu Toameh sees the agreement as

a tactical move [by Abbas] aimed at putting pressure on Israel and the U.S. to accept his conditions for extending the peace talks after their April 29 deadline…. [There is no] sign that Hamas is willing to allow the Palestinian Authority security forces to return to the Gaza Strip, which fell into the hands of the Islamist movement in 2007…. Neither Hamas nor Fatah is interested in sharing power or sitting in the same government…. Abbas is now waiting to see what the U.S. Administration will offer him in return for rescinding his plan to join forces with Hamas….

Avi Issacharoff, however, suggests that Hamas—now in difficult shape with Iran having scaled back support, Egypt having closed its smuggling tunnels from Sinai, and Israel pressuring it to put a stop to rocket attacks by small, even more

The problem with Hillary Clinton’s candidacy isn’t that she would take office at the age of 69. An older and more mature president is not a bad thing. It’s how little she has done in that time.

After 2008, when Hillary was beaten by an even more inexperienced candidate, most people forgot just how little experience she has holding elected office.

Hillary Clinton only won one political office and she did so in her fifties. Despite winning two elections, her Senate career only covered the period from January 2001 to January 2009.

It’s more time than Obama spent in the Senate, but that’s not saying much.

JFK was considered young and inexperienced after spending 14 years in Congress. Hillary Clinton isn’t young, but her experience in elected office at the age of 69 will be less than his was at the age of 44.

Hillary’s supporters will argue that she has plenty of experience in public life. Unfortunately it’s the wrong kind of experience.

Like Elizabeth Warren, a slightly younger and more left-wing Hillary clone, she spent a good deal of time in the corrupt intersection between leftist non-profits, corporate boards and politically connected legal positions. The bad lessons those posts taught her are evident from Whitewater and HillaryCare.

Hillary Clinton embodies the corrupt culture of Washington D.C. whose cronyism and nepotism she has far too much experience with as the other half of a power couple notorious for personal and political corruption.

Respected Ha’aretz journalist Ari Shavit has made a startling confession: he was wrong about the prospects for peace with the Palestinians that he, like so many Israelis and diaspora Jews on the left, has vigorously advocated. Ever since Labor party politician Yossi Beilin revealed, for his private scrutiny, the peace plan to which Mahmoud Abbas had ostensibly agreed seventeen years ago, Shavit has been a true believer in peace now.

As he recently wrote (April 24): “people as steadfast as us don’t give up on our dreams.” Despite the subsequent failure of the Camp David peace summit (2000), Abbas’s failure to sign the Geneva Accord (2003), and his refusal to accept Ehud Olmert’s virtual surrender offer (2008), the Israeli Left swallowed one hollow Palestinian promise after another. “Have we opened our eyes?” Shavit asks, before providing the obvious answer: “Of course not.” Relentlessly blaming Prime Minister Netanyahu and his Likud party for every failure in the current so-called peace process, the gullible Left believed that Abbas surely would not dare to say no to John Kerry. But it was, once again, wrong.

“The Palestinian president’s position is clear and consistent,” Shavit finally understands: “The Palestinians must not be required to make concessions.” Shavit wisely, if belatedly, concludes that “twenty years of fruitless talks have led to nothing.” But many others, he claims, “haven’t learned a thing. They’re still allowing Abbas to make fools of them, as they wait for the Palestinian Godot, who will never show up.”