RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.prudenpolitics.com/newsletter?utm_source=P&P%20Auto%201&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=6668

A late education is better than no education at all, even for a president of the United States. The man who is a mighty legend in his own mind is even showing a little humility. Barack Obama, who usually finds someone else – usually George W. – to blame for every little thing that goes awry, finally admitted this week in Israel that even a synthetic messiah can make mistakes.

“I hope I’m a better president now than when I first came into office,” he told reporters at one stop early in his trip. “I’m absolutely sure that there are a host of things that I could have done that would have been more deft and, you know, would have created better optics.”

Now if he’ll only turn from an obsession with “better optics” to the serious statecraft at hand, we can all breathe a little easier. Not a lot, but a little.

There’s no more crucial place to get a late education than in the Middle East, where graduate schools abound in every nook in the brambles and crannies in the ancient rocks. This is one place where making crucial and momentous decisions on the fly risks not only disasters, but invites catastrophes. This is no place for “a man without a foreign policy,” as one commentator remarked, a man with only naïve aspirations who operates on the notion that a chaotic and perilous world can be changed by “the transformative power of a good speech, but no clear path to achieve anything.”

Perhaps the president burned a little midnight oil just in time. Vali Nasr, who was not so long ago a senior insider at the Obama White House, describes in his forthcoming book, “The Dispensable Nation,” how decisions have sometimes been made. On Afghanistan, for example, he says Obama policy-makers were determined not to make long-reaching strategic decisions but to satisfy shifting public opinion. These policy makers, according to an advance reading of Mr. Nasr’s book, comprised “a small cabal of relatively inexperienced White House advisers whose turf was strictly politics.”

Campaign politics Chicago style, where every problem can be solved with a favor or an expertly placed shiv, clearly doesn’t work in the Middle East. President Obama arrived in Jerusalem just when the strategic interests of the United States and the strategic concerns of Israel seemed to be on a collision course. The president has been concerned with spreading clichés and bromides, the prime minister with survival. The photographs of Mr. Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, unarmed and smiling, were staged to show everyone that despite their history of hostile relations, they could, too, get along without taking or giving a punch.

Another Tack: Bad Jews = Good story It was a PR windfall for Hamas when 11-months-old-Omar Misharawi was killed by a rocket that hit his family’s home on November 14, 2012 – at the very outset of Operation Pillar of Defense. During that confrontation, thousands of Hamas missiles and mortars rained on Israel. The long-range ones […]

Starting way back when the “peace process” started with the Rogers Plan of 1969 every time an Arab terrorist declared that his group only wanted two thirds of Israelis dead rather than all of them, the appeasers, the pundits, the statesmen all gushed at the “winds of moderation” wafting through the Middle East. Every single American administration then recycled the Rogers plan giving it their own imprimatur….But, it was the same tired old fix it now kit.

The Arabs continually rejected the offer and the “winds of moderation” were dispelled.

Now according to President Obama in Israel we have more wind power:

“Across this region the winds of change bring both promise and peril.”

Promise? Where? What is he talking about? Iran, Egypt, Libya, Syria, the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, calls for Jihad and imposed Sharia throughout the Arab world?

And yes he does mention the peril…and what will be his solution? Why a dusted off two-state solution will be the end run of his charm offensive…and I do mean offensive….in Israel.

But will the Israelis fall for it?

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/media-labels-arab-spring-pro-democracy-as-muslim-brotherhood-fulfills-jihadist-vision?f=puball In late December 2010, the Tunisia uprising was sparked by a tragic public suicide-burning of a twenty-something street vender in an act of civil disobedience. Instantaneously, media commentary like wildfire around the world labeled this event “Arab Spring,” branding it the beginning of a struggle for democracy in the region. Correspondents in the tumultuous […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/a-shocking-interview-with-i-q-rassooli-islam-expert The Iraqi-born native Arabic-speaker who goes by the name “I. Q. Rassooli” has lived in Europe since his university days studying engineering in England. His mind is an inquiring and a questioning one, characteristics not much appreciated among the conformist Muslim community of his origins. And so he stayed in the West and, for […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/if-you-like-your-doctor-you-can-see-him-at-the-same-time-as-12-other-patients/

Welcome to ObamaCare. Making really bad health care affordable and mandatory. If you have any complaints, please see the Obama Voter on your right and collect your mandatory six-thousand dollar birth control at the exit.

In recent years, a growing number of doctors have begun holding group appointments — seeing up to a dozen patients with similar medical concerns all at once. Advocates of the approach say such visits allow doctors to treat more patients, spend more time with them (even if not one-on-one), increase appointment availability and improve health outcomes.

You see this is good news. It allows doctors to spend more time with large numbers of patients with outwardly similar medical problems. This way a doctor can see a dozen patients with stomachaches while trying to guess which one might have cancer. (If he guesses wrong, you die.)

Now there will be more appointments to see doctors as part of large groups. And once the groups hit a 100, there will be even more appointments available. You may even be able to see your doctor in under three months.

Some see group appointments as a way to ease looming physician shortages. According to a study published in December, meeting the country’s health-care needs will require nearly 52,000 additional primary-care physicians by 2025. More than 8,000 of that total will be needed for the more than 27 million people newly insured under the Affordable Care Act.

“With Obamacare, we’re going to get a lot of previously uninsured people coming into the system, and the question will be ‘How are we going to service these people well?’ ” says Edward Noffsinger, who has developed group-visit models and consults with providers on their implementation. With that approach, “doctors can be more efficient and patients can have more time with their doctors.”

Doctors can be more efficient at providing bad medical care while patients can have hardly any time with their doctors, because they’re actually standing in line to get medical exams with 11 strangers in a room while talking over each other about their medical problems.

Suddenly Cuban medicine is looking surprisingly good.

Some of the most successful shared appointments bring together patients with the same chronic condition, such as diabetes or heart disease. For example, in a diabetes group visit, a doctor might ask everyone to remove their shoes so he can examine their feet for sores or signs of infection, among other things.

This is how doctors handled medical problems when visiting Third World countries or distant army bases. But we can now enjoy the same quality of medicine as Sub-Saharan Africa.

Afghanistan: Obama’s “Good War” Failure — on The Glazov Gang »
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/iraq-ten-years-since-removing-saddam-on-the-glazov-gang/

Shant Kenderian, Michael Walsh and Josh Brewster reflect on the president’s catastrophic waste of American lives and treasure.

This week’s Glazov Gang had the honor of being joined by Shant Kenderian, author of “1001 Nights in Iraq,“ Michael Walsh, author and screenwriter, and Josh Brewster, an NHL hockey broadcaster (hockeytalk.biz). The Gang members discussed Afghanistan: Obama’s “Good War” Failure. The dialogue occurred in Part II and focused on the president’s waste of American lives and treasure. The segment included a discussion on A Republican Second Wind? and the meaning of the appointment of Pope Francis.

Part I dealt with Shant Kenderian’s memoir, 1001 Nights in Iraq and focused on Shant’s shocking story about being an American forced to fight for Saddam against the country he loves. The segment also included a discussion on whether on not we won the Iraq war and whether we should have engaged in it.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/davidhornik/regional-threats-loom-large-over-obamas-israel-trip/

Speculations that President Obama was coming to Israel to keep pursuing a blind obsession with the Palestinian issue appeared, fortunately, unsubstantiated by the time of his press conference with Prime Minister Netanyahu on Wednesday evening.

Both leaders’ words were devoted mainly to the Iranian and Syrian issues; Obama’s own words on the Palestinian matter expressed a lowering of expectations and an acknowledgment that the “solution” he had often stridently pursued during his first term was more elusive than he had thought.

In their three-hour talk before the press conference, Netanyahu was accompanied by his national security adviser Yaakov Amidror and his military attaché Yair Zamir; Obama by his security adviser Tom Donilon and Secretary of State John Kerry. The makeup clearly connotes that security issues were paramount.

A grim preface to Obama’s visit was a statement earlier in the day by Yuval Steinitz—Israel’s finance minister in the previous government, now minister of intelligence and strategic affairs—that chemical weapons had been used in Syria. Steinitz did not claim to know whether it was the regime or rebel forces that had used them. AP reports that a “senior [Israeli] defense official… concurred…[based] on intelligence reports.”

Obama has called the use of chemical weapons in Syria a “red line” possibly prompting U.S. military action. Asked about the matter during the press conference, Obama said the U.S. would investigate whether the weapons were used and that “the Assad regime must understand that they will be held accountable for the use of chemical weapons or their transfer to terrorists.”

Lebanon’s Daily Star had reported two days earlier that Israeli planes had dropped flare bombs in southern Lebanon—a possible response or warning about Syrian weapons making their way into Hizballah’s hands.

Obama, in other words, is entering a war zone, not a playground for peace fantasies. Although his visit to Palestinian Authority headquarters and address to Israeli university students on Thursday may yet hold surprises, indications so far are that he has sobered up about Israel’s neighborhood and the real issues it faces.

More critical yet, of course, than the Syrian crisis is Iran’s ongoing march toward a nuclear bomb. Netanyahu told the assembled reporters: “A nuclear Iran is a grave threat. The U.S. is committed to deal with it, Israel is committed to deal with it. Israel has a right to independently defend itself from any threat.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/343428/obama-s-mangled-quotation-craig-s-karpel

President Obama met recently with a group of Jewish leaders about his trip to Israel that begins today. The Washington Post reported that Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, “expressed concern that Obama might be softening his pledge to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, based on recent reports of frustrated international diplomatic efforts,” and then asked Obama what he intends to do to stop Tehran from having nuclear weapons.

The president’s reply, as quoted in the Post: “I’m not going to beat my chest to prove my toughness on this.”

“Obama continued,” the story said, “by citing a quote attributed by some to the Chinese military tactician Sun Tzu, who suggested that a ‘golden bridge’ must be built to give what Obama described as a ‘proud people’ a face-saving retreat to a diplomatic solution.”

According to individuals present at the meeting, the president referred to the quote’s author as “a Chinese philosopher.”

The ancient treatise The Art of War, ascribed to Sun Tzu, contains no reference to a bridge, golden or otherwise. The only passage that resembles Obama’s reference is this dictum, as translated in 1910 by Lionel Giles, head of the British Museum’s Oriental Manuscripts and Printed Books department: “When you surround an army, leave an outlet free.”

Giles noted, “This does not mean that the enemy is to be allowed to escape. The object, as Tu Mu [a.d. 803–52] puts it, is ‘to make him believe that there is a road to safety, and thus prevent his fighting with the courage of despair.’ Tu Mu adds pleasantly: ‘After that, you may crush him.’”

The 1963 translation by Samuel B. Griffith, a Marine general who served in China before and after World War II and then earned a doctorate from Oxford in Chinese military history, renders the aphorism as “To a surrounded enemy you must leave a way of escape.” Griffith parsed the commentary by Tu Mu more tersely than did Giles: “Show him there is a road to safety, and so create in his mind the idea that there is an alternative to death. Then strike.”

So for Sun Tzu, the purpose of providing a path for retreat isn’t to avoid hurting the feelings of a “proud people” so that engagement can work its magic. It’s to fool the enemy into believing there’s a way he can avoid a fight to the death — and then to strike and crush him.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

“This vulgar worship of peace as a religion, a creed that restores the faith of faithless men and women in humanity is a combination of empty sentimentality and calculated ignorance.”

“War is peace,” entered our cultural vocabulary some sixty-four years ago. Around the same time that Orwell’s masterpiece was being printed up, an armistice was being negotiated between Israel and the Arab invading armies. That armistice began the long peaceful war or the warring peace.
The entire charade did not properly enter the realm of the Orwellian until the peace process began. The peace process between Israel and the terrorist militias funded by the countries of those invading armies has gone on for longer than most actual wars. It has also taken more lives than most actual wars.

War has an endpoint. Peace does not. A peace in which you are constantly at war can go on forever because while the enthusiasts of war eventually exhaust their patriotism, the enthusiasts of peace never give up on their peacemaking.

Warmongers may stop after a few thousand dead, but Peacemongers will pirouette over a million corpses.

As you read this, Obama is probably stumbling through some ceremony or speech in Israel. The speeches all say the usual things, but there really is only one purpose to the visit. There really ever only is one purpose to these visits. The revisiting of the endless peace war.

Two decades after the peace process has failed in every way imaginable. Two decades after cemeteries on both sides are full of the casualties of peace. Two decades which have created two abortive Palestinian states at war with one another and with Israel.

Two decades later, it’s still time for peace.