RUTHFULLY YOURS

‘Things change fast in Benghazi,” we are told near the opening of Michael Bay’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, and the dynamism with which the film presents the events of September 11, 2012, makes the quote ring true.

As the film starts, we land with former SEAL turned private-security-officer Jack Silva (The Office’s John Krasinski) in the middle of a post-Qaddafi Libyan hellscape. Benghazi is dominated by local security forces and militias indistinguishable from one another that can and will switch sides on the turn of a dime. We are reminded constantly that everyone is a bad guy “until they’re not.”

As anyone familiar with the Benghazi attack will know, a disaster is looming for the security contractors and their CIA liaisons on the ground. Only our own State Department remained seemingly unaware of the cauldron of tribal extremism that Benghazi had become — as the film shows, Foggy Bottom had all but abandoned or disavowed knowledge of the CIA outpost in the city. “We have no f***ing support,” one of the few U.S. security personnel on the ground declares as he attempts to talk his way past a militia roadblock.

That doesn’t stop Ambassador Chris Stevens from giving the CIA station chief (played by David Costabile) and Global Response Staff (GRS) forces led by “Rone” (The Departed’s James Badge Dale in a long-overdue leading tough-guy role) a hopeful pep talk about the future of Benghazi and Libya in general. Stevens is an idealist and an optimist, a “true believer” as he’s described during security prep for his arrival on Monday September 10, 2012. What Silva finds is a heavily under-equipped consulate with an under-prepared security detail, “Real dot gov s***,” he laments.

When the assault on Stevens’s compound starts just after sundown on September 11, (and notably, without the film’s showing protests) we are thrown suddenly into the middle of the chaos, with the “Ambo” (as the ex-special forces agents refer to Stevens), Foreign Service officer Sean Smith (Christopher Dingli), and the security personnel at the consulate hunkering down and begging for backup. As the first wave of the attack roars by, Bay is at his kinetic best, like an anxious kid with his hand on the detonator.

Changes of administrations usually mark dicey times in American foreign policy. But transitional hazards will never be greater than in 2016.

Over a span of just a few months in mid 1945, new president Harry Truman lost all trust in Soviet Union strongman Josef Stalin — in a way that Truman’s predecessor, the ailing Franklin Delano Roosevelt, never had during nearly four years of World War II.

Ensuing American foreign policy jerked from a pragmatic Lend-Lease alliance with a duplicitous Communist superpower to a tense Cold War.

President John F. Kennedy was young, idealistic, cocky — and without the military reputation of his predecessor, the much more experienced former general Dwight D. Eisenhower. Soon after JFK’s inauguration in 1961, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev predictably began testing Kennedy’s mettle as commander-in-chief, from Berlin to Cuba.

Kennedy’s eventual restoration of American deterrence during the Cuban blockade marked the scariest phase in Cold War history.

By 1980, as lame duck Jimmy Carter neared the end of his first and only term, the Russians had sought to absorb Afghanistan. Communist insurrections kept spreading in Central America. China went into Vietnam. The new theocracy in Iran still held American diplomats and employees hostages.

Most aggressors had logically accelerated their risk-taking before the newly elected, mostly unknown (but volatile-sounding) Ronald Reagan took office in 1981.

Beneath the Treasury building in London is a large underground bunker fortified with over 9ft. of reinforced concrete holding the Cabinet War Rooms used by Winston Churchill and his Cabinet during the Blitz and throughout the duration of World War II. It is now a museum, but in its day it was the nerve center for operations against the Axis powers and the location where Churchill spent many arduous nights and from which he made many of his wartime speeches becoming the world’s symbol of resistance to Nazi tyranny.

Now framed and on prominent display is the letter written to Churchill by FDR in his own hand in January of 1941 quoting a verse from Longfellow’s poem, “The Building of the Ship”. It reads:

Dear Churchill

Wendell Willkie will give you this — He is truly helping to keep politics out over here.

I think this verse applies to you people as it does to us:

‘Sail on, Oh Ship of State!
Sail on, Oh Union strong and great.
Humanity with all its fears
With all the hope of future years
Is hanging breathless on thy fate.’

As ever yours,

Franklin D. Roosevelt

It has been seven long years since Barack Obama scrambled into the imperial box and it is impossible to read Longfellow’s lines without thinking of how they apply to America today due not only to Obama’s tragically flawed stewardship based on his devotion to the cultural Marxism of Saul ‘Red’ Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals but also due to the strong sentimental attachment to the Islam of his youth which, disastrously for the security of our republic, still exerts a domineering influence in a nostalgic chamber of his mind.

The arrival of The Big Short in theaters a few weeks ago has reignited interest in the causes of the 2008 financial crisis. If you believe that the crisis was caused by greed and recklessness on Wall Street then you’ll like this film. Paul Krugman, writing on the op-ed page of the New York Times, liked it immensely, apparently thinking a Hollywood version of reality was fact.

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Twenty20 License

We can all agree that the financial crisis was caused by a “mortgage meltdown” mostly among subprime and other risky mortgages. What neither this film nor the greed narrative tells us, is why there were so many of these mortgages in the financial system to begin with. The answer: Sorry Dr. Krugman, it was not Wall Street.

In June 2008, just before the crisis, more than half of all US mortgages—31 million loans—were subprime or otherwise risky. Of these, 76 percent were on the books of government agencies, primarily the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This shows, without question, that the government—a sophisticated buyer—created the demand for these deficient loans.

The remaining 24 percent of these loans were on the books of private sector entities, such as banks, investment banks, insurers, and investment funds of all kinds.

Because of their government backing, Fannie and Freddie were the dominant players in the US mortgage market, and had been for more than a quarter century. They did not make loans themselves, but acquired mortgages from banks and other lenders. These were held in their portfolios or sold off to investors with a GSE guarantee.

Late last week China confirmed that it is building its first aircraft carrier from scratch, adding to a fleet that includes a Russian-made carrier. The news cast U.S. military policy in a particularly unsettling light: While China’s naval power expands, America has deliberately reduced its presence on the seas. The Navy—after nearly $1 trillion of Defense Department cuts, in part mandated by the 2011 budget-sequestration deal between Congress and the Obama administration—is already down to 272 ships. That means the U.S. fleet is less than half its size at the close of the Reagan administration nearly 30 years ago (and down by 13 ships since 2009).

The Navy had intended to increase the fleet to 308 ships, including 12 that will replace the nation’s aging ballistic-missile submarine deterrent. But in a mid-December memo, Defense Secretary Ash Carter told the Navy to cut the number of ships it plans to build in favor of placing more-advanced technology aboard the existing fleet.

Secretary Carter’s plan implies that the deterrent effect of a constant U.S. presence in the world is less important than the Navy’s ability to fight and win wars with the advanced weapons he favors. That assumption is mistaken. We need both the ability to be present, which demands more ships than we have, and the related power to win a war if deterrence doesn’t work. Even the Navy’s now-endangered plan for 308 new ships was far below the approximately 350 combat ships needed to achieve this aim.

From “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” by Edward Gibbon, the 18th-century English historian:

It was scarcely possible that the eyes of contemporaries should discover in the public felicity the latent causes of decay and corruption. This long peace, and the uniform government of the Romans, introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire. The minds of men were gradually reduced to the same level, the fire of genius was extinguished, and even the military spirit evaporated. . . . Their personal valour remained, but they no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honour, the presence of danger, and the habit of command. They received laws and governors from the will of their sovereign, and trusted for their defence to a mercenary army. The posterity of their boldest leaders was contented with the rank of citizens and subjects. The most aspiring spirits resorted to the court or standard of the emperors; and the deserted provinces, deprived of political strength or union, insensibly sunk into the languid indifference of private life.

‘The history of the world,” wrote Thomas Carlyle in 1841, “is but the biography of great men.” Libertarian polymath Herbert Spencer countered 30 years later: “Before [the great man] can remake his society, his society must make him.” With whom does the novelist Robert Harris’s Cicero Trilogy, which began with “Imperium” (2006) and “Conspirata” (2009) and ends now with “Dictator,” side? Cicero’s lifetime (106-43 B.C.) saw the ambitions, caprices and convictions of the Roman Republic’s leading figures (Marius, Sulla, Caesar, Pompey, Crassus, Cato, Octavian, Antony and Cicero himself) determine the fate of Western civilization. Were these truly great men or the bitter fruits of an intrinsically corrupting political system?

“Imperium” traces Cicero’s rapid ascent; “Conspirata,” the career-defining stand against Catiline; “Dictator,” his (and the Republic’s) downfall. The middle narrative has hooked many schoolboys, myself included. The year he served as consul (63 B.C.), Cicero inveighed against Catiline, an aristocratic malcontent, gleefully detailing his alleged plot to overthrow the state. Having forced Catiline from Rome and secured Cato’s decisive backing, Cicero pushed through the execution of five conspirators without trial. (Catiline offered battle in 62 B.C., dying, according to the historian Sallust, with conspicuous bravery.) Where Cicero’s consulship was compact and—as he would have it—morally unambiguous, the events that led to his proscription were drawn out and often bewildering.

The challenge for Mr. Harris of maintaining dramatic momentum through 15 years of shifting loyalties and shabby compromises is considerable. Yet as anyone who has read his previous novels, including the riveting alternate history “Fatherland” (1992) and the political thriller “The Ghost” (2007), knows, he is incapable of writing an unenjoyable book.

Told from the perspective of Cicero’s slave-amanuensis, Tiro, who reputedly invented shorthand, “Dictator” picks up the thread in 58 B.C., when fallout from the unlawful Catilinarian executions drove Cicero into exile. Tiro recounts his master’s role in the developments of the first and second triumvirates—the alliances whereby Caesar, Pompey and Crassus and, later, Octavian, Antony and Lepidus divvied up the empire—and ensuing civil wars. Tiro’s viewpoint is partisan but not unquestioning. In “Dictator,” Cicero, whom Tiro served off and on after his manumission in 53 B.C., can be weak and monstrously egotistical.

The sudden upheaval that shattered ties between Iran and Saudi Arabia over the weekend also saddled the Obama administration with unexpected complications in what already was a long-shot bid to ease the crises of the Middle East.

Administration officials voiced rising concern that the conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia could undermine their broader regional efforts—in particular ending the Syrian civil war.

Secretary of State John Kerry had been pressing Tehran and Riyadh for months to establish a direct diplomatic channel to address the Syria conflict.

The two countries reluctantly agreed late in 2015 to join a multinational peace process. That led to a United Nations plan for a cease-fire and peace talks, but the latest developments raise questions about its viability.

The conflict is also exposing deteriorating relations between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia under President Barack Obama. Saudi officials have repeatedly pressed the White House to take more-aggressive steps to check what they say is Iran’s regionwide efforts to destabilize Arab countries.

Saudi officials have warned that the nuclear agreement reached in July between world powers and Iran would significantly strengthen Iran’s finances while only scaling back its nuclear capabilities for a few years.

That headline question may seem premature, but it’s worth asking if only to reduce the odds that the Saudis are lost as we enter the last perilous year of the Obama Presidency. Iran and Russia have an interest in toppling the House of Saud, and they may be calculating whether President Obama would do anything to stop them.

This comes to mind watching the furious reaction by Iran and its allies to Saudi Arabia’s New Year execution of 47 men for terrorism. Most of the condemned were Sunnis, including members of al Qaeda, but the Saudis also executed prominent Shiite cleric Nemer al-Nemer, who had led a Shiite uprising in 2011.

“The divine hand of revenge will come back on the tyrants who took his life,” said Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Sunday, among many other denunciations across the Shiite Middle East. Protesters ransacked and set fire to the Saudi Embassy in Tehran before police belatedly stopped them. The Saudis responded by cutting off diplomatic relations with Iran.

Nouri al-Maliki, the Iranian ally and former Prime Minister of Iraq, put regime change on the table by saying the execution “will topple the Saudi regime as the crime of executing the martyr al-Sadr did to Saddam” Hussein. He was referring to the death of another prominent Shiite cleric in Iraq in 1980.

The White House expects Iran to finish work needed to trigger implementation of an international nuclear deal in the coming weeks, but Washington needs more time to prepare sanctions over its ballistic missile program, a U.S. official said on Saturday.
The administration had additional diplomatic and technical work to complete before announcing any new sanctions related to the missile program, but the delay was not a result of pressure from Tehran, said deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes.

“We have additional work that needs to be done before we would announce additional designations, but this is not something that we would negotiate with the Iranian government,” Rhodes told reporters in Hawaii, where President Barack Obama is on vacation.