RUTHFULLY YOURS

ACORN’s successor group in Missouri has been paying protesters $5,000 a month to generate civil unrest in Ferguson, the troubled St. Louis suburb where black youth Michael Brown was killed by a white police officer last August.

We know this because some of the protesters haven’t been paid and, now, they are demanding what they were promised. They held a sit-in at the offices of Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE) and posted a demand letter online.

Public opinion veers with every change in current conditions in Iraq.

Probable Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush got himself into trouble by sort of, sort of not, answering the question whether he would have supported going into Iraq in 2003 — had he known then what we know now.

Republican candidates vied in attacking Bush’s initial confusion about answering the question. Most reiterated that they most certainly would not have invaded Iraq, regardless of what they know now or thought they knew then. Politically, it appears to be wiser to damn the decision to invade Iraq and to forget the circumstances that prompted the war — and the later political environment that ended the American presence.

Unfortunately, our country seems to be suffering from collective amnesia.We apparently have forgotten a number of crucial points:

Liberals want to talk about anything but the current world disorder.

Normally it’s good when matters of policy turn into big public spats, because there is always the chance the public will learn something worth knowing. In the week since Jeb Bush was queried about the war that his brother waged in Iraq, the public’s store of useful knowledge about the Iraq war has, if anything, declined. Senator Marco Rubio is the latest Republican presidential candidate to wade through the media swamp called the Iraq war.

Fifty years ago this week, American Jews were up in arms over a deeply offensive art-and-poetry display at the World’s Fair – but unlike some of today’s aggrieved protesters, they responded with bologna rather than bullets.

The controversy began when the government of Jordan set up a harshly anti-Israel display at its Word’s Fair pavilion, in New York City in early 1964. It featured a wall-size mural of a Palestinian Arab child, flanked by the text of a long anti-Zionist poem.

“For centuries,” according to the poem, Christians, Muslims, and Jews all lived in harmony in the Holy Land, “Until strangers from abroad / Professing one thing, but underneath, another / Began buying up land and stirring up the people…The strangers, once thought terror’s victims, became terror’s fierce practitioners.”

Here’s what must be done to defeat them.

In the closing years of the Vietnam War it was often noted sardonically that the “victories” against the Viet Cong were moving steadily closer to Saigon. The same could be said of Baghdad and the victories claimed against Islamic State, or ISIS, in Iraq in the past year. The ISIS takeover of Ramadi in the Anbar province over the weekend exposed the hollowness of the reported progress against ISIS. The U.S.-led bombing campaign in support of Iraqi forces isn’t working.

WASHINGTON—The State Department is proposing a January deadline to complete the release of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email archive from her time in office, with the department citing the complexity of sorting though the tens of thousands of pages for the long review period.

The proposed timeline means the complete set of emails could be released just two weeks before Democratic voters would head to the polls in the first presidential nominating contest.

According to a court filing on Monday, the State Department has asked a federal judge to approve a plan that would release Mrs. Clinton’s email records publicly by Jan. 15, 2016.

Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s deputy national security adviser, has been offering a reassuring view of the Iranian nuclear deal in the face of some Arab skepticism. “If you can diplomatically and peacefully resolve the nuclear issue in a way that prevents Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” he told reporters last week, “we believe that will lead to a much more stable region.” Mr. Rhodes also contends that with a deal “there will be no need to see [a] regional arms race.”

So what’s more frightening: That Mr. Rhodes believes what he’s saying? Or that he does not?

Just for Mr. Rhodes’s benefit, here’s a refresher course on stability and the arms race in the Middle East since April 2, 2015, the day Mr. Obama announced his framework nuclear agreement with Iran.

“I took a trip by myself in January of 2002 to Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria, and I told each of the heads of state that it was my view that George Bush had already made up his mind to go to war against Iraq – that that was a predetermined set course which had taken shape shortly after 9/11.”

So spoke Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) on “Fox Sunday” on November 14, 2005, who at the time of his trip was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and is now its vice chairman.

Please read the first paragraph once again, digest it (if your stomach can handle it), and consider its immense — if not treasonous — implications.

By himself and fully armed with America’s most sensitive intelligence, Sen. Rockefeller decided to go to three Arab countries — including Syria which is on the State Department’s list of terrorist regimes and a close ally of Saddam Hussein — and literally alert them to what (“in my view”) might befall a neighboring Arab state.

When Jordan’s Arab Legion seized half of Jerusalem, ethnically cleansed its Jewish population and annexed the city– the only entity to recognize the annexation was the United Kingdom which had provided the officers and the training that made the conquest possible. Officers like Colonel Bill Newman, Major Geoffrey Lockett and Major Bob Slade, under Glubb Pasha, better known as General John Bagot Glubb, whose son later converted to Islam, invaded Jerusalem and used the Muslim forces under their command to make the partition and ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem possible.

Since then, the annexation and ethnic cleansing has become an international mandate. It would be absolutely inconceivable for the international community to denounce an ethnically cleansed group which survived attempted genocide for moving back into a city where they had lived. It is, however, standard policy at the State Department and the Foreign Office to denounce Jews living in those parts of Jerusalem that had been ethnically cleansed by Muslims, as “settlers” living in “settlements,” and describe them as an “obstruction to peace.” Peace being the state of affairs that sets in when an ethnic cleansing goes unchallenged.

As my weekend column indicates, I am not as down as Patrick, Eliana, and some of my other colleagues on the hypothetical Iraq question the media is pressing on GOP presidential candidates —​ viz., Was it a mistake to invade, knowing what we now know? It’s a very fair point that the question should not be asked solely of Republicans – Hillary Clinton and other Democrats who supported the war should be grilled, too.

Maybe I come out differently on this because I don’t accept the narrowing of the question to a matter of whether Saddam had a WMD program and stockpiles to the degree foretold by intelligence we now know was faulty. If that were all there was to it, I’d concur that there is nothing to be gained about this line of inquiry —​ as Patrick says, if President Bush was right to think Iraq had the WMDs but “almost certainly could not have known” it did not, then it is pointless to try to corner Republicans into admitting Bush made a mistake.

But I don’t think, and never have, that the WMD were the most significant part of the equation. That’s why I argued repeatedly that too much emphasis was placed on them.