RUTHFULLY YOURS

A pan-Arab coalition with a patchy record steps up as Yemen falls apart and U.S. policy remains unclear.

Few organizations boast a reputation of dysfunction comparable to the Arab League’s. Over seven decades the Arab League has distinguished itself through infighting and fecklessness. But now, with the Obama administration seen as missing in action in the Middle East, the alliance of 22 countries is undergoing a renaissance. Over the weekend, the Arab League met in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, and endorsed the creation of an intervention force to fight terrorism in the Middle East.

Regional backing for the force came days after a mostly Arab coalition led by Saudi Arabia launched airstrikes targeting the Iran-backed, nominally Shiite Houthi rebels in Yemen, who last week sacked the provisional capital of Aden and drove Yemen President Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi into exile.

First, let me just say that I hope Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post is wrong and that President Obama has no intention of making a dramatic break with Israel in the coming months. But alas, the story he tells is very convincing. According to Diehl, the Obama administration is getting ready to back a U.N. Security Council resolution that would, in his words, “mandate the solution to the questions Israelis and Palestinians have been unable to agree upon for decades, such as the future status of Jerusalem.” Why does this matter? If Israel rejects peace terms imposed on it by outsiders, the effort to turn the Jewish homeland into a pariah state will gain enormous ground. This is a consequence that the president must fully understand. If Obama’s champions are to be believed, he is a subtle strategic thinker with a deep understanding of history. So no, his efforts to radically remake our relationship with Israel isn’t a reflection of ignorance or a lack of familiarity with the basics of the conflict. If the president chooses to pursue this dangerous course, let no American who values our alliance with Israel, or for that matter our national honor, ever forget it.

She’s secretive, scandal-plagued, and seemingly inevitable.
Ever since Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal broke earlier this month, comparisons between her secretive style and that of Richard Nixon, whom she ironically pursued as a young lawyer on the House impeachment committee, have been frequent. But with Friday’s revelation that she wiped her private e-mail server clean after her records were requested by the State Department last year, the comparisons are becoming more concrete. Washington wags note that even Nixon never destroyed the tapes, but Hillary has permanently erased her e-mails.

Exactly what would a Hillary presidency look like, and could it plunge the nation into another round of debilitating Clinton scandals? That’s a question Democrats should ask themselves before they hand the nomination over to her with barely a fight.

The former governor sat on the board of the GOP-establishment-friendly American Action Forum. Jeb Bush was associated for years with the tip of the spear of the Republican establishment’s campaign for a permissive immigration policy. For five years the American Action Network (AAN) and the Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF), well-heeled outside spending groups, have been go-to sources of support for the Republican establishment’s immigration “reform” efforts.

For most of that time, Bush sat on the board of the think tank with which both are affiliated, the American Action Forum (AAF) — from shortly after its founding in February 2010 by former Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former Minnesota senator Norm Coleman, and hotelier and Nixon hand Fred Malek, until December 2, 2014. The most notorious initiative by AAN — the brawn to AAF’s brain — came in early March, a few months after Bush had left the board of its sister organization. As John Boehner pushed a “clean” Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill, one that would fund President Obama’s executive amnesty, AAN launched a controversial $400,000 national ad campaign accusing conservative opponents in the House of “putting our security at risk” by resisting Boehner’s bill.

CAIRO (AP) – Arab League member nations formally announced on Sunday an agreement to form a joint military force. While details of how such a force would actually operate remain thin, the agreement is a telling sign of a new determination among Saudi Arabia, Egypt and their allies to intervene aggressively in regional hotspots, whether against Islamic militants or Iran-backed groups.
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HOW WILL THE JOINT FORCE WORK?
Senior officials from participating counties have been dispatched to collectively examine the issue, and a full proposal is to be presented to the Arab League’s Joint Defense Council within four months. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, has described the force as an absolute necessity. Egyptian military and security officials have said the proposed force would be made of up to 40,000 elite troops and will be headquartered in either Cairo or Riyadh, the Saudi capital. The force would be backed by jet-fighters, warships and light armor.
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WHO WILL LEAD IT?
Saudi Arabia, as the region’s economic powerhouse, will likely take a leadership role. Egypt, which boasts the Arab world’s largest standing army but is heavily dependent on financial aid from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf nations, will also be a major player.

An estimated 40% of Muslim youth in France and 50% in Germany are unemployed but far from destitute. Rather, they receive a wide range of social benefits. [2] For example, an estimated 40% of welfare outlays in Denmark go to the 5% of the population that is Muslim. [3] According to Otto Schily, former German interior minister, speaking of immigrants in general: “Seventy percent of the newcomers [since 2002] land on welfare the day of their arrival.” [4] In Sweden, perhaps the most acute case, immigrants are estimated at 1.5 million out of 10 million people; immigration is estimated to cost almost $14 billion per year. [5]

These high levels of welfare are accompanied by high levels of unemployment. Nor has this situation improved; rather, it is deteriorating. According to analyst Christopher Caldwell: “In the early 1970s, 2 million of the 3 million foreigners in Germany were in the labor force; by the turn of this century, 2 million of 7.5 million were.” [6] Similar stories abound in other West European countries.

Large numbers of people may be receiving unemployment, but that is not their only form of income. The money for the designer sneakers sported by idle youth comes, in fact, from drug deals and fenced goods as well as from welfare payments. But the symbolism of welfare payments affects not only disgruntled taxpayers but also the youth themselves. Some Muslims interpret the payment of social benefits as a form of jiziya, the poll tax traditionally paid in Islamic societies by non-Muslim peoples as a sign of their submission to Islamic rule. In other words, not only are the social benefits interpreted as a right due to Muslim recipients, but they reflect the higher, dominant position of the latter which is embedded in sharia. [7] In fact, a minority consider draining the government’s coffers to be a contribution to jihad. [8]

Never in the history of American foreign policy has so much egg adhered to so little face as in the matter of Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank. All of America’s allies, including Britain and Australia, have elected to join the Chinese-led institution. That is a grand validation of China’s One Belt/One Road vision for infrastructure upgrades across the whole Eurasian landmass. China’s President Xi Jinping envisions $2.5 trillion of trade between his country and the “Silk Road” nations over the next decade. Rather than fret about the impact of a slowing (or shrinking) world economy on China’s export-driven prosperity, China is seeking to shape the economic environment around it.

I share the legitimate concerns of center-right critics over the gravely delusive and dangerous concessions the Obama Administration appears hell-bent to agree upon in its nuclear negotiations with Iran:

giving an international imprimatur to Iran’s so-called “right” to enrich uranium, with the maintenance of ~6500 centrifuges, including perhaps 600 in the concrete-reinforced, 300 foot subterranean Fordow facility;
simultaneous “quick” economic sanctions relief, and even a partial lifting of existing embargoes on arms sales to the Islamic Republic;
the exclusion of Iran’s robust ballistic missile (BM) program, which, per mid-March Senate testimony by the U.S. Missile Defense Agency Director, Navy Vice Admiral James Syring, could have intercontinental (IC) capability this (i.e., 2015) calendar year [note: a satellite image published January, 2015 purports to show a 27-meter tall Iranian ICBM just outside Tehran];
the steadfast refusal by Iran—despite repeated, ongoing International Atomic Energy Agency demands—to reveal its record of putative military nuclear development/ weaponization experiments.

After weeks of escalating criticism of Israel by the Obama Administration, Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State and the leading 2016 Democratic presidential contender, on Sunday called for the renewal of the “special” relationship between the US and the Jewish state.

In a telephone conversation with Malcolm Hoenlein, Executive Vice Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Clinton said that she “thinks we need to all work together to return the special US-Israel relationship to constructive footing, to get back to basic shared concerns and interests.”

Gaming the demise of the Saudi monarchy has been a flourishing industry on the think-tank circuit for the past dozen years. Not long ago I sat in private conclaves of US national security officials with a sprinkling of invited experts where the head-shaking, chin-pulling consensus held that the Saudi royal family would be gone in ten years. A premise of the “realist” view that American policy in the region should shift towards Iran was that the Saudi monarchy would collapse and Sunni power along with it. All of us misunderestimated the Saudis.

Now the Saudis have emerged at the top of a Sunni coalition against Iran–limited for the moment to the Houthi insurgency in Yemen, to be sure, but nonetheless the most impressive piece of diplomacy in the Sunni world since Nasser, and perhaps in modern times. That attributes a lot of importance to a coalition assembled for a minor matter in a small country, but it may be the start of something important: the self-assertion of the Sunni world in response to the collapse of American regional power, the threat of Sunni jihadist insurgencies, and the Shi’ite bid for regional hegemony.