RUTHFULLY YOURS

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter argued at the Reagan Defense Forum on Saturday that Russia and China pose a “potentially more damaging” threat than terrorist groups like ISIS because of “their size and capabilities.”

“Russia appears intent to play spoiler by flouting these principles and the international community. Meanwhile, China is a rising power, and growing more ambitious in its objectives and capabilities,” Carter said. “Of course, neither Russia nor China can overturn that order, given its resilience and staying power. But both present different challenges for it.”

He reminded the Reagan Library audience that his recent trip to Asia was his third as Defense secretary.

Carter stressed that “in the face of Russia’s provocations and China’s rise, we must embrace innovative approaches to protect the United States and strengthen that international order.”

Russia, he said, “violated sovereignty” of Ukraine and Georgia and is “actively trying to intimidate the Baltic states,” while “throwing gasoline on an already dangerous fire” in Syria.

So, this is what we have come to in the Bill O’Reilly KillingIcons series. First, a book that entertainingly hypothesizes an assassination out of thin gruel (Killing Patton) and now a book about a failed assassination attempt (Killing Reagan). Except very little about O’Reilly’s most recent book is even about the assassination attempt on President Reagan—unless you want to count the character assassination by O’Reilly and his (actual) writer, Martin Dugard. It’s little more than the latest attempt by Bill O’Reilly to gain mainstream acceptance.

Not long ago, I wrote that comparing Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump was the biggest insult imaginable to Reagan’s legacy. Not any more. This garbage far surpasses it, in no small part because the big breaking news that O’Reilly claims justifies his rush job on this sloppy, poorly constructed book was already discussed—and mostly discarded—in 1988.

That’s right, Bill, the 1980s called and they want their breaking news back.

The big breaking news (in Bill O’Reilly’s mind) is an internal investigation conducted by then chief of staff Howard Baker into the condition of White House operations in the wake of the Iran-Contra affair. Baker asked his longtime staffers James Cannon and Thomas Griscom to give him an assessment of the situation.

“It is only when the Western chancelleries break out of their delusional bubble and acknowledge the Manichean and irreconcilable nature of the challenge posed by their Islamist adversaries that their policies will stand the slightest chance of success.”

Efraim Karsh, professor emeritus at King’s College London and currently professor of political studies at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, has written a tour de force on the follies of great-power Middle East policies over the past century, down to the disastrous misconceptions and blunders of President Barack Obama.

The Tail Wags the Dog [1] begins with some myth-busting about the Sykes-Picot agreement, now ritually denounced as a British-French imperialist grab of the Middle East from which its current woes originate. Actually, Karsh demonstrates from the historical record, Britain and France sought to construct a unified Arab empire that would replace the Ottoman Empire. Instead they were outmaneuvered by local actors—namely Sharif Hussein of Mecca and his sons, Faisal and Abdullah—into forging what are now Jordan, Syria, and Iraq, of which the latter two (at least) were undoubtedly problematic entities from the start.