RUTHFULLY YOURS

Old habits die hard. On April 29, Itar-Tass, the state-owned Russian news agency, issued a press release. Following talks between Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and his Cuban counterpart, Bruno Rodriguez, Russia is keen to invest in Cuba.

The two countries want to resolve tensions arising from a legacy of debt that has long plagued relations between them. In the 30 years before its break-up, the Soviet Union supplied Cuba with oil at beneath the world market price, and did not always demand full and immediate payment.

Cuba sent the bulk of its sugar production to the Comecon countries in return, but the value of the sugar exported was much less than that of the oil imported. Over the years Cuba incurred a debt of about $35 billion.

Russia’s rulers, lonely in European diplomatic circles after their annexation of Crimea, have decided they need friends in the world. Cuba is being embraced as if the Cold War had never ended. So the recent talks have resulted in Russia writing off 90 percent of the $35 billion owed by Cuba.

This may sound drastic, but all is not lost. The two governments, no doubt with assorted cronies and hangers-on, can work together to profit from the remaining $3.5 billion. The Itar-Tass press release quotes Lavrov as saying that the $3.5 billion will be transformed into “investments” and, in his words, “we’re interested in making these investments productive to the maximum.”

In the geopolitical struggles between capitalism and Communism in the 20th century, Cuba had an importance out of all proportion to its size. When Fidel Castro overthrew the Batista dictatorship in 1959, many outsiders expected his government to be quickly replaced by one more friendly to American interests. But Cuba adopted a communist model devised by Che Guevara, the theoretician of the revolution, and received such massive help from the Soviet Union that the new regime became entrenched.

THIS BLIP ON THE RADAR OF THE 2014 CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS IS CAUSING HIVES AMONG STATUS QUO REPUBLICANS….CANTOR LOST AND BRAT WON FAIR AND SQUARE. YOU CAN’T BE A CROSS DRESSING REPUBLICAN WHO VOTES FOR AND SUPPORTS POLICIES INIMICAL TO CONSERVATIVES. THERE ARE PLENTY OF BRILLIANT, ENERGETIC, PRINCIPLED GOP INCUMBENTS WHO CAN FILL CANTOR’S SLIPPERS AND DO BETTER…RSK

The best candidates for GOP leader are Paul Ryan and Jeb Hensarling.

The rout of Majority Leader Eric Cantor means a period of turmoil for House Republicans, but also a chance for some new and invigorating leadership. Mr. Cantor announced Wednesday he’ll resign as leader by the end of July, and various Members are considering a run to replace him. This is a chance to fix what has too often been a dysfunctional majority.

One place to start is not by panicking into a false conclusion about the reasons for defeat. David Brat, the economics professor who beat Mr. Cantor 56% to 45%, rode a wave of popular frustration with Washington and an incumbent who had lost touch with his district. Considering the unpopularity of Congress, the surprise this year is that we haven’t seen more such upsets.

Far from being a radical, Mr. Brat sounded traditional free-market themes and assailed the House GOP for getting too close to big business. He ran against Fannie Mae FNMA Freddie Mac, , as well as the farm and flood insurance bills that Mr. Cantor guided through the House this year. To the extent his victory warns the GOP to disavow crony capitalism, Mr. Brat has done a public service. Let’s hope he joins the GOP’s growth wing, and maybe now the Export-Import Bank will finally be allowed to expire.

Mr. Cantor also suffered from having to govern in a polarized Washington. That fault lies more with President Obama and the Republican kamikazes who hurt the GOP image by shutting down the government, but many grass-roots activists wanted someone to pay for that political failure. Mr. Cantor’s national travels also took him away from his district and he rarely engaged with grass-roots activists.

In the June 5 issue of Rolling Stone magazine, Bill McKibben declares his desire to “set the world on a fundamentally new course.” He’s inviting fellow climate-change activists to participate in a “People’s Climate March” in New York City on Sept. 20—which he hopes will be the “largest demonstration yet of human resolve in the face of climate change.”

Mr. McKibben is among the world’s most famous environmentalists. He’s written or edited 15 books and been awarded honorary degrees from 18 colleges and universities. He is also the founder of 350.org, whose goal is to reduce atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels to 350 parts per million from the current level of about 400 parts per million. To achieve that goal, he’s written that “we need to cut our fossil fuel use by a factor of twenty over the next few decades.”

But what are the actual implications of cutting fossil fuels 20-fold? Let’s “do the math,” as Mr. McKibben is fond of saying.

Global hydrocarbon consumption is now about 218 million barrels of oil equivalent energy a day, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, which includes 83 million barrels of oil as well as about 75 million barrels of oil equivalent from coal and about 60 million barrels of oil equivalent from natural gas. Reducing that by a factor of 20 would cut global hydrocarbon use to the energy equivalent of 11 million barrels of oil a day, roughly the amount of energy now consumed by India, where 400 million people lack access to electricity.

In 2012, the average resident of planet Earth consumed about 1.3 gallons of oil-equivalent energy a day from hydrocarbons. If Mr. McKibben’s plan were enacted—and we shared those available hydrocarbons equally—-each of us would be allotted about eight fluid ounces of oil-equivalent energy from hydrocarbons a day. Today, the average resident of Bangladesh uses about half a liter of oil equivalent—slightly less than 17 ounces—a day. Under Mr. McKibben’s prescription, the average Bangladeshi would be required to cut his hydrocarbon use by about half.

The fall of Mosul, Iraq, to al Qaeda terrorists this week is as big in its implications as Russia’s annexation of Crimea. But from the Obama presidency, barely a peep.

Barack Obama is fiddling while the world burns. Iraq, Pakistan, Ukraine, Russia, Nigeria, Kenya, Syria. These foreign wildfires, with more surely to come, will burn unabated for two years until the United States has a new president. The one we’ve got can barely notice or doesn’t care.

Last month this is what Barack Obama said to the 1,064 graduating cadets at the U.S. Military Academy: “Four and a half years later, as you graduate, the landscape has changed. We have removed our troops from Iraq. We are winding down our war in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda’s leadership on the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan has been decimated.”

That let-the-sunshine-in line must have come back to the cadets, when news came Sunday that the Pakistani Taliban, who operate in that border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan, had carried out a deadly assault on the main airport in Karachi, population 9.4 million. To clarify, the five Taliban Mr. Obama exchanged for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl are Afghan Taliban who operate on the other side of the border.

Within 24 hours of the Taliban attack in Pakistan, Boko Haram’s terrorists in Nigeria kidnapped 20 more girls, adding to the 270 still-missing—”our girls,” as they were once known.

Then Mosul fell. The al Qaeda affiliate known as ISIS stormed and occupied the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, population 1.8 million and not far from Turkey, Syria and Iran. It took control of the airport, government buildings, and reportedly looted some $430 million from Mosul’s banks. ISIS owns Mosul.

Iraq’s army in tatters, ISIS rolled south Wednesday and took the city of Tikrit. It is plausible that this Islamic wave will next take Samarra and then move on to Baghdad, about 125 miles south of Tikrit. They will surely stop outside Baghdad, but that would be enough. Iraq will be lost.

Julian Hassan graduated from Vassar College with a degree in Cognitive Science and Russian. He is currently an intern at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni in Washington, D.C. Last year, their ”What Will They Learn?” project gave Vassar an “F” ranking for weak curricular standards.

Julian Hassan stood up for Israel against faculty, Students for Justice in Palestine and J Street U

I graduated from Vassar College in May 2014. I was the President of the Vassar Conservative Libertarian Union, and the anti-Israel fervor found me.

Before we go into this sordid story, it gives us perspective on the times to remember that Vassar College was once a great friend of Israel. In 1975, “Students React Quickly to U.N. Zionism Vote” was a headline in the school paper:

“Concerned Vassar students gathered in the Chapel on a rainy Nov. 12 to protest the U.N. resolution condemning Zionism as racism. Chaplain George Williamson, Jewish Chaplain Derry Baker, Professor Benruy Kraut and two prominent Jewish community leaders, Rabbis Arnold and Zimmet spoke at the student organized rally.”

It took thirty years, but what if I told you today that this same college community now views Zionism as the most insidious form of racism. Would it seem Orwellian?

Two student groups, Students for Justice in Palestine and JStreetU, were formed last fall. Both liberal, SJP rallies against a two state solution while JStreetU claims to endorse one. At a glance they might seem different, but they share a lot in common when it comes to condemning attempts to by me and my group to counter anti-Israel propaganda on campus.

In December 2013, the American Studies Association released a resolution boycotting Israel. Reminiscent of students in 1975, the Vassar administration swiftly rejected this resolution right after New Years 2014.

Diana West, author of American Betrayal, graciously consented to an interview with Marcia. While garnering enthusiastic reviews, Ms. West has been excoriated by some members of the conservative media, accused of being a crackpot and closet John Birch Society member. Apparently many of her critics never bothered to read her book, though, or check her voluminous research. This reviewer has read her book and the subsequent rebuttal addressing her attackers — reviewed here and here, respectively.

Marcia: I’d like to start by inquiring about the mechanics of writing the book. Before conservatism was much more than a gleam in Bill Buckley’s eye there was scarcely a conservative publication or organization that didn’t have M. Stanton Evans’ fingerprints. Did he encourage you to write the book?

Diana: Perhaps you’re thinking of Stanton Evans’ father?

Marcia: Yes I am. Sorry, my confusion. They both wrote books about McCarthy and I conflated the two.

Diana: I didn’t get to know M. Stanton Evans until after I was already at work on American Betrayal. That said, I consider his seminal book, Blacklisted by History, an inspiration, and not only because it sheds new and vindicating light (and documents) on McCarthy’s career, and offers a damning case against his political enemies. What Evans’ McCarthy book also demonstrates is that it is possible, through much hard detective work, to assemble an archive of facts, primary-source materials, from which to reconstruct reality-based history – as opposed to the endlessly recycled “court history” our professional historians tend to produce. The “conventional wisdom” may be conventional but it is also, I find more and more, usually wrong.

While working on American Betrayal, I had a question related to something in Blacklisted – I think it might have been to ask Stan to elaborate on why it was, after he had assembled the facts about Joseph McCarthy, there was still no redress, and whether he thought there ever would be. I was still rather innocent about the lengths the Establishment goes to preserve its “narrative.”

Anyway, someone gave me Stan’s number and I just called him up. From that time forward, he was always generous with time and expertise. Later, when the disinformation campaign against American Betrayal was on – Stan labeled it a “mugging” – he was very supportive and actually wrote two related essays: Harry Hopkins, Diana West and Me, and In Defense of Diana West. It was a career highlight to be introduced by him last November when the Center for Security Policy gave me the Mightier Pen Award for American Betrayal.

The last engaging book I read on the means and ends of warfare before John Lewis’s was a 2009 abridged version of Winston Churchill’s The River War, originally published in 1899. Its original, full title included An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan.

The term “reconquest” was misleading, because the Sudan had never before been “conquered” by the British, but was under the jurisdiction of Egypt, then a protectorate of Britain. Egypt was unable to deal militarily with the Dervish forces that meant to conquer it. It fell to Britain extinguish the Mahdist or Islamic threat, which, unchecked, could well have spread from Egypt to the rest of North Africa and the Middle East.

General Herbert Kitchener was tasked with that formidable project. Churchill describes the meticulous and determined campaign he waged, which was not just a matter of sending an army into the desert wastes to fight fanatical tribesmen. It meant reforming the corrupt and ineffectual Egyptian government, rebuilding the Egyptian army and its Sudanese levies, building a railroad into enemy territory, and mastering the stupendous logistics of supplies and men. The stated objective was to erase the Mahdist regime as a military and political threat in the whole region. The climax of the campaign was the Battle of Omdurman in September 1898, in which the Dervish army was utterly decimated and routed.

In the end, over a year later, the successor of Mahdi Muhammad Ahmed, Abdallah ibn Muhammad, was killed and the remnants of his forces routed at the Battle of Umm Diwaykarat.

The Sudan Campaign had clear military and political objectives. The British government then had the will to take the necessary actions to destroy an enemy and discredit the ideology that moved it.

Churchill noted in The River War that, ” The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property – either as a child, a wife, or a concubine – must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.”

“America cannot do a damn thing.”

A banner displaying that slogan adorned the stage of an elegant mausoleum in Tehran where Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, appeared last week. Negotiations to conclude a deal ending Western sanctions on the Islamic republic, the world’s foremost sponsor of terrorism, in exchange for a verifiable halt to its nuclear weapons program, are now in a critical phase with a new round of talks to begin Monday in Geneva. At this moment, it would make sense for Iran’s rulers to soothe and reassure their American interlocutors. Why are they provoking and taunting them instead?

Because they can. They are convinced that the U.S. government is as feckless and self-deluding today as it was when “America cannot do a damn thing” was first proclaimed, 35 years ago this fall, by Iran’s revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei, after his followers seized the American Embassy in Tehran and took the diplomats working there hostage.

Doing so was not just a violation of international law. It was a casus belli — an act that unquestionably would have justified going to war against the fledgling Islamic republic. Instead, President Jimmy Carter launched a rescue attempt that failed. After that, he utilized diplomacy to no effect.

The number of executions in Iran in 2014, up to June 5, now totals 325; the Iranian government has admitted to only 122. These numbers do not include the Iranian regime’s “silent executions” — depriving prisoners who were tortured of medical care, and then claiming they died in prison of “natural causes.”

On February 13, two prisoners were publicly hanged in Kouzehgari Square, in the Iranian city of Shiraz, and in the same spot on February 19, another prisoner was also publicly hanged.

The number of executions in Iran in 2014, up to June 5, now totals 325; the Iranian government has admitted to only 122, according to the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center’s Chart of Executions by the Islamic Republic of Iran – 2014. These numbers do not include the Iranian regime’s “silent executions” — depriving prisoners who were tortured of medial care, and then claiming they died in prison of “natural causes.”

The Mehr News Agency, an official mouthpiece of the Iranian regime, also reported that a prisoner was condemned to the sharia law punishment of “cutting off one hand and one foot.”

The recent victories in Iraq and Syria by the terrorists of ISIS — said to be an offshoot of al-Qaeda — have emboldened the group and its followers throughout the Middle East. Now the terrorists are planning to move their jihad not only to Jordan, but also to the Gaza Strip, Sinai and Lebanon.

Failure to act will result in the establishment in the Middle East of a dangerous extremist Islamic empire that will pose a threat to American and Western interests.

“The danger is getting closer to our bedrooms.” — Oraib al-Rantawi, Jordanian political analyst

Islamist terrorists in Iraq and Syria have begun creeping toward neighboring countries, sources close to the Islamic fundamentalists revealed this week.

The terrorists, who belong to The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria [ISIS — known as DAESH in Arabic] and are said to be an offshoot of al-Qaeda, are planning to take their jihad to Jordan, Lebanon, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula — after having already captured large parts of Syria and Iraq, the sources said.

The capture this week by ISIS of the cities of Mosul and Tikrit in Iraq has left many Arabs and Muslims in the region worried that their countries soon may be targeted by the terrorists, who seek to create a radical Islamist emirate in the Middle East.

According to the sources, ISIS leader Abu Baker al-Baghdadi recently discussed with his lieutenants the possibility of extending the group’s control beyond Syria and Iraq.