Flaubert's politics compared with Marx's

Flaubert strove to make sense of the politics of the nineteenth century in the same way that Marx did. In the “The Politics of Flaubert” Edmund Wilson writes, “we become aware that Marx and Flaubert started from very similar assumptions and that they were actuated by moral aims almost equally uncompromising. Both implacably hated the bourgeois, and both were resolved at any cost of worldly success to keep outside the bourgeois system. . . The author of Das Kapital can hardly, of course be said to have had a very high opinion of any period of human history; but in comparison with the capitalist nineteenth century, he did betray a certain tenderness for Greece and Rome and the Middle Ages. . . .”

“Karl Marx’s judgment on his age was the Communist Manifesto. . . Flaubert’s L’ Education sentimentale . . . plants deep in our mind an idea which we never quite get rid of: the suspicion that our middle-class society of manufacturers, businessmen and bankers, of people who live on or deal in investments, so far from being redeemed by its culture, has ended by cheapening and invalidating all the departments of culture, political, scientific, artistic and religious, as well as corrupting and weakening the ordinary human relations: love, friendship and loyalty to cause – till the whole civilization seems to dwindle.”

In Flaubert’s novel “There are no hero, no villain, to arouse us, no clowns to entertain us, no scenes to wring our hearts. Yet the effect is deeply moving. It is the tragedy of nobody in particular, but of the poor human race itself reduced to such ineptitude, such cowardice, such commonness such weak irresolution – arriving, with so many fine notions in its head, so many noble words on its lips, at a failure which is all the more miserable because those who have failed in their roles have even forgotten what roles they were cast for. . . .”

“The one conspicuous respect in which Flaubert’s point of view on the events of 1848 diverges from that of Marx has been thrown into special relief by the events of our own time [This essay appears in The Triple Thinkers which was first published in 1948]. For Marx, the evolution of the socialist into a proletarian-persecuting policeman would have been blamed on the bourgeois in Senecal (a Socialist who becomes a policeman and shoots a proletarian Flaubert describes favorably); for Flaubert, it is a development of socialism implicit in socialist beginnings. He distrusted . . . the authoritarian aims of the socialists. It is Flaubert’s conception that Senecal, given his bourgeois hypocrisy, is still carrying out a socialist principle – or rather, that his behavior as a policeman and his yearnings toward socialist control are both derived from his impulse toward despotism.

“We may not be prepared to conclude that the evolution of Senecal represents the whole destiny of socialism, but we must recognize that Flaubert had here brought to attention a danger of which Marx was not aware. We have had the opportunity to see how even a socialism which has come to power as the result of a proletarian revolution can breed a political police of almost unprecedented ruthlessness – how the example of Marx himself, with his emphasis on dictatorial control rather than on democratic processes, has contributed to produce this disaster. . . .”

Flaubert wrote to George Sand about his pessimism. “Oh, how tired I am of the ignoble worker, the inept bourgeois, the stupid peasant and the odious ecclesiastic.” But whereas most of us a century after Flaubert wrote have selected Liberal Democracy as the lesser of all possible evils, Flaubert concluded “Our salvation now is in a legitimate aristocracy, by which I mean a majority which will be made up of something other than numerals.” Wilson adds, “Renan himself and Taine were having recourse to similar ideas of the salvation of society through an ‘elite.’ In “Flaubert’s case . . . The Commune [of 1870] has stimulated . . . a demand for his own kind of despotism.”

Neither Marx nor Flaubert thought the known proletariat capable of acting in its own best interest. Marx and Engels thought that the proletariat could eventually be brought to that place, but Flaubert did not. “To Flaubert the proletariat made a certain pathetic appeal, but it seemed to him much too stupid to act effectively in its own behalf; the Commune threw him into such a panic that he reviled the Communards as criminals and brutes.”

Flaubert become misanthropic: “Never, my dear old chap, ‘he had written Earnest Feydeau,’ have I felt so colossal a disgust for mankind. I’d like to drown the human race under my vomit.” And in Bouvard et Pechuchet, left unfinished at his death “The bourgeois has ceased to preach to the bourgeois: as the first big cracks begin to show in the structure of the nineteenth century, he shifts his complaint to the incompetence of humanity, for he is unable to believe in, or even to conceive, any non-bourgeois way out.”

COMMENT: Edmund Wilson seems caught up in Flaubert’s pessimism. He read L’Education sentimentale enough times to eventually appreciate it. Ford Madox Ford read it fourteen times. But neither Wilson nor Ford despaired of humanity to the extent that Flaubert did who thought an intellectual Elite, perhaps the sort of elite described by Julien Benda, mankind’s only salvation. By the end of the Cold War, most of us see Liberal Democracy as mankind’s best hope. Within our Liberal Democracies the Left longs for a Paternalistic elite, or a Paternalistically managed system that will care for them from the “cradle to the grave.’ On the Right side of our Liberal Democracies is distrust much like Flaubert’s. The benefit of being cared for by an elite is more than countered by the fear that any elite that has ever existed has succumbed to that same human nature Flaubert railed against, and there is no different nature available to any elite that will exist in our future. Therefore, many of us exposed to pessimistic writers continue to believe that we should elect politicians for limited periods of time and give them very limited powers and hope for the best.

Some on the Left both in Europe and America expected a more thorough-going socialism from the Obama administration not fully recognizing that the checks and balances built into American government prevent any American executive from overturning Liberal Democracy to that extent. Those on the Left with more realistic expectations hoped that Obama would move the U.S. in the direction of the Welfare Statism of Europe and he has done his best. Knowing this, will a majority in the U.S. return him to a second term? Or will there be a majority who think the time isn’t right to vote ourselves any more entitlements., for once we have them, we learn from France’s experience, we never want to give them up – even if it is proved beyond doubt that we cannot afford them.

Muslims cheered on 9/11, many still do

http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/2011/09/11/flashback-muslims-cheered-911-attacks-video/

“Many Muslims celebrated on 9/11. Many continue to celebrate. Some even want a huge mosque at Ground Zero. Never forget. Never submit.”

“ The area also includes two luxury apartment high-rises that erupted into cheers when the World Trade Center fell on 9/11. Law enforcement has dubbed them the “Taliban Towers.” Investigators routinely find posters and computer screen savers celebrating Osama bin Laden as a hero.

“ Down the street is a Saudi charitable front for al-Qaida once run by bin Laden’s nephew. The U.S. branch of the dangerous Muslim Brotherhood is in the same office park. Farther down in Alexandria is the Saudi madrassa that’s graduated several terrorists, including the al-Qaida operative who plotted to assassinate President Bush.

“ Agents on the ground working the inordinate number of terror cases in the area say it’s no less than the base of operations for the bad guys in America”

COMMENT: Too many anti-American, pro-anyone-who-is-not-American Liberal/Leftists are promoting the same sort of thing David Horowitz has railed against in his Unholy Alliance, Radical Islam and the American Left. Nothing seems to have changed. I recently criticized some disruptive Islamist actions only to have Leftists try to turn the tables on me: It was really disgruntled Jews and Brits who were disruptive. Another searched a You-Tube of the disruption by Muslims of the Zubin Mehta concert in honor of the Queen of Denmark and declared “I don’t see any Muslims.” Maybe he didn’t, but why say that as though the story was being concocted to persecute poor innocent Muslims?

Muslims who attack any part of the West, or seek to undermine it through their “Creeping Sharia” should be opposed. We should also oppose those who defend the nefarious acts of anti-Western Muslims. Those who assert that 9/11 was caused by Americans or Jews are doing just what recent Leftists did on a smaller scale who blamed the disruption of the Zubin Mehta concert on Jews and Brits.

Imagine what our present world would be like if after December 7^th 1941, people like our present-day leftists railed at us for causing the attack? Those poor Japanese only attacked us because we were cutting off their supply of oil. We shouldn’t have done that. We should have left their Chinese enterprises alone. It isn’t our business what they do over there. Who are we to challenge the Japanese? Do we think we are better than they are? That’s pure racism!

That, of course, didn’t happen. We went to war against the Japanese, defeated them, and in subsequent years saw them adopt Liberal Democracy patterned on the U.S. model.

After 9/11 Bush launched a war against the Islamists. Islamists didn’t have a single name and it took some research to get their various elements straight, but it didn’t matter. We were able to figure out who are enemies were. We attacked them in Afghanistan and in Iraq. America’s Left-Wing enemies verbally attacked us on cue for not having dotted our i’s and crossed our t’s; what did Saddam Hussein, they demanded, ever do to us. Claire Berlinski’s grandfather was dying at the time (http://www.city-journal.org/2011/eon0909cb.html ). He assessed the attack on 9/11 in these words: “They must pay for it with a city.” We took more than a city. We conquered two antagonistic nations and set them on the road to democracy. Leftists are looking under the table and the other way, but there is every reason to believe that Bush’s “war on terror” provided one of the causes, if not the main impetus for the “Arab Spring.” -- yes, quite a bit more than a city.

In a review of Hitch-22 in “The Australian” David Free writes, “While Noam Chomsky and others construed the attacks as a more or less straightforward response to US foreign policy, Hitchens, seasoned by the Rushdie affair, called the hijackers "nihilists . . . at war with culture as a whole". One of his earliest ripostes to the Chomsky position has stuck in my mind. Noting that September 11 happened to mark the anniversary of the 1973 military coup in Chile -- a CIA-backed enormity that gave democratic Chileans every right to resent the US government -- Hitchens wrote: ‘I don't know any Chilean participant in this great historical struggle who would not rather have died -- you'll have to excuse the expression -- than commit an outrage against humanity that was even remotely comparable to the atrocities in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.’”

One day after the attack, Hitchen’s wrote, “It was as if Charlie Manson had been made God for a day.”

The Left of course will never agree with such assessments. They will never say anything good about the U.S. or the West. That is a given so there is no point trying to placate them – any more than there is to placate Islamists, shrouding the fact (as the Obama administration seems to be doing) that it was Islamic forces bent on subverting freedom that brought down the twin towers so as not to offend members of the Muslim Brotherhood and their ilk.

An editorial in this morning’s “The Press-Enterprise” begins “America’s institutional memory of Sept, 11, 2001, is shaping up as a sense of loss without context. There seems to be an effort to forget, whether out of revulsion or political correctness, that 19 religious fanatics drove jets full of people and fuel into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, and crashed another in Pennsylvania. As the nation pays its respects today to the 2,977 innocent victims of the attacks, Americans should also remember that the attacks arose from a totalitarian impulse that free people must defeat.” Some of us do – I don’t know how many.

Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brothers since 9/11

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/09/us-sept11-alqaeda-future-idUSTRE7881DS20110909

Mark Hosenball of Reuters writes,

“Al Qaeda's core leadership is badly wounded and almost certainly incapable of mounting another attack like the one on September 11, 2001, in New York and Washington, according to U.S. and European security officials.

“But even as the threat of spectacular, coordinated mass-casualty attacks by al Qaeda seems to have faded, it has been replaced by new worries -- the network's violent spinoff groups and individual radical "lone wolves," to name two.”. . .

"AQ Central has never been weaker, they have been pounded into submission" by CIA drone attacks, said Roger Cressey, a former top White House counterterrorism official, referring to al Qaeda by its initials. . . .”

“A worrisome development is the proliferation of individual violent militants -- the "lone wolves" -- who operate unseen by intelligence agencies and police and can create mayhem with a carful of home-made explosives or guns. The result is a lower risk of future large conflagrations but a growing threat of smaller attacks that could be harder to detect and thwart.”

COMMENT: I don’t agree that the “proliferation of individual violent militants” is a new “development” if that is what is being implied. Khomeini discussed this sort of thing years ago. He didn’t want to give names to militant groups. Groups with names and organizations could more readily be coopted. He had the Muslim Brothers as an example of that. They became much less militant through their efforts to be recognized as non-threatening in Egypt. They claim (in private) to have the same goals, but the more militant activists don’t believe them.

Also, In an editorial earlier this year entitled “Obama and the Muslim Brothers” http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jun/30/obama-and-the-muslim-brothers/ a Washington Times representative writes, “The administration is reaching out to Egypt’s radical Muslim Brotherhood ahead of parliamentary elections scheduled for September. “The political landscape in Egypt has changed, and is changing,” an unnamed White House source told Politico. “It is in our interests to engage with all of the parties that are competing for parliament or the presidency.” As President Obama’s previous attempts at outreach to Islamists have failed, there is little reason to believe this effort will succeed. . . .”

“The White House appears to be blind to the schizophrenic message it is broadcasting throughout the Middle East. Mr. Obama says he wants to improve relations with Islam, yet he supports policies that offend orthodox Muslim morality.”

COMMENT: One can hardly blame Obama for recognizing that the real power in the Middle East is with radical Muslims. Maybe the “orthodox” Muslims are offended, but some of us have been offended by their unwillingness to deal with or ever challenge radical Islam. And didn’t Jimmy Carter, of whom it was said that he never met an authoritarian ruler he didn’t like, set the pattern for this?

Apparently Obama is still reaching out to the Muslim Brothers inasmuch as they were invited to the National Cathedral 9/11 program. The most popular Christian denomination in the U.S.(Baptist) is publicizing the fact that while the Muslim Brothers were invited by Obama, it was not.

Evangelicals left off, but Muslim Brothers allowed on

Lest I be seen as complaining about the mote in Britain’s eye while ignoring the plank in my own, here is an article from www.foxnews.com entitled “Evangelicals Left Off National Cathedral 9/11 Program” http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/09/06/evangelicals-left-off-national-cathedral-11-program/ Is Fox News the only news agency that picked this up – or merely the only one willing to report it?

“A weekend of religious-themed observances at Washington National Cathedral marking the tenth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks will include a Buddhist nun and an Imam, but not an evangelical Christian, leading the head of the Southern Baptist Convention to ask President Obama to reconsider attending the event.

“A Call to Compassion” will include an interfaith prayer vigil on Sept. 11. It will feature the dean of the Cathedral, the Bishop of Washington, a rabbi, Buddhist nun and incarnate lama, a Hindu priest, the president of the Islamic Society of North America and a Muslim musician.

“However, Southern Baptists, representing the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, were not invited to participate – and neither were leaders from any evangelical Christian organization.

“’It’s not surprising,’ said Frank Page, president of the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee. “There is a tragic intolerance toward Protestants and particularly toward evangelicals and I wish the president would refuse to speak unless it was more representative.”

Richard Weinberg, the Cathedral’s director of communications, confirmed that Southern Baptists were not extended an invitation to participate.

“’The goal was to have interfaith representation,’ he told Fox News Radio. ‘The Cathedral itself is an Episcopal church and it stands to reason that our own clergy serve as Christian representatives.’ . . .”

“Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, told Fox News Radio the lineup was better suited for the United Nations than the United States.

“Three quarters of the American people identify as Christian and nearly a third of them are evangelical Christian,” Perkins said. “And yet, there is not a single evangelical on the program.”

“There’s no doubt that this is clearly politically correct,” Perkins told Fox News Radio. “It is historically inaccurate that in times of need or mourning that Americans pray to the Hindu or Buddhist Gods or the God of Islam. America is overtly a Christian nation that prays to the Judeo-Christian God – and specifically to Jesus Christ.”

“Page called political correctness the “elephant in the room.”

“It is very clear that it is that it is not politically correct to include evangelical Christians,” he said.

“Obviously, tolerance is at work here. In a nation whose current God is tolerance, it is absolutely hypocritical that the major group to be excluded and be intolerant of – is evangelical Christians.”

COMMENT:  I have read of Brits afraid to speak out against ‘Creeping Sharia’ for fear of being accused of “racism.”  is there something like that at work in the U.S. as well.  Is Christianity to be rejected by the most Christian nation in the world because its Politically Correct leaders accept the pro-Islamist definition that Christianity is racist?  Sounds like it.

Is Obama anti-Israel?

That Obama is carrying on Bush’s policies in Iraq and Afghanistan seems unquestionable. One pundit entitles his article to this effect, “Barack Obama, Neocon?” [From http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/05/029062.php ]

But Obama’s foreign policy diverges from Bush’s notably on the matter of Israel. This same pundit writes,

“But it is the last section of Obama's speech that is drawing the most attention. He called on Israel to accept withdrawal to its 1967 borders as a precursor to "peace" negotiations with the Palestinian Authority and Hamas:

[From Obama’s speech] The fact is, a growing number of Palestinians live west of the Jordan River. Technology will make it harder for Israel to defend itself.

I'm not sure how this is an argument for Israeli withdrawal.

[From Obama’s speech] “The United States believes that negotiations should result in two states, with permanent Palestinian borders with Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, and permanent Israeli borders with Palestine. We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states. ...

“These principles provide a foundation for negotiations. Palestinians should know the territorial outlines of their state; Israelis should know that their basic security concerns will be met.

Under Obama's formula, the Palestinians would begin negotiations "knowing" that their territory will include, among other things, the entire Temple Mount, including the Western Wall. Obama can't seriously believe that Israel would accept this as a starting point (or ending point) of negotiations.

It gets worse from there:

[From Obama’s speech] I'm aware that these steps alone will not resolve the conflict, because two wrenching and emotional issues will remain: the future of Jerusalem, and the fate of Palestinian refugees.

But moving forward now on the basis of territory and security provides a foundation to resolve those two issues in a way that is just and fair, and that respects the rights and aspirations of both Israelis and Palestinians.

So in Obama's view, the "right of return" is on the table, and it is incumbent on Israel to make further concessions, on top of acceptance of the 1967 borders--correctly labeled "indefensible" by Prime Minister Netanyahu--if it wishes to continue to exist.

Others will have more profound observations on Obama's seemingly gratuitous change in America's policy toward Israel. For the moment, let me just note this: as with Obamacare and a number of other issues, Obama evidently is acting from conviction, not political calculation. The Mearsheimer/Walt hypothesis, widely accepted on the Left, is that the Israeli lobby exerts a sinister influence on American foreign policy. The truth, however, is that the American people overwhelmingly side with Israel, for reasons that do not need to be explained to our readers. It is shared conviction and culture, not lobbying, that accounts for America's traditionally pro-Israel policy.

Obama will not gain politically by sabotaging Israel; on the contrary. He must know that his re-election is in grave jeopardy, and going out of his way to put his administration at odds with Israel will hurt, not help, his chances. So one can only conclude that Obama is genuinely, as a matter of philosophical conviction, anti-Israel.

COMMENT: I agree in part with this writer. But Americans sympathize with Israel for more than one reason. My reason is that they are a Western nation and I would hate to see any Western nation bullied out of existence by militant Islam.

Another reason is that Christian Fundamentalism is predominately ‘Dispensational’ which embraces an eschatological perspective hinging on Israel “staying in the land.” If those of who support Israel because it is of the West are not vocal enough, the Dispensationalists are sure to be.

However, while a withdrawal to Israel’s 1967 borders sounds alarming and absurd to those who have followed the history of Israel, it may not mean that much to the average voter; so if this writers prediction that this speech, at least the part about Israel, will harm Obama politically; someone is going to have to put this matter in different terms. From my standpoint if a nation invades my country and loses, and the cease fire occurs well inside his former territory, I am under no obligation to give back all his land. I may give back most of it, but I may keep enough “high ground” to discourage his invading me again.

From the Dispensationalists standpoint, they are not going to want to give back the temple mount.

From Israel’s standpoint, if returning to the 1967 borders could get Palestine to agree to a two-state solution, including the moving of the Palestinian refugees to the Palestinian state, while retaining Jewish access to the holy places outside this border, then Israel would probably go for it.

No doubt it depends on how this plays out politically. If the voting public becomes convinced that Obama is anti-Israel, this could count against him – even if Israel itself isn’t terribly offended by what Obama has said. 

Donald of Arabia

http://www.arabist.net/blog/2011/5/3/donald-of-arabia.html

I subscribed to a few Arab-Egyptian blogs recently. Here is Issandr El Amrani’s view of Donald Trump:

“I just came back from a few days in New York. As always when in the US, I watch Fox News in the hotel room (not because I think it's representative, but because it's so jaw-droppingly fascinating). On Fox and other channels, Donald Trump is very much the flavor of the moment, as well as an unlikely early leader for the Republican presidential primary. It's a good indication of how weird the Republicans have become, and how the Tea Party crowd has turned it upside down.

“In the video above, the Donald makes some quite insane comments about the Arab world. Some are refreshingly honest, like when he says he would only go to Libya "if we get the oil", and then some very ignorant ones, like how without the US, the Arab countries "wouldn't exist". (My favorite piece of Moroccan-American trivia: the Sultanate of Morocco was the first country to officially recognize the United States in 1777). I tend to think that Trump's bizarre candidacy is a good thing, hoping that it will weaken the Republicans, but then again who knows if the alternative is that much better...”

COMMENT: I frankly haven’t been following domestic politics very much but my mostly-uninformed impression of Trump isn’t unlike Issandr’s. Unlike Issandr I hope the Republican Party can field someone I can have more respect for, but at the present time the Republicans do not seem in very good shape. They impress me as not knowing how to progress; so it may seem to some a good time to bring out the clowns.

I watched most of President Obama’s speech about the killing of Osama bin Laden and thought that if the national election were held the next day, Obama would win. Obama, whatever Liberal errors I might think he embraces, is not a clown. No president, whether Liberal or Conservative could have been more presidential. On the other-hand, I recalled the exultation that followed the First President Bush’s situation after Gulf War number 1. He was so popular it was as though he felt he could phone in his reelection. But Clinton, believing it was “the economy, dummy” was elected instead. Our present economic difficulties are likely to be with us at the time of the next election, and it doesn’t seem likely that Obama’s admiration of the European-style Welfare State is going to find favor with a majority of the voters.

But on the other, other-hand, if Obama is running against a real dummy then his presidential stature may compensate for any economic difficulties, especially if the economy has shown a marked improvement.

Obama to appoint Panetta and Patraeus?!?!

The problem with Liberal presidents isn’t that they don’t believe in defending the country, they do. The problem is that they don’t do it very well; at least that was the case with Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Clinton. Also, the bad guys think our Liberal Presidents are weak so they are more likely to try to push them around than they are with Conservative presidents. The most notable example is Khrushchev who thought Kennedy weak (which historians tell us he was) and pushed and pushed until Kennedy finally stood up to him during the Cuban Missile Crisis. A Liberal President is not likely to totally capitulate – at least it has not happened so far.

I give Obama higher marks than presidents noted above. He started out saying all the Liberal-Radical things, but when he became enmeshed in the job, he did what was necessary. Are our enemies pushing him around more than they would have Bush? Perhaps, but only a little. For example, Qhadaffi gave up his WMD plans during the time Bush was flexing his muscles, but he seemed resolved not to give up anything during the Obama administration. Still, that hasn’t gone terribly well for him, and I rather think Obama did the right thing by letting NATO deal with Qhadaffi rather than risk the expense of three fronts of war.  And perhaps NATO has learned some things since their inept attempt to quell the Serbs.

Conservatives aren’t likely to fault Obama for his recent Defense Department and CIA picks. Witness this FrontPageMag article:

[From http://frontpagemag.com/2011/04/28/defense-department-shakeup/?utm_source=FrontPage+Magazine&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=36303c0b09-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN ]

“With Robert Gates set to leave his post as Pentagon chief this summer, reports are circulating that President Barack Obama will soon appoint CIA Director Leon Panetta to take over as secretary of defense and Gen. David Petraeus to slide into the top spot at the CIA. Given the alternatives that Obama could have chosen—and probably would rather choose—Panetta and Petraeus are solid picks. Not only do they have proven track records and backing in Congress; they also underscore that despite all the rhetoric, Obama continues to fill key security and defense posts with people who understand the country is at war.

“A little history is in order. It pays to recall that as a candidate and in the early months of his presidency, Obama rejected the Bush administration’s characterization of America being a nation at war. For example, the Obama administration made a concerted effort to expunge the “war on terrorism” phraseology from official pronouncements, ordering the executive branch to use the banal, bland and bureaucratic “overseas contingency operations” instead. In quick succession, Obama ordered the closure of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, sped up the pullout of troops from Iraq, put a time limit on the U.S. mission in Afghanistan and made entreaties to the thugs who run Iran. In the midst of this 180-degree turn, Obama’s secretary of homeland security even went so far as to use the Orwellian phrase “man-caused disasters” rather than call terrorism by its name.”

The writer of this article, Alan W. Dowd, goes on to describe the merits of Peneta and Patraeus. Unlike some conservatives who would bite off their tongues rather than say anything good about Obama, he gives Obama credit for doing the right thing. To underscore this confidence Dowd has Obama’s doing the right thing in regard to dealing with our nation’s enemies before he does it. While Panetta and Patraeus have yet to be appointed, he clearly believes the rumor saying that they will be. He believes that Obama, rather than run true to the ideals of the Leftists who helped put him in office, will do his utmost to combat our enemies both militarily and covertly.

This doesn’t mean Obama is giving up his Liberal domestic agenda, and note the advertisement adjacent to the subject article on the first page “Find out More. Help us stop Obama’s Radical transformation of America. Find out more. Subscribe to FrontPageMag.”

I noticed that Fox News reported the same information, but managed it without the “little history” Dowd provides: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/04/28/obama-prepares-announce-new-national-security-team/

War, then and now: Libya

 

I was typing up old poems and putting them in a folder when I came to “Horace and the Preparation for war.” http://www.lawrencehelm.com/2010/08/horace-and-preparation-for-war.html

Lefty, aka Billy Blogblather, didn’t object to that representation of his ideas, if I recall correctly; so I can’t help but wonder what he thinks of Obama’s bombing of Libya. Lefty, as was the case with most of Western Europe, heralded Obama as the inaugurator of world peace and Welfare-Stateism. Western Europe has made the transition from anti-war-anti-Bush, to pro-war against Libya just as Obama has, but I wonder about Lefty. Did he make the transition as well?

Victor Davis Hanson has written a short clever article synopsizing the changes: “By bombing Libya, Obama turned America upside-down.” Since the article is offered for flikr, tweeting, etc. I don’t think Hanson would object to my reproducing most of it here:

By bombing Libya, President Barack Obama accomplished some things once thought absolutely impossible in America:

•War-mongering liberals. Liberals are now chest-thumping about military "progress" in Libya. Even liberal television and radio cite ingenious reasons why an optional, preemptive American intervention in an oil-producing Arab country, without prior congressional approval or majority public support – and at a time of soaring deficits – is well worth supporting, in a sort of "my president, right or wrong" fashion. Apparently, liberal foreign policy is returning to the pre-Vietnam days of the hawkish "best and brightest."

•Europe first. Many Americans long have complained about the opportunistic, utopian Europeans. Under the protective U.S. defense shield, they often privately urged us to deal with dangerous foreign dictators – while staying above the fray to criticize America, at the same time seeking trade advantages and positive global PR. But now the wily Obama has out-waited even the French. He has managed to shame them into acting, using a new possum-like U.S. strategy of playing dead until, finally, even Europe was exasperated – almost as if the president were warning them, "We don't mind the Gadhafi bloodletting if you, who are much closer to it, don't mind." The British Guardian and French Le Monde will be too knee-deep in the Libyan war, busy chalking up Anglo-French "wins" and worrying about European oil concessions, to charge America with the usual imperialism, colonialism and militarism. We are almost back to the 1956 world of the Suez crisis.

•Iraq was just a Libyan prequel. Conservatives have complained that past opposition . . . to George W. Bush's antiterrorism policies and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was more partisan than principled. Obama ended that debate by showing that not only can he embrace – or, on occasion, expand – the Bush-Cheney tribunals, preventative detentions, renditions, Predator attacks, intercepts and wiretaps and Guantanamo Bay, but, now, preemptively attack an Arab oil-exporting country without fear of Hollywood, congressional funding cutoffs, Moveon.org "General Betray Us"-type ads, Cindy Sheehan on the evening news, or "Checkpoint"-like novels. In short, Obama has ensured that the exasperated anti-war movement will never be quite the same.

•Monster-in-recovery. The Gadhafi clan has been wooing Westerners through oil money and multicultural gobbledy-gook. In the past few years, the British released the Lockerbie bomber, a native of Libya; Saif Gadhafi, the would-be artist and scholar and the son of Col. Muammar Gadhafi, essentially bought a Ph.D. from the prestigious London School of Economics; the creepy Harvard-connected Monitor Group hired out cash-hungry "scholars" to write on-spec tributes to Gadhafi's achievements; and singers Mariah Carey, 50 Cent, Beyoncé and other entertainers earned a pile of petro-dollars for crooning before the Gadhafis. Then, suddenly, Obama spoiled the fun and profits by turning Gadhafi from a rehabilitated monster back into Ronald Reagan's old "Mad Dog of the Middle East."

•Stuff happens. Many supporters of the Iraq war condemned Abu Ghraib as the poorly supervised, out-of-control prison it was. Lax American oversight resulted in the sexual humiliation of detained Iraqi insurgents. It was a deplorable episode in which, nonetheless, no one was killed, and yet it took an enormous toll on the credibility of administration officials. But while the media covered the Libyan bombing and the Middle East uprisings, a number of Afghan civilians allegedly were executed by a few rogue American soldiers. That was a far worse transgression than anything that happened at Abu Ghraib under Bush's tenure – but apparently an incident that, in the new media climate, can legitimately be ignored. Obama made "stuff happens" a legitimate defense for those doing their best to run a war from Washington.

•War really is tiring. The media serially blamed a supposedly lazy Ronald Reagan for napping during military operations abroad. George W. Bush was criticized for cutting brush at his Texas ranch while soldiers fought and died in Iraq. Obama rendered all such presidential criticism as mere nitpicking when he started aerial bombardment in the midst of golfing, handicapping the NCAA basketball tournament and taking his family to Rio de Janeiro.

•The road to Damascus? After Bush's interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, many war-weary Americans believed that we would never again get involved in a Middle East war. But now, with Obama's preemptive bombing of Libya, giddy American interventionists are again eyeing Iran, Syria – and beyond!

In short, Obama turned America upside down when he bombed Libya – and in ways we could have scarcely imagined.

With Obama's preemptive bombing of Libya, giddy American interventionists are again eyeing Iran, Syria – and beyond.

Hanson is obviously enjoying his little exaggerations. I can’t imagine Lefty thumping his chest about military progress in Libya. In fact I haven’t heard Lefty say anything at all about Obama or Libya recently. While there may now exist a majority my-President-right-or-wrong Liberals out there, there are probably a growing number of minority Liberals and Leftists who are disillusioned by Obama’s following in the footsteps of all previous presidents who went to war when they deemed it necessary.

As for me, nothing has happened recently that violates the ideas presented in “Horace and the preparation for war.” Idealists may imagine we are, or can be, in a post-war era, but reality keeps contradicting them. Nothing has changed in regard to war since the time of Horace.

Israel's "preemptive" Six Day War

Mike Geary wrote, " Do you not know the history of the region?  Are you ignorant of the lead up to the Six Day War?  Do you not know that it was a preemptive war initiated by Israel?  Are you ignorant of the fact that Israel drove out hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, confiscated their properties and have never compensated them and deny them right of return?   And the religious fanatic settlers and doing the same in the territories.  The Pals have ever right to fight back." 

            If one knows very little about the Six Day War, then one might accept that anti-Israeli calumny -- that Israel attacked the defenseless and peace loving Arabs for no justifiable reasons.  But let us consider the history.  I have Oren's Six Days of War back which at the time I read it (2005) seemed to be the best account of that war in English.  On page 63 we read "Nasser, in a statement released on Palestine Day -- a day of mourning throughout the Arab world, lamenting Israel's Independence -- exhorted, 'Brothers, it is our duty to prepare for the final battle of Palestine.'  While Rabin did not believe that Nasser wanted war, a momentum was gathering that could seriously erode Israel's deterrence power, to the point where the Arabs felt free to attack.

            "That danger seemed to skyrocket between the nights of May 15 and 16.  Initial IDF estimates had put the size of the Egyptian buildup at one division, the 5th -- this in addition to the 30,000 troops already stationed in Sinai and the 10,000 man Palestine Liberation Army division maintained in Gaza.  But then the numbers jumped threefold.  the 2nd and 7th Infantry Divisions had also crossed the Canal, and the 6th Armored was not far behind.  Significantly, the 4th Division under the command of Maj. Gen. Sidqi al-Ghul had crossed the Canal and dug in at Bir al-Thamada.  Each of these units comprised 15,000 men, close to 100 T-54 and T-55 tanks, 150 armored personnel carriers, and a range of Soviet artillery: howitzers, heavy mortars, Katyusha rockets, SU-100 anti-tank guns.  Along with these forces came vast amounts of ammunition, MiG-17 and 21 fighters, and -- IDF intelligence believed --  canisters of poison gas.

            "Rabin was baffled.  The Egyptian deployment, though still defensive, with tanks and troops digging in, had surpassed the dimensions of a mere power display.  With the 4th Division on the move and heavy bombers transferred to the forward base at Bir al-Thamada, the enemy could be preparing to invade the Negev or to bomb the Dimona reactor.  Cairo's tenor was bellicose -- 'If Israel now tries to set the region on fire, then Israel itself will be completely destroyed in this fire, thus bringing about the end of this aggressive racist base' -- and was duly echoed by Damascus: 'The war of liberation will not end except by Israel's abolition.'  Syrian troops were also reportedly advancing . . ."

            On page 84, Oren writes that Egypt "issued the order to close the Tiran Straits.  ". . . elation was registered throughout the Arab world, where Nasser's Ablan Wa-sablan reverberated.  In Hebron and Jerusalem, in the streets of Baghdad, Beirut, and Tripoli, mass demonstrations erupted in acclaim of Egypt's action.  The armed forces of Lebanon, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia were activated; Irawqi armored columns were reportedly moving toward the Syrian and Jordanian borders 'to participated in the battle of Honor.'  King Hussein donned a military uniform and reviewed units of his army, among them American made tanks that were not supposed to cross the Jordan River, parading toward the West Bank."

            On page 86 Oren writes "News of the closure reached IDF intelligence on 2:30 A.M., on May 23, along with reports of Egyptian submarines passing through the Straits and the emplacement of heavy guns at Sharm al-Sheikh.  On the Golan Heights, Syrian forces were at Maximum strength and war footing; the movements of UN observers had been strictly curtailed.  The chief of staff would recount that 'the key piece of Middle Eastern puzzle -- Nasser's provision of a casus belli -- had just fallen into place.  In effect , the ball was now in our court . . . ' At stake, [Rabin] knew, was more than just the issue of free passage and the well-being of Eilat.  'It is now a question of our national survival,' he told his generals that night, 'of to be or not to be.'"

            COMMENT:  If one isn't already bent upon Israel's destruction, he should be able to understand that Israel by May 23 was justified in believing it very likely that they were about to be attacked.  Arab Armies were building up on all sides.  And yet Anti-Israeli (and usually Anti-American) Leftists well blame Israel for attacking first.  Perhaps the U.S. is large and spread out enough to be able to wait until they are attacked before responding, but tiny Israel doesn't have that advantage.  Any attack might prove fatal; which is what the Arabs dearly desired (and still desire), that Israel would be utterly destroyed. 

            We of course know that for Leftists "deaths" trump national defense.  Thus, Leftists feel free to dismiss the threat against Israel and wring their collectives hands about the number of Arabs killed, about the aftermath where, "gasp," Israel didn't immediately restore all the land they conquered and pay reparations to the people they defeated.

            Will there be another attack against Israel?  Qutb-inspired Islamism demands one.  Islamists are not to give up just because Israel defeats them a few times.  Allah, after all, is on the Arab side.  Islam will win eventually they fanatically believe.   And when that victory occurs and the Israeli remnant flees destroyed Israel to such lands of sanctuary as . . . (well where else other than the U.S.?) all the Arab and Left-wing world will breathe a sigh of relief and collectively say, "it's about time."

            I can refer to histories of the Six Day War and show that Israel had good evidence, evidence they could not afford to ignore, that they were about to be attacked.  But while I can assume, as I do, that it would be a bad thing for Israel to be attacked, I cannot force an Arab or a Leftist to make that same assumption.  For them "revolution" is more important than Israel's survival.  In the case of the Arab Islamist it is the ongoing Jihad (Revolution) begun by Mohammad.  In the case of the Leftist it is revolution for revolution's sake.

            And it isn't the nature of the Anarchistic-Leftist to ever be happy, however much of a revoltuion he has managed.  There was singing in the streets and in Memphis bars when the radical Obama was elected, but now, in the same message I have been referring to, Geary can write, "Obama is Bush in black-face.  Where's the goddamn liberal we elected???  Playing community organizer, I fear.  Presidents aren't elected to "do" things, technicians do the work.  Ronnie boy Reagan knew that.  Have the "look", have the words -- that's all we elect a President for.  Carter tried to be a technician President -- he was probably more intelligent and decent than the last ten Presidents combined, but intelligence isn't what we hired them for.  We want them to speak our prejudices, our indignation, our rage, our smugness.  We want to believe that we are in charge.   You should love Obama, Lawrence, he's been such a disappointment to us socialist, Marxist, pacifist liberals."

            Chuckle, chuckle, chuckle!

Is Obama "trying to pretend"?

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1209/31054.html

 

In the above article which builds upon a statement made by Dick Cheney, Obama is in essence accused of reverting the Democratic party to the days of Clinton, during which the first attack against the World Trade Center was treated as a criminal matter.  The Obama administration’s response included the following: “The difference from the last administration is that we are at war with that which is tangible — Al Qaeda, violent extremists, and terrorists — rather than at war with a tactic, ‘terrorism’.”   

            Cheney continues with the view that we are at war with Radical Islam.  This view has been well developed by scholars and journalists:  A substantial percentage of Muslims subscribe to the teachings of Qutb, Maududi, Khomeini and a host of lesser lights.  They seek to pick up the military cudgel dropped by the followers of Mohammad and advance the cause of Islam by any means necessary.  They claim to be resuming Mohammad’s “Jihad.”  They claim to be at war with all “infidels.”   Subscribers to the Cheney view believe that 9/11 was part of the Islamist Jihad against “the chief among the infidel nations,” the United States.

            There is another view, one advanced by European scholars, especially Olivier Roy and Jules Kepel who argue that while “Globalized Islam” exists, it is not a regimented force like the Nazis and Communists.  It is searching for an identity, “for a new Ummah,” Olivier Roy writes.  As to those causing actual trouble, the tangible “violent extremists and terrorists,” well they are a small minority of alienated educated Muslims and not representative of “Radical Islam” as a whole.

            While I lean toward the view that “Radical Islam” aka “Islamism”  is a serious threat and wish that Bush had said we were at war with it and not with terrorism, I do not rule out the possibility that the Roy, Kepel, and Obama may turn out to be correct.  In support of the Cheney view there is no doubt that those who subscribe to Islamism represent a huge percentage of Islam as a whole.  There may be as many as 300,000,000 who believe in those radical teachings.  Even though the “tangible” forces in the field are small in number they have they support of the rest of the 300,000,000 who stay at home.  Cheney might “hope” that the rest of the 300,000,000 continue to stay at home, but he would rather prepare for worse cases.

            The Roy-Kepel-Obama view is more variegated but it includes the idea of wooing the Islamists.  Sure, maybe there are 300,000,000 Muslims who are attracted to radical ideas, but they haven’t acted on their beliefs yet; so let’s woo them to a less radical point of view.    

            Cheney is not presently in office, Obama is, so the wooing process will continue.  Voices such as Cheney continue to argue that it won’t work and that we may as well settle down to the idea of a protracted war.

            If serious Islamist attacks continue to be thwarted, overt Islamic Radicalism could eventually peter out.  In which case the Cheney, Obama arguments would peter out as well – to be replaced, no doubt, by an argument over which position truly thwarted the Radical Islamic threat.  On the other hand if Al Qaeda or some other group manages a large 9/11-type attack or a series of substantial attacks in the West, the Cheney view would gain credence.  If Radical Islam develops the means to ramp up its attacks then surely the wooing process must be abandoned – at least here in the U.S.  The voter would demand it by voting the wooers out of office. 

 

Obama's speech approaches Heideggerian authenticy

ONE WORLD NOW left the following comment in response to the post "Applying Heidegger to America":

“The Obama Presidency is going in the direction of Rightness, I think. . “.

Perhaps “One World Now” is also responding to Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.  When I read this speech (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34360743/ns/politics-white_house/ ) it seemed that Obama was moving in the direction of Heideggerian authenticity insofar as his presidency was concerned – at least insofar as foreign affairs were concerned.  Consider some of the things he said in his speech:

“The concept of a "just war" emerged, suggesting that war is justified only when it meets certain preconditions: if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the forced used is proportional, and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence.

“America led the world in constructing an architecture to keep the peace: a Marshall Plan and a United Nations, mechanisms to govern the waging of war, treaties to protect human rights, prevent genocide, and restrict the most dangerous weapons.”

“. . . modern technology allows a few small men with outsized rage to murder innocents on a horrific scale.”

“the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest - because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if other peoples' children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity.”

“The soldier's courage and sacrifice is full of glory, expressing devotion to country, to cause and to comrades in arms.”

“More and more, we all confront difficult questions about how to prevent the slaughter of civilians by their own government, or to stop a civil war whose violence and suffering can engulf an entire region.”

“I believe that force can be justified on humanitarian grounds, as it was in the Balkans, or in other places that have been scarred by war. Inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later. That is why all responsible nations must embrace the role that militaries with a clear mandate can play to keep the peace.”

“But I also know this: the belief that peace is desirable is rarely enough to achieve it. Peace requires responsibility. Peace entails sacrifice. That is why NATO continues to be indispensable. That is why we must strengthen UN and regional peacekeeping, and not leave the task to a few countries. That is why we honor those who return home from peacekeeping and training abroad to Oslo and Rome; to Ottawa and Sydney; to Dhaka and Kigali - we honor them not as makers of war, but as wagers of peace.”

“But it is also incumbent upon all of us to insist that nations like Iran and North Korea do not game the system. Those who claim to respect international law cannot avert their eyes when those laws are flouted. Those who care for their own security cannot ignore the danger of an arms race in the Middle East or East Asia. Those who seek peace cannot stand idly by as nations arm themselves for nuclear war.

“The same principle applies to those who violate international law by brutalizing their own people. When there is genocide in Darfur; systematic rape in Congo; or repression in Burma - there must be consequences. And the closer we stand together, the less likely we will be faced with the choice between armed intervention and complicity in oppression.”

“In some countries, the failure to uphold human rights is excused by the false suggestion that these are Western principles, foreign to local cultures or stages of a nation's development. And within America, there has long been a tension between those who describe themselves as realists or idealists - a tension that suggests a stark choice between the narrow pursuit of interests or an endless campaign to impose our values.

“I reject this choice. I believe that peace is unstable where citizens are denied the right to speak freely or worship as they please; choose their own leaders or assemble without fear. Pent up grievances fester, and the suppression of tribal and religious identity can lead to violence. We also know that the opposite is true. Only when Europe became free did it finally find peace. America has never fought a war against a democracy, and our closest friends are governments that protect the rights of their citizens. No matter how callously defined, neither America's interests - nor the world's -are served by the denial of human aspirations.” 

“In light of the Cultural Revolution's horrors, Nixon's meeting with Mao appeared inexcusable - and yet it surely helped set China on a path where millions of its citizens have been lifted from poverty, and connected to open societies. Pope John Paul's engagement with Poland created space not just for the Catholic Church, but for labor leaders like Lech Walesa. Ronald Reagan's efforts on arms control and embrace of perestroika not only improved relations with the Soviet Union, but empowered dissidents throughout Eastern Europe. There is no simple formula here. But we must try as best we can to balance isolation and engagement; pressure and incentives, so that human rights and dignity are advanced over time.”

COMMENT:  Insofar as Foreign Affairs are concerned and considering Heidegger’s thesis: where is the realm of Presidential “authenticity”?  Answering this question involves a good deal of subjectivity, but I recognized most of what Obama said in the speeches of past presidents and statesmen.  He was walking in their footsteps.  He maintained a consistency with what I believe is best in America.  Some place back there in our history, our traditions, is what we might consider Heideggerian authenticity, and from my perspective, and insofar as foreign affairs are concerned, Obama has tapped into it, used it for inspiration, and used it for direction.

            Is what Obama said consistent with what the Nobel Peace Prize committee expected?  That is an interesting question.  We might speculate and suggest “perhaps not.”  It feels as though the Nobel committee was attempting to influence Obama in a European direction – a direction that is less American-Just-War oriented and more “Let’s put all our eggs in the diplomatic basket.”  Obama hasn’t eschewed diplomacy.  In fact he implies that he will continue to explore diplomatic solutions in North Korea and Iran.

            No doubt some are going to take comfort in differences between what Obama has said and what Bush did during his administration, but I don’t see anything that significantly diverges.  Consider the “torture business.”  That was proposed during a time of panic when the Pakistani ISI was telling us that Al Qaeda had suitcase nukes.  If they ever had these nukes, they have gone beyond their “use by” dates; so giving up “torture” is no longer a large issue in my opinion.  Also, I believe that “torture” is not something that could be “authenticated” in our tradition.  However, if in the future there is an individual who knows about some impending 9/11-type attack, a Jack Bauer-type may very well torture the information out of the guy and be willing to take the punishment for it later on.  We are officially against torture, and individual soldiers and officials are forbidden to engage in it, but there are no means for preventing it – only punishing it after the fact.

Is Obama getting tough in North Korea?

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/05/30/gates.north.korea

When I saw the headlines of the above article, “Gates: Nuclear-armed N. Korea not acceptable,” and read the Google lead, “The United States will not accept North Korea as a nuclear-armed state, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Saturday at an international conference,” I was just glancing at the headlines before going off to feed the dogs.

I rolled that idea around in my mind as I worked: Shoot, if the US really forced North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons, that would put a big harpoon right into the middle of Iran’s Nuclear Weapons ambitions. If the US clamped down on NK militarily, for that is what it would take barring China’s help, Iranians would be sure to elect a president who wasn’t going to get them into that kind of trouble.

As soon as I could, I rushed back to my computer and read the whole CNN article and watched the CNN videos CNN referred me to. Alas, everything I read and saw contradicted the impression I got from the CNN headline and lead-in. The US was not going to get tough with North Korea. Gates didn’t think there was anything to worry about. The North Korean missiles didn’t have the range to reach the US. There was no troop movement to indicate that NK was going to move on the South Korean and US troops at the 1953 cease-fire line.

A statement by Clinton ended up sounding amusing. She began tough, the same way the UN article did. She said North Korea had made choices and those choices would have consequences, but as she got to the point where she needed to describe those consequences she repeated that there would be consequences and then added the very weak statement, in a stuttering and stammering fashion that those consequences would be added to. Rather than back up the idea that the US might do something, the UN was invoked. The naughty North Koreans had violated a UN resolution so additional consequences will be incurred by North Korea. I couldn’t help coughing a bit at that. I watched her and she said all that with a straight face as far as I could tell. Remarkable!

Our history isn’t terribly long as national histories go, but one thing we might have learned is that weak American presidents are invariably challenged by someone. If some president is elected on a platform of playing nice, enemies are sure to think this he is a weakling and try him out in some way. As it turns out (consider this advice for those who voted for Mr. Nice) we seem to get into more violent trouble when electing a Mr. Nice then we probably would have if we had elected Mr. Tough. The bad guys want to try out the toughness of Mr. Nice. Think here of how far Nikita Khrushchev pushed the Nice President Kennedy. He was forced, much against his will and against his experience, to learn how to be tough – and he wasn’t very good at it. We came as close to a nuclear war then as we ever had.

Think also of the nice President Jimmy Carter. He was so nice that he opposed that nasty Shah of Iran, got him ousted and replaced by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Let’s not forget the nice Jimmy Carter or avoid giving him all the credit he is due for our current Iranian difficulties. The Ayatollah thanked you, or would have if he weren’t so nasty, and Ahmadinejad would too if he weren’t giving all the credit to Allah who must surely have pulled the wool over Carter’s eyes.

And now we have the nice Barack Obama as president. He is ably being assisted by the nice Mr. Gates. Mrs. Clinton isn’t quite as nice, but she is trying to be. Obama does seem to be smarter than Kennedy. I don’t know if he is smarter than Bill Clinton, but maybe he won’t be so distracted by scandals. Maybe he will be able to apply his intelligence to the challenges at hand. Both North Korea’s Kim Jon-Il and Iran’s Ahmadinejad have been challenging him. He hasn’t been over matched so far; which is good. Kim Jon-Il is ill and his successor may be one of his descendants. Will this successor carry on the policies of the Dear Leader? If he does, and he isn’t very experienced, perhaps he may not try to test Obama too much. But if he tries to prove himself as being tougher than his father and grandfather, there could be trouble.

And Ahmadinejad isn’t in a good position for testing Obama too much just yet. He has an important election coming up and there are opposition candidates that seem formidable. Some are saying that negotiating diplomatically with Obama wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. But if Ahmadinejad is reelected, he may believe that the Mahdi still has some important work for him to do before he returns. That important work might be, if we can believe Ahmadinejad’s statements, scary.

So Obama could follow in the footsteps of earlier nice Presidents and let the bad buys do whatever they liked until they actually did something to the US or its people that they couldn’t ignore. Kennedy had to keep missiles out of Cuba and Carter had to try and rescue hostages from Iran in Operation Eagle Claw in 1980. It bears repeating that neither Kennedy nor Carter were very good at this sort of thing.

If Obama intends to let North Korea stay nuclear and doesn’t mind if Iran becomes so then I wish he would instruct his cabinet to quit confusing me by trying to sound tough from time to time. Talking tough in headlines and then sounding very weak in the rest of the article may accomplish some American political goal, but it won’t help get rid of North Korean and Iranian nuclear weapons. But if somehow Obama could learn to be tough up front, preemptively, before he is later forced to learn how to be tough, that would be an impressive and effective thing.

You don’t avoid war, Mr. President, by being as nice as possible. You don’t avoid it by refusing to study it. Doing those things make you see a victim to our enemies. You avoid war by being as tough as necessary and by studying war. You can’t avoid it if you don’t know what it is. And studying war may teach you that it is sometimes prudent to do a little war now in order to avoid a big one later on.

Obama's victory exposes European hypocrisy

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1858658,00.html

The above is an article by Jamey Keaten entitled “Obama’s Victory Inspires European Minorities.” Minority groups in Europe are taking the Obama victory as an opportunity to draw attention to the fact that they do not form the same proportion of government that they do of the population. Being Europeans, these minorities want government to do something about it.

Over here in America we don’t want government to “do” anything about such matters. We like to be able to vote for the best man or woman for the job regardless of race. The fact that we elected Obama doesn’t mean that our government made that possible. It meant that America is color-blind to a very large extent. They voted, most of them I suspect, because they believed Obama was a better choice than McCain.

As anyone would know who has read much of my blog, I did not favor Obama and did not feel he was the best qualified for the presidency, but not for reasons of his “race,” or not because I was prejudiced against his “race,” but because of his Leftist background. I am prejudiced against Leftism.

I also pointed out that he spent 17 years in a church that advocated Black Liberation Theology which is racist in that much of which James Cone (the mentor or Jeremiah Wright) teaches is anti-white. I didn’t have adequate evidence that he hadn’t been influenced by such teaching.

What Europeans are observing is what I have argued in several notes. The Leftist elites in government favor Socialistic Welfare systems and an egalitarian approach toward race, but the European man in the street is still of the ancient European culture which has for centuries been suspicious of strangers. The French elite favored a EU charter, but the French man-in-the-street rejected it. The EU elite has embraced a color-blind philosophy, but the EU man-in-the-street is still prejudiced against non-Europeans – at least to a much greater extent than is true of Americans against non-Americans. (I recall that Hitler called us “mongrels.”) Note that even some of our Southern States, which are still accused of racism, went for Obama.

Maybe we had an easier time accepting our minorities over here. As Keaten wrote, “Europe and the relatively young United States have vastly different histories when it comes to race. The United States is a lot more diverse: Minorities now make up about a third of all Americans. . .” Whatever. Many Europeans still criticize us for being racist over here. First pull the plank from thine own eye, oh Europeans. Then come and tell us how to remove the sliver from ours.”

Muslim opinion of Obama's win

http://www.danielpipes.org/article_print.php?id=6017&v=2703056221

The above is an article by Daniel Pipes evaluating some of the differing Muslim views about Obama’s win.

Amir Taheri refers to a 7^th century prophecy that is apparently current among Shiites today: “A ‘tall black man’ commanding ‘the strongest army on earth’ will take power ‘in the west.’ He will carry ‘a clear sign’ from the third imam, Hussein.”

Robert Spencer “generalizes that jihadists and Islamic supremacists worldwide showed ‘unalloyed joy.’”

John Esposito of Georgetown University “emphasizes the Muslim world’s welcome to Obama as an ‘internationalist president.’

Pipes quotes some negative Muslim opinions as well, and some draw the obvious conclusion that Obama is going to be prevented from being very different from previous presidents.

But I was most interested in the following Pipes comment: “Never before have Americans voted into the White House a person so unknown and enigmatic.” That was my view as well. I did a bit of research and found only Leftist, radical or the religiously bizarre (James Cone) views and experiences in his background. But none of that was being put forward by the media. Instead he was taken at face value. His words, and he is a polished speaker, were taken as the all in all of his being and purpose. His past was not counted. This implies a level of faith in his supporters most Christian pastors would wish for their congregations.

I don’t spend much time reading or watching the Media and so did learn about Obama’s past. I was alarmed by it and wished it were better known by the voting public. But now that the election is over I am willing to hope for the best. As Pipes writes, “Some commentators argue that Obama cannot make a real difference; an Iranian newspaper declares him unable to alter a system ‘established by capitalists, Zionists, and racists.’ Predictably, the appointment of Rahm Emanuel as Obama’s chief of staff confirmed Palestinian perceptions of an omnipotent Israel lobby. A commentator in the United Arab Emirates went further, predicting Obama’s replication of Jimmy Carter’s trajectory of flamboyant emergence, failure in the Middle East, and electoral defeat.”

Well, that’s put a bit more negatively than I would put it. I hope Obama does well for America, and that will perforce mean that he won’t satisfy all the dreams and wishes of our enemies and detractors in the Middle East.

Obama "changing" back to the Clinton era

The following is an article by Dick Morris & Eileen McGann entitled “Obama’s ‘Change’ Back to the Democratic Washington Insiders. Since Morris invites recipients of his column to send it to family & friends and to subscribe for free to dickmorris.com, I don’t believe he’ll object to my posting it on this blog. I have some comments at the end.

[Published on DickMorris.com on November 7, 2008]:

What's with Obama's choice of old-time Clinton cronies and recycled Washington insiders to run the transition to his new politics of change?

Can't the anti-Washington insiders President-elect find anyone who isn't a Beltway has-been?

Judging by the appointments to his transition committee and leaks about possible top staff and Cabinet choices, Obama appears to be practicing the politics of status quo, not the politics of change.

Obama based his innovative campaign on an emphatic and convincing commitment to change the culture of Washington and bring in new people, new ideas, and new ways of doing business.

But now, Obama has definitely changed his tune. As president-elect, he's brought back the old Washington hacks, party regulars, and Clinton sycophants that he so frequently disparaged. Like Jimmy Carter, the last President who ran as an outsider, Obama has reached out to the same old folks who dominate the Democratic Party and represent the status quo.

His Transition Committee looks like a reunion of the Clinton Administration. No new ideas of how to reform the system there. The Chairman, John Podesta, was Clinton's Chief of Staff. He presided over the outrageous last minute pardons and his style is strictly inside-the-beltway and make-no-waves.

Then there's Carol Browner, Clinton's competent former EPA Administrator who became the consummate Washington insider. She's Madeline Albright's partner and recently married mega-lobbyist and former Congressman Tom Downey. During the uproar over Dubai taking over U.S. ports, Browner brought Downey to meet with Senator Chuck Schumer to plead Dubai's case. Downey was paid half a million dollars to push Dubai's position. He's also a lobbyist for Fannie Mae, paid half a million to try to cover their rears on the subprime mortgage mess. Is his change?

Federico Pena was Clinton's Secretary of Transportation and of Energy. The President felt he was unduly soft on Air Florida after their crash and lost confidence in him. Now he's back as a Transition Committee member.

Bill Daley, Clinton's former Secretary of Commerce and the brother of the Mayor of Chicago, is the epitome of the old Democratic establishment. Clinton appointed him to the Fannie Mae Board and his son worked as a lobbyist for the agency. Aren't these the kind of folks that Obama ran against?

Larry Summers, President of Harvard and former Clinton Secretary of the Treasury is not exactly an outsider either. He's also alienated more than a few with his bizarre suggestion that women may be genetically inferior to men in math and science.

Susan Rice, Assistant Secretary of State under Clinton advised John Kerry and Mike Dukakis. Does that tell you enough?

Obama has named one of his big bundlers - Michael Froman, an executive at Citigroup. Is this supposed to symbolize change?

Obama's choice of a spokesperson for the transition is also surprising; hers' is definitely not the face of reason and new politics. Stephanie Cutter is the brash and combative former Clinton, Kerry, and Ted Kennedy mouthpiece. The liberal DailyKos.com once described Cutter as "a moron to the nth degree" when she tried unsuccessfully to force the New York Times' Adam Nagourney to treat her unsolicited email criticizing Howard Dean as "background" without mentioning her name.

Speaking of brash, Rahm Emmanuel, the new White House Chief of Staff, makes Cutter look timid. Rahm is also a former Clinton White House staffer - and a very obnoxious one. He spent his White House years leaking to the Washington Post whenever he didn't like what the President was doing. Even Bill Clinton stopped trusting him. Any hopes of Obama keeping his commitment to reach across the aisle would go right out the window with Rahm's appointment. Instead of extending a hand to the opposition, it would be like raising just one finger. And Rahm's strident demeanor laced with the 'f' word in every sentence will do little to elevate the bipartisan dialogue in Washington.

Christopher Edley, another member of the transition team, is Dean of the Berkeley Law School. He's a former member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission under Clinton and his wife, Maria Echaveste was Clinton's Deputy Chief of Staff.

Transition committee staffer Christine Varney was a Federal Trade Commissioner under Clinton and worked in the White House.

Throughout the early debates, Obama criticized Hillary as part of the inside-the beltway establishment that needed to go. But now he's reaching out to these exact same folks. Some change.

COMMENT:

While Dick Morris & Eileen McGann are outraged over Obama’s administration choices, I am reassured by them. Actually, when Obama referred to the “Change” he felt the American people wanted, I suspected he meant a change back to the Clinton era, but I feared the sort of “change” that is implicit in the term “Progressive,’ which is what Leftists like to call themselves nowadays. They don’t explain what sort of change they want to progress toward either, but Leftism has Socialism in mind, and a kinder gentler Communism.

But now that Obama has declared what he meant by change, surely Morris, who probably never had my fear, shouldn’t have been surprised. The accusation of “inexperience” wasn’t only applied to Palin, it was applied to Obama himself; so for him to get a lot of inexperienced outsiders into his cabinet probably had more risk than benefit to it. That sort of change, selecting outsiders with no Washington experience, reminds me of Kennedy’s “Whiz Kids,” Think of Robert McNamara for example.

Many historians think that Bush’s reputation will improve with time, but Kennedy’s hasn’t. His foreign policy mistakes have become lessons for what a president ought not to do. He didn’t “courageously keep us out of a nuclear war,” he foolishly presented a meek cowardly persona to Khrushchev who thought he could push him around and get whatever he wanted, and had it not been for all the peer pressure surrounding Kennedy, he probably would have. In retrospect, when Senator Bentson said to Dan Quayle in 1988, "Senator, I worked with John Kennedy; I knew John Kennedy. Senator, you're no John Kennedy,” that was a compliment. All Kennedy seems to have had going for him was a good oratorical manner and a lot of charisma and style. His handling of foreign policy was a disaster.

Thus, I am relatively happy that Obama is taking unto himself, Clintontonian party hacks rather than Kennedy-like Whiz Kids. All he needs now is Madeleine Albright. She’s about McCain’s age and still energetic enough to work as a professor at Georgetown University. Obama ought to check in on her. She once said, "What’s the point of you saving this superb military for, Colin, if we can't use it?" That’s good stuff, Barack. Better Madeleine than Colin.

Lawrence Helm

Dow falls after Obama elected

http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/democrats-and-stocks-history-is-bullish/

The media is doing its best to dissociate the fall of the DOW from Obama’s election. According to the New York Times only “die-hard Republicans may be tempted to blame the rout on the election of Barak Obama as president of the United States.”

The DOW dropped 835 points in the two days following Obama’s election. The people dancing in the street are dancing to some extent because Obama has promised them entitlements. He is going to take money from the rich (the people who invest in the stock market) and give it to the poor (people who don’t have any stocks). I suspect that more people than die-hard Republicans are going suspect there is a connection.

On not being more upset over Obama's victory.

Someone wrote me expressing surprise that I wasn’t more upset over Obama’s victory. I’m surprised that he was surprised. If I were upset, it would mean I was partisan; and though I get accused of partisanship regularly, I don’t think of myself as a partisan. I believe in arguments that have the weight of evidence on their side. I also consider if/then arguments as being important. Let me explain:

I examined the evidence that Obama came out of a Leftist milieu. The evidence was persuasive that he was associated with Bill Ayers to a greater extent than he confessed to. This evidence seems to have been largely ignored by the media, but setting that aside, the most important question is, if Obama retains his Leftist views, then he may be a dangerous president. Of course that is something we can’t know. Perhaps Obama has grown out of his Leftist views. Perhaps his views weren’t as strong as other Leftists in his neighborhood. I would have preferred a candidate who either had no Leftist background or else had it and denounced it.

Another matter I investigated was Obama’s associated with the Reverend Wright and his Black Liberation theology (as defined by James Cone). Obama sat under Wright for almost 20 years. He heard Black Liberation Theology a lot during that period. So once again we must conclude, if Obama believes in racist Black Liberation Theology then he may not be a trustworthy president in regard to his treatment of non-blacks. However, this also is something we can’t know. Perhaps he dozed off each Sunday Morning. Perhaps he disagreed with the pastor. Only time will tell, but I would rather we didn’t have a Black Liberation Theologist as president.

However, those arguments and others have been ignored (more probably not known) by the people who voted and they elected Obama president. So what next? My primary concern is foreign policy and since I considered the Bush doctrine back in 2002 as something that would probably be carried on by a Democratic successor in 2006, and if he pursued this foreign policy through 8 years then it would be very nearly impossible for a Democratic successor to reverse it in 2008. And I was encouraged by what I heard from Obama on that subject. He wants out of Iraq, but he won’t leave precipitously, and I was most encouraged by his desire to beef up American forces in Afghanistan – even lean on Europeans to send troops. He isn’t sounding at all alike a pacifist in regard to Afghanistan.

Also, I like the idea of the Europeans getting off our backs for awhile. They got the president they wanted; so let’s see how this plays out with them. They have looked into Obama’s heart and seen goodness there. Let’s hope they see better than Bush did when he looked into Putin’s heart.

Also, I listened to Carl Rove being interviewed by Chris Wallace last night and Rove listed all the things the Republicans did wrong. He said that next time the Republicans should have a “clear message” of how they will provide better health care, better education for children, better funds so parents can send their children to college, etc. That’s all well and good and I don’t oppose those things, but they are not inherently Republican. They are welfare-state-type entitlements. Which means, if Rove has his way, that the Republicans will move closer to the Democrats on domestic matters – and since the Democrats are moving closer to the Republicans on Foreign Affairs . . . how upset would Marcus Aurelius be?