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Fouad Ajami says it’s time for Iran to pay a price for it’s foreign policies.
We tell the Iranians that the military option is “on the table.” But three decades of playing cat-and-mouse with American power have emboldened Iran’s rulers. We have played by their rules, and always came up second best.
Next door, in Iraq, Iranians played arsonists and firemen at the same time. They could fly under the radar, secure in the belief that the U.S., so deeply engaged there and in Afghanistan, would be reluctant to embark on another military engagement in the lands of Islam.
This is all part of a larger pattern. As Tehran has wreaked havoc on regional order and peace over the last three decades, the world has indulged it. To be sure, Saddam Hussein launched a brutal war in 1980 against his nemesis, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. That cruel conflict, which sought to quarantine the revolution, ended in a terrible stalemate; and it never posed an existential threat to the clerical state that Khomeini had built. Quite to the contrary, that war enabled the new rulers to consolidate their hold.
Over the course of its three decades in power, this revolutionary regime has made its way in the world with relative ease. No “White Army” gathered to restore the lost dominion of the Pahlavis; the privileged classes and the beneficiaries of the old order made their way to Los Angeles and Paris, and infidel armies never showed up. Even in the face of great violation – the holding of American hostages for more than 400 days – the indulgence of outside powers held.
Compare the path of the Iranian revolutionaries with the obstacles faced by earlier revolutions, and their luck is easy to see. Three years into their tumult, the tribunes of the French Revolution of 1789 were at war with the powers of Europe. The wars of the French Revolution would last for well over two decades. The Bolsheviks, too, had to fight their way into the world of states. The civil war between the White and Red Armies pulled the Allies into the struggle. A war raged in Russia and in Siberia. It was only in 1921 that Britain granted the Soviet regime de facto recognition.
In its first decade, the Iranian revolution was a beneficiary of the Cold War. …
Mark Steyn decided to listen to what Obama is saying. Yipes!
If you read a Barack Obama speech, you notice that, aside from the we-are-the-ones-we’ve-been-waiting-for narcissistic uplift and the Washington-needs-to-lift-people-up-not-tear-them-down bromides, almost everything he says is, well, nuts.
I don’t mean the moments when he gets carried away and announces that his administration would “stop the import of all toys from China.” As it happens, that’s a policy I’m not unsympathetic to. Almost 80 percent of American toys are made in the People’s Republic and, while that may well be appropriate given the whiff of totalitarian coerciveness that hangs around Barney the Dinosaur, I can’t say I’m entirely comfortable with contracting out U.S. innocence to the butchers of Tiananmen. For one thing, come the Sino-American War, Beijing will have the ultimate fifth column inside the West: The nation’s moppets, resentful at having their Elmos and SpongeBobs cut off for the duration, will be shinning down the drainpipe after dark in ski masks and blowing up power stations to hasten the day of liberation.
But forget that. Worse than the painting-by-numbers demagoguery are some of the accidental glimpses of the senator’s worldview. For example: “The drug companies, they’re not going to give up their profits easily when it comes to health care.”
Well, gee, how unreasonable of them. But demanding they give up their profits “easily” comes easy to him. Until he wrote his recent bestseller, the concept of “profits” was entirely theoretical to Obama’s life. As his wife put it, the Obamas “left corporate America, which is a lot of what we’re asking young people to do. Don’t go into corporate America.” So Barack didn’t. Instead, he became a “community organizer,” whatever that is. It would make no difference to life in this great republic if every “community organizer” in the lower 48 were deposited on an atoll in the Antarctic. On the other hand, if America’s drug companies were no longer profitable, it might make rather a lot of difference. …
Interesting look at the Dem race from a NY liberal.
… But of course, I don’t know many of those fierce Clinton supporters, because most of my friends and acquaintances are writers and editors and cultural impresarios of one kind or another—members of “the media”—and there are precious few Clintonites among them. Because almost as much as geography is dispositive in spectator sports—if you live in New England, you’re bound to love the Red Sox and hate the Yankees—demography is dispositive in this year’s Democratic race. And the great majority of media people are members of the same (white) demographic cohort that has rejected Hillary and voted for Barack—educated, more-affluent-than-average residents of cities and suburbs. …
… When Bill Clinton was first elected, baby-boomers had just become an absolute majority of working journalists, and among some of them simmered an envy-cum-distrust of the first baby-boomer commander-in-chief. Somebody our age is president? Then, over the course of Bill Clinton’s (bungled, distasteful) presidency and Hillary Clinton’s (bungled, distasteful) campaign for the presidency, the couple have separately and together become incarnations of the most unattractive attributes of their generation’s elite—blind ambition cloaked in do-good self-righteousness, a sense of entitlement, high-handed snobbiness (“I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies”), hedonism (Monica et al.), narcissism. As a poster couple for people of a certain age and demographic, they have become a bit of an embarrassment. …
… With the ten-point loss in Pennsylvania, the latest Reverend Wright eruption, and the shrinkage of Obama’s leads in the polls, the media are feeling lousy, and not just because their guy is taking a beating. If Obama is deemed to be an effete, out-of-touch yuppie, then the effete-yuppie media Establishment that’s embraced him must be equally oblivious and/or indifferent to the sentiments of the common folk.
Uh-oh. As the cratering of newspaper circulations accelerates (thousands a week are now abandoning the Times) and network-news audiences continue to shrink, for big-time mainstream journalists to seem even more out of touch makes some of them panic. …
Froma Harrop says Rev. Wright is no prophet, but Bill Cosby is.
Jeremiah, you’re no Jeremiah. Although Barack Obama’s controversial former pastor the Rev. Jeremiah Wright puts himself at the center of a prophetic tradition of the Afro-American church, he’s not much of a prophet. The prophet in the Biblical mode often tells his people what they don’t want to hear. Wright only mimics the prophet in his fiery condemnations of America. When it comes to the feelings of those who employ him, he’s strictly on tiptoe.
Around the time Wright was fluffing his feathers before the national media, a genuine prophet appeared in Newark, N.J., to deliver a tough look-in-the-mirror message to fellow African-Americans. The visionary was entertainer Bill Cosby, and his theme encapsulated in the title of a book he wrote with Harvard professor of psychiatry Alvin Poussaint: “Come on, People! On the Path From Victims to Victors.”
For his candor, Cosby has been tarred by black and white intellectuals as “blaming the victim.” He’s been accused of worse things, but that’s the lot of the prophet. “A prophet is despised in his own country, and in his own house, and among his own kin,” Jesus says in the Book of Mark. …
Bill Kristol looks at a McCain – Jindal ticket.
… the McCain campaign knows the environment for Republicans remains toxic. They noticed that on Saturday night Republicans lost their second House seat in a special election in two months — this one in a district they had held since 1974 and that Bush had carried by almost 20 points in 2004.
Another McCain staffer called my attention to this finding in the latest Fox News poll: McCain led Obama in the straight match-up, 46 to 43. Voters were then asked to choose between two tickets, McCain-Romney vs. Obama-Clinton. Obama-Clinton won 47 to 41.
That reversal of a three-point McCain lead to a six-point deficit for the McCain ticket suggests what might happen (a) when the Democrats unite, and (b) if McCain were to choose a conventional running mate, who, as it were, reinforced the Republican brand for the ticket. As the McCain aide put it, this is what will happen if we run a traditional campaign; our numbers will gradually regress toward the (losing) generic Republican number.
Maybe that’s why, in separate conversations last week, no fewer than four McCain staffers and advisers mentioned as a possible vice-presidential pick the 36-year-old Louisiana governor, Bobby Jindal. They’re tempted by the idea of picking someone so young, with real accomplishments and a strong reformist streak. …
David Warren cautions against trusting the experts.
For at least the next decade, the most august scientific authorities are now saying, global average temperatures will not increase. My first instinct, had I any free money to blow, is to bet that they will rise: less from a betting impulse than from greed, for I’ve noticed that a lot of money has been made betting against the consensus of the authorities in my lifetime, and a lot lost on assuming it was sound.
I might hesitate, however, in this instance, for from the little I know about world climate — enough to dismiss global warming alarmists, but not enough to make my own confident predictions — a cooling trend is more likely than a warming one, in the near future, for two big reasons. First, Earth weather seems to track space weather, and the solar magnetic activity cycle seems to be entering relaxation mode.
Second, we have, as everybody agrees, regardless of their views on greenhouse warming, just passed through a decades-long phase of slightly rising global temperatures, which followed a few decades of slightly falling temperatures. The rise ended about 1998, a record warm year. We’re at the top of the roller coaster now. Experience should tell us: hang on for the plunge.
Another analogy might be to trends in breathing. It would not follow that my reader will never inhale again, from the fact that he is exhaling now. …
No one asked him, so P. J. O’Rourke treats us to the commencement address he would give. Here’s the outline.
1. Go out and make a bunch of money!
2. Don’t be an idealist!
3. Get politically uninvolved!
4. Forget about fairness!
5. Be a religious extremist!
6. Don’t listen to your elders!