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David Warren on the upcoming elections in Israel.
… From this distance, it appears the old Israeli notion — that peace happens only while her neighbours are afraid to attack — has revived. It is a notion that corresponds well to the country’s hard experience since independence. Strong and immediate retaliation for any breach of the peace is necessary: “You do this, we do that.” It goes without saying, this is not the way to court the affection of liberals throughout the West, but Israel has nothing to lose on that front, for she has never been rewarded for heroic restraint.
The West Bank stayed quiet throughout the Gaza campaign, and except a couple of errant rockets on the northern frontier — mere jeux d’esprit from Hezbollah — the thoroughness of the operation was noted. Moreover, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the other so-called “moderate” regional powers have become sufficiently alarmed by the threat from Iran — for which both Hamas and Hezbollah serve as proxies — that they will not even “run interference” on the terrorists’ behalf. This does not mean they will sign new peace agreements with Israel, however.
Mr. Netanyahu’s likely victory in the upcoming election will be explained, correctly for a change, by Israel’s “shift to the right,” after a decade of setbacks. Not only Netanyahu’s Likud, but all parties have shifted, in the same direction. Netanyahu simply represents the most plausible way to hang tough, given an Obama administration that will itself be merely responding to events.
The Corner had a discussion about interrogation techniques. First Marc Thiessen, a former Bush speechwriter.
… A few months after 9/11, a terrorist named Abu Zubaydah was captured. He was a close associate of Osama bin Laden, and ran a camp in Afghanistan where some of the 9/11 hijackers had trained. And he helped al Qaeda leaders escape from Afghanistan after the start of Operation Enduring Freedom, including the future leader of al Qaeda’s Iraqi branch, Abu Mussab al Zarqawi.
Zubaydah was captured in a gun battle and severely injured. The CIA arranged medical care, saving his life. After he recovered, Zubaydah provided what he thought was nominal information—including that KSM’s alias was “Muktar,” something our intelligence community did not know. But he soon ceased all cooperation. It was clear to his interrogators that he had received interrogation resistance training, and the traditional methods were not working. So the CIA employed alternative interrogation techniques. And Zubaydah started talking.
He provided information that led to the capture of Ramzi bin al Shibh—one of the key plotters of the 9/11 attacks and a close associated of KSM. Bin al Shibh was the mastermind behind a plot for a follow-on attack to hijack airplanes in Europe, and fly them into Heathrow airport. Now he was off the street and the Heathrow plot was setback.
Together, bin al Shibh and Zubaydah provided information that led to the capture of KSM.
Once in custody, KSM refused to cooperate, until enhanced interrogation techniques—including waterboarding—were used. Then he began to talk. …
Marc then posts on the moral basis for harsh interrogation.
Several readers have questioned whether, even if the CIA program did in fact save lives, using these techniques crosses a moral line. I don’t believe it does—any more than I believe going to war when national security requires it crosses a moral line or puts us at odds with our principles.
Those who oppose this program are preaching the moral equivalent of radical pacifism. Pacifism holds that killing is always wrong, therefore war—official killing by the state—is always wrong as well. This is both noble and naïve. Standing against this view is the Judeo-Christian tradition of “Just War” theory, which holds that there are circumstances under which war is permissible and indeed necessary, and ways in which it can be ethically conducted.
The same holds true for interrogations. …
Ramesh Ponnuru takes exception.
Andy McCarthy defends Thiessen.
Now some looks at Obama’s appearance on Arab TV. Fouad Ajami first.
… Say what you will about the style — and practice — of the Bush years, the autocracies were on notice for the first five or six years of George. W. Bush’s presidency. America had toppled Taliban rule and the tyranny of Saddam Hussein; it had frightened the Libyan ruler that a similar fate lay in store for him. It was not sweet persuasion that drove Syria out of Lebanon in 2005. That dominion of plunder and terror was given up under duress.
True, Mr. Bush’s diplomacy of freedom fizzled out in the last two years of his presidency, and the autocracies in the Greater Middle East came to a conviction that the storm had passed them by and that they had been spared. But we are still too close to this history to see how the demonstration effect works its way through Arab political culture.
The argument that liberty springs from within and can’t be given to distant peoples is more flawed than meets the eye. In the sweep of modern history, the fortunes of liberty have been dependent on the will of the dominant power — or powers — in the order of states. The late Samuel P. Huntington made this point with telling detail. In 15 of the 29 democratic countries in 1970, democratic regimes were midwifed by foreign rule or had come into being right after independence from foreign occupation.
In the ebb and flow of liberty, power always mattered, and liberty needed the protection of great powers. The appeal of the pamphlets of Mill and Locke and Paine relied on the guns of Pax Britannica, and on the might of America when British power gave way. In this vein, the assertive diplomacy of George W. Bush had given heart to Muslims long in the grip of tyrannies.
Take that image of Saddam Hussein, flushed out of his spider hole some five years ago: Americans may have edited it out of their memory, but it shall endure for a long time in Arab consciousness. Rulers can be toppled and brought to account. No wonder the neighboring dictatorships bristled at the sight of that capture, and at his execution three years later.
The irony now is obvious: George W. Bush as a force for emancipation in Muslim lands, and Barack Hussein Obama as a messenger of the old, settled ways. Thus the “parochial” man takes abroad a message that Muslims and Arabs did not have tyranny in their DNA, and the man with Muslim and Kenyan and Indonesian fragments in his very life and identity is signaling an acceptance of the established order. Mr. Obama could still acknowledge the revolutionary impact of his predecessor’s diplomacy, but so far he has chosen not to do so. …
Eric Trager in Contentions.
… Barack Obama ran for U.S. President as the anti-Bush – the candidate who wasn’t going to fight wars for idealistic purposes, such as spreading democracy. Well, Obama might abhor “stupid wars,” but that hardly makes him a realist: true to his community-organizing roots, he apparently sees impoverished foreigners as one of the many constituencies he represents – right up there with the Americans.
The take-away from this miserable performance is rather straightforward: Obama’s personal charisma cannot mask his utter lack of substance on the Middle East. Here’s to hoping that Obama can fix this shortcoming before people start listening to what he’s actually saying.
And Jennifer Rubin.
… All of this suggests there is no one in the administration empowered to tell the President just how counterproductive this sort of meandering, touchy-feely routine is to establishing his bona fides on the world stage. After hearing this, is Iran more or less likely to be deterred from pursuing its nuclear program? Certainly he’s not suggesting there is a line in the sand — or any penalty to be paid when Iran ignores the entreaties of his envoys to halt its nuclear program. As Michael Goldfarb explains:
Wouldn’t a simple ‘no, a nuclear Iran is unacceptable to the United States and our allies’ have sufficed? Instead Obama says that Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon is “unhelpful,” that it’s “not conducive to peace.” When Obama was in Israel, he said that “a nuclear Iran would pose a grave threat and the world must prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” He added that he would “take no options off the table in dealing with this potential Iranian threat.” In the first debate of the general election, Obama reiterated that the United States “cannot tolerate a nuclear Iran.” But when Obama has the chance to speak directly to the Muslim world, he can only muster retread rhetoric from his inaugural address about clenched fists and open hands.
If the President is going to be taken seriously, he’ll have to do better than this. Or at the very least, keep his encounter-group chit-chat to himself.
Dilbert’s 19 year-old cat gets a touching send-off.