Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

The problem of Iran and its nukes gets a lot of attention today.

David Warren starts us off.

…We deal only with Iran from abroad, and as currently the principal threat to world peace. In his capacity as captain of the West, President Obama spent his first year trying the policy of appeasement and negotiation with a regime whose word is worthless. It is clear he now understands there is no way to “talk Iran down.” But he has lost precious time and sacrificed continuity from the more advanced confrontational position of the Bush administration.

He is now back to square one: doing what Bush first tried, unsuccessfully, nine years ago. He is appealing to U.S. allies to enforce tougher sanctions, buying them off, one by one, to get them onside. It is a very expensive business, for a proven waste of time. …

…So we now have a double mystery: an extremely dangerous regime in Iran doing we know not what, and standing against it, an American president who does not know what he is doing.

Roger Simon comments on Saudi Arabia’s Prince Saud Al-Faisal statement on Iran going nuclear. Al-Faisal gave implicit agreement to a military strike.

…according to the AP, the Saudi Foreign Minister opined publicly at a Monday meeting with Hillary Clinton:

“‘Sanctions are a long-term solution,” the Saudi minister said. “But we see the issue in the shorter term because we are closer to the threat,” referring to Iran. “We need immediate resolution rather than gradual resolution.’

He didn’t identify a preferred short-term resolution. …

No kidding? I wonder what those other actions might be. …

As for sanctions, who could believe in them? Certainly not a Saudi, who lives across the street from the mad mullahs, or certainly not even any remotely impartial observer who has watched Khamenei & Co. put the boot to their own people since the Iranian election/selection. If they can shoot their own citizens in the streets, do you think they’ll really be worried about sanctions from abroad, sanctions that any un-law-abiding mullah knows never hold up for long anyway? …

Spengler discusses some possible military strike scenarios and repercussions.

…First, the Sunni Arab states have a stronger interest than Israel’s to stop Iran from possibly going nuclear. Israel, after all, possesses perhaps two hundred deliverable nuclear devices, including some very big thermonuclear ones, and is in position to wipe Iran off the map. But none of Iran’s Arab rivals is in such a position. The Saudis have done everything but take out a full-page ad in the Washington Post to encourage the Obama administration to attack Iran. Prince Saud al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, warned on February 15 that sanctions were a long-term measure while the world faces a short-term threat from Iran. Egypt reportedly has allowed Israeli missile ships to pass through the Suez Canal en route to the Persian Gulf.

Secondly, Russia well might prefer to deal with Israel as an independent regional power than as an ally of the United States. A stronger Israeli presence in the region also might contribute to Russia’s market share in missiles and eventually fighter aircraft. Russian-Israeli cooperation in a number of military fields has improved markedly during the past year, including the first-ever sale of Israeli weapons to Russia (drones) and Israeli help for the Russian-Indian “fifth generation” fighter project. …

In the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick has fallen in love with Sarah Palin.

…To date, in light of his sinking approval ratings, the main thing Obama has had going for him is that since the presidential election, his political opponents have lacked a leader capable of uniting his opponents around an alternative path. Over the past week, that leader may have emerged.

On Saturday, former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin gave the keynote address at the Tea Party Movement convention in Nashville, Tennessee. As she did in the presidential campaign, Palin electrified her audience in Nashville by credibly channeling the populist impulses of American voters. In her signature line she asked, “So how’s that hopey changey stuff working out for ya?” …

…Sarah Palin’s emergence as the mouthpiece of populist opposition to Obama presents Israel’s supporters – and particularly Israel’s Jewish supporters – with an extraordinary opportunity and an extraordinary challenge. Palin’s coupling of support for Israel with her populist domestic agenda marks the first time that support for Israel has been treated as a core, populist issue. The opportunity this presents for American Jews who care about Israel is without precedent. …

The Streetwise Professor looks at some of the current political dynamics in Russia.

…Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin’s political strategist, defended the system of state control he developed, saying Russia can only modernize if it has a strong central government.“Consolidated power is the instrument of modernization,” Surkov said in an interview in Vedomosti today. “Some call it authoritarian modernization. I don’t care what they call it.” …

…Medvedev wants Russia to establish its own Silicon Valley, Surkov said, possibly outside Moscow or in the Pacific port city of Vladivostok. The main problem facing Russian innovators is a lack of demand, he said. …

…Indeed, Surkov’s performance is a salvo fired in that very cause of obstructing progress.  In this, it provides telling insights on the Putinite-Muscovite response to Medvedev’s tentative liberalization effort.  To derail this effort, Surkov is appropriating the ostensible goal–modernization–but making it clear that the same old Muscovite means will prevail, Medvedev or no.  Note well that Medvedev has explicitly singled out state corporations as an impediment to progress; by endorsing them Surkov is making it quite clear that the Putinists reject completely Medvedev’s plans. …

It is tragic irony to have Amnesty International suspend an employee who spoke her conscience against the Taliban. Christopher Hitchens fills us in.

…This organization is precious to me and to millions of other people, including many thousands of men and women who were and are incarcerated and maltreated because of their courage as dissidents and who regained their liberty as a consequence of Amnesty International’s unsleeping work. So to learn of its degeneration and politicization is to be reading about a moral crisis that has global implications.

Amnesty International has just suspended one of its senior officers, a woman named Gita Sahgal who until recently headed the organization’s “gender unit.” It’s fairly easy to summarize her concern in her own words. “To be appearing on platforms with Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban, whom we treat as a human rights defender,” she wrote, “is a gross error of judgment.” One might think that to be an uncontroversial statement, but it led to her immediate suspension. …

In Contentions, Evelyn Gordon criticizes Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for ignoring atrocities in Congo. This article has some disturbing descriptions.

…Neither Amnesty nor HRW has issued a single press release or report on Congo so far this year, according to their web sites. Yet HRW found time to issue two statements criticizing Israel and 12 criticizing the U.S.; Amnesty issued 11 on Israel and 15 on the U.S. To its credit, HRW did cover Congo fairly extensively in 2009. But Amnesty’s imbalance was egregious: For all of 2009, its web site lists exactly one statement on Congo — even as the group found time and energy to issue 62 statements critical of Israel. …

…Human-rights organizations clearly should not ignore genuine violations in developed countries, but they do need to maintain a sense of proportion. Instead, the relative frequency of their press releases paints countries such as Israel and the U.S. as the world’s worst human rights violators. The result is that the real worst abuses, like those in Congo, remain largely below the public’s radar. And so the victims continue to suffer in unheard agony.

John Fund writes about Senator Evan Bayh’s retirement and the lesson the Dems can’t seem to learn.

Before Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh suddenly announced he will not seek re-election in November he had issued several warnings to fellow Democrats. Last month, for example, he told Gerald Seib of this newspaper that his party’s liberals were “tone deaf” to the fact that they’d “overreached” in their agenda. “For those people,” he said, “it may take a political catastrophe of biblical proportions before they get it.”

Mr. Bayh knows something about high-water political floods. As a 24-year-old law student he helped run his father’s 1980 Senate re-election and saw him go down to defeat under the Reagan landslide. In 1994, Mr. Bayh was governor of Indiana and thankful he wasn’t before the voters when they revolted against Bill Clinton. “Every 14 or 16 years we seem to have to relearn this lesson,” Mr. Bayh said. “I do have a sense of deja vu, and the movie doesn’t have a happy ending.” …

Thomas Sowell comments on the hypocrisy of politicians forcibly taking money from its citizens, and then judging wealthy people who earn what they make.

…The distracting phrases here include “obscene” wealth and “unconscionable” profits. But, if we stop and think about it — which politicians don’t expect us to — what is obscene about wealth? Wouldn’t we consider it great if every human being on earth had a billion dollars and lived in a place that could rival the Taj Mahal?

Poverty is obscene. It is poverty that needs to be reduced —and increasing a country’s productivity has done that far more widely than redistributing income by targeting “the rich.”

You can see the agenda behind the rhetoric when profits are called “unconscionable” but taxes never are, even when taxes take more than half of what someone has earned, or add much more to the prices we have to pay than profits do. …

In Samizdata, Johnathan Pearce blogs about what he has read in Peter Schiff’s new book. Schiff appears here often. Pearce has reservations and we thought you would be interested.

I have started reading the book, Crashproof 2.0 by Peter Schiff, and I thought I would register some early impressions.

He is a guy who was once mocked for daring to suggest, only a few years ago, that the buildup of debt in the US and parts of the West, and its reliance on what amounts to “vendor financing” from Asia, was bound to end in tears. It did. “Vendor financing”, by the way, relates to the practice of a firm that offers temporary loans to the consumers of its own products. This, more or less, says Mr Schiff, is what happened in the past decade or so: Western consumers bought cheap products from China; Western manufacturers went bust or offshored production to Asia; China used the foreign earnings from its exports to buy up Western debt, enabling even more Western consumer spending, fuelling even more Chinese exports……until the whole process when up in smoke. (This process was aided by an artificially weak Chinese exchange rate, not to mention the recklessly loose monetary policy of the Fed.) So far, so good: Schiff makes a lot of sense in debunking all of this. …

Mark Steyn discusses J.D. Salinger and some of the idiosyncracies of rural New Hampshire living.

I’m not sure I’m the go-to guy for a disquisition on The Catcher in the Rye, but I confess I was always intrigued by the J. D. Salinger lifestyle, at least since I moved to New Hampshire. He was a ways down the Connecticut River from me, but in this neck of the woods it’s a small world. I was once on a BBC current-affairs show and the sneering host produced a Solzhenitsyn quote designed to demonstrate that my view of American preeminence was all hooey, and rounded it out with a snide “I take it you’ve heard of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn?”

“Oh, sure,” I said. “We have the same piano tuner.” Which, at that point, we did. …