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USA Today OpEd on our Mid-East policy in tatters.
President Obama’s first journey to Israel as president comes amid earth-shattering change in Middle East, much of it for the worse. The Arab Spring, which once raised hopes of freedom and dignity, has diverged onto the dark path of Islamist authoritarian rule. In Syria, tens of thousands of people have died in a bitter civil war that might have recently seen its first use of chemical weapons. And Iran continues its march toward nuclear weapons capability, heedless of international condemnation. Obama’s effort to seek peace between Palestinians and Israelis is in tatters.
That’s why the White House has been lowering expectations for Obama’s trip to Israel all this week. He will announce no new peace plan, grand design or major foreign policy initiative. His advisers are calling the trip a “listening tour.” That is what you call a state visit when you have little to say.
Despite downgrading the trip, many see Obama’s arrival as the sequel to his 2009 visit to Cairo, where he announced a “new beginning” with the Muslim world. Four years later, that doesn’t auger well for renewed efforts in Israel and the West Bank. …
Interesting post from Roger Simon on CA’s freeway gypsy encampments.
On our way to downtown Los Angeles Saturday night for the annual Churchill Dinner of the Claremont Institute at the venerable Biltmore Hotel, my wife Sheryl and I took the Hollywood Freeway, a route we had taken uncountable times before.
Only something was different. Small encampments of homeless had been set up on the edge of the freeway. We were used to them under freeway bridges, but these were more elaborate, makeshift tents and blankets positioned on slopes along the freeway, so that, we speculated, they were in full view of the constant passing traffic. That way the violence frequently visited on the homeless by themselves and by others would at least partly be discouraged.
I was reminded of Victor Hanson’s poignant descriptions of the California Central Valley and also of when I lived in Southern Spain and would see impoverished gypsy encampments along the roads to Grenada and Seville. But that was decades ago and that part of Spain, Andalucia, was desperately poor then, struggling to play catch up with the rest of Europe. It did — for a while anyway.
The Hollywood Freeway was not so simple. This was a parade of the haves and have-nots, Mercedes and Lexuses, streaming past the tattered homeless: Obama’s America.
The president has a solution to this problem, even as it gets worse. Tax those folks in the Mercedes. Only that’s been tried a thousand times, most notably in the Great Depression, and it never worked. For someone so versed in Frankfurt School “critical theory,” the president has a convenient way of forgetting history.
He prefers, as we know, the pursuit of “fairness,” but in so doing he has seemed to make things less fair. The stock market is up at the same time as the number of those who have dropped out of the labor force reached a jaw-dropping 89 million in January. I wouldn’t be surprised to find gypsy encampments along all the freeways soon. African-Americans, as we also all know, have been hurt worst of all.
And yet Obama’s adversaries are accused of racism. La vie à l’envers, life upside down, as the French say. …
Fouad Ajami reminds us why we invaded Iraq ten years ago.
Nowadays, few people step forth to speak well of the Iraq War, to own up to the support they gave that American campaign in the Arab world. Yet Operation Iraqi Freedom, launched 10 years ago this week, was once a popular war. We had struck into Afghanistan in 2001 to rout al Qaeda and the terrorists’ Taliban hosts—but the 9/11 killers who brought ruin onto American soil were not Afghan. They were young Arabs, forged in the crucible of Arab society, in the dictators’ prisons and torture chambers. Arab financiers and preachers gave them the means and the warrant for their horrific deeds.
America’s previous venture into Iraq, a dozen years earlier, had been a lightning strike: The Iraqi dictator was evicted from Kuwait and then spared. Saddam Hussein’s military machine was all rust and decay by 2003, but he swaggered and let the world believe that he had in his possession a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. The Arab redeemer, as he had styled himself, lacked the guile that might have saved him. A great military expedition was being readied against him in London and Washington, but he gambled to the bitter end that George W. Bush would not pull the trigger.
On the eve of Operation Iraqi Freedom—the first bombs fell on March 19—well over 70% of the American public supported upending the Saddam regime. The temptation to depict the war as George W. Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s is convenient but utterly false. This was a war waged with congressional authorization, with the endorsement of popular acceptance, and with the sanction of more than a dozen United Nations Security Council resolutions calling for Iraq’s disarmament. …
In spite of the unpopularity of ”nation building”, Max Boot says we better learn how to keep those skill sets.
There are two essential lessons one can draw from the Iraq War: either that we should never get mired in counterinsurgency or “nation-building” operations in the future or that, if we do get involved, we should do a better job of achieving our objectives. The prevailing wisdom in Washington adheres to the former position, but I believe the latter lesson offers more useful guidance for the future.
No less an eminence than Bob Gates, on his way out the door as secretary of defense, proclaimed, “In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.” Although he subsequently walked back that statement, it is fair to say that Gates’ view is now the conventional wisdom.
But is it—to borrow the favored term of Gates and others—“realistic” to argue that we will never get involved in another major ground war? No one could have imagined on September 10, 2001, that we would shortly be fighting in Afghanistan, nor can anyone imagine what the future will bring. Suffice it to say, when one looks at the wide arc of instability stretching from West Africa to Central Asia, it is hard to rule out in advance that U.S. ground troops will ever be dispatched into harm’s way. …
Corner post says the Iraq war was right, the rhetoric was wrong.
I supported the Iraq War from the start. I supported it so much that as the anti-war movement built momentum at home and around the world — and as key members of the U.N. Security Council failed to support a new resolution authorizing the invasion — I felt anxious that President Bush would blink. Yes, I believed that Saddam Hussein had a stockpile of WMDs, but I also believed there were ample additional (and sufficient) reasons to invade: He was violating the Gulf War cease-fire accords, he was shooting at our pilots on a daily basis, he was a prime financial supporter of the Palestinian suicide bombing offensive in the Second Intifada, and he tried to kill a former American president. All those events occurred after he had previously launched two offensive wars (against Iran and Kuwait) and gassed his own people. Both the Authorization for the Use of Military Force in Iraq (2002) and the Iraq Liberation Act (1998) detail Saddam’s many sins, yet even these Acts of Congress fail to provide the full list.
In other words, there were legal, moral, and strategic grounds for war even absent weapons of mass destruction.
Yet it was here that we made a terrible rhetorical mistake. By grounding the public case for war so solidly in the existence of large and dangerous stockpiles of existing weapons — rather than making the more complete case for war — when those stockpiles didn’t exist (much to the surprise even of many Iraqi generals) to a great many Americans the reason to fight simply disappeared.
Minding the Campus has more on the administrative pigs at NYU.
For John Sexton, president of New York University, March came in a like a lion. In one aggravating week Sexton found himself the subject of two biting stories in the press: a no-confidence vote from faculty and focus on $72 million in unexplained NYU loans to Jack Lew and many others. The first was merely embarrassing. The second could endanger Sexton’s powerhouse position at NYU.
Ironically, Sexton and his university may be victims of their own success. For decades NYU has steadily enlarged its huge footprint, and now plans to add two million more square feet to its campus in historic (and crowded) Greenwich Village. NYU has elbowed aside community protests and even tore down a house where Edgar Allen Poe once lived, despite loud objections from many of its own faculty.
One of the main complaints of last week’s faculty vote of no-confidence in Sexton is that he places financial objectives ahead of academic pursuits, while limiting faculty participation in shaping the university’s future. Sexton, who earns $1.5 million a year, with a $2.5 million bonus waiting in the wings, has been asked by Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) to hand over documents concerning loans and other fringe benefits it paid out over the last 10 years. Grassley also wants information on the university’s generous compensation packages and details on how they were calculated. …