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Fouad Ajami writes that Obama has rushed into foreign policy issues where angels have feared to tread.
President Barack Obama did not “lose” Iran. This is not a Jimmy Carter moment. But the foreign-policy education of America’s 44th president has just begun. Hitherto, he had been cavalier about other lands, he had trusted in his own biography as a bridge to distant peoples, he had believed he could talk rogues and ideologues out of deeply held beliefs. His predecessor had drawn lines in the sand. He would look past them.
Thus a man who had been uneasy with his middle name (Hussein) during the presidential campaign would descend on Ankara and Cairo, inserting himself in a raging civil war over Islam itself. An Iranian theocratic regime had launched a bid for dominion in its region; Mr. Obama offered it an olive branch and waited for it to “unclench” its fist.
It was an odd, deeply conflicted message from Mr. Obama. He was at once a herald of change yet a practitioner of realpolitik. He would entice the crowds, yet assure the autocrats that the “diplomacy of freedom” that unsettled them during the presidency of George W. Bush is dead and buried. Grant the rulers in Tehran and Damascus their due: They were quick to take the measure of the new steward of American power. He had come to “engage” them. Gone was the hope of transforming these regimes or making them pay for their transgressions. The theocracy was said to be waiting on an American opening, and this new president would put an end to three decades of estrangement between the United States and Iran.
But in truth Iran had never wanted an opening to the U.S. For the length of three decades, the custodians of the theocracy have had precisely the level of enmity toward the U.S. they have wanted — just enough to be an ideological glue for the regime but not enough to be a threat to their power. Iran’s rulers have made their way in the world with relative ease. No White Army gathered to restore the dominion of the Pahlavis. The Cold War and oil bailed them out. So did the false hope that the revolution would mellow and make its peace with the world. …
David Warren says in Iran you win, or you die. We will root for the regime to lose, because many good things will come from that.
Everything is on the line in Iran, at present — not only the future of the Iranian regime, but also of the Middle East, and by extension, the most tangible western interests.
Consider: if the Iranian regime were to fall, by far the largest organized threat to peace in the region would be removed. This includes not only a fairly proximate nuclear threat to Israel (for all we know North Korea’s second nuclear test was actually Iran’s first), but sponsorship of the most efficient part of the world’s Islamist terror apparatus.
Hezbollah and Hamas are both, today, for all practical purposes, Iranian proxies. Through them, and through other channels, the regime of the ayatollahs makes money, materiel, and expertise available to terror cells as far away as Argentina, Sweden, the Philippines.
But more significantly, Hezbollah and Hamas together represent an Iranian veto on any Palestinian settlement, or any attempt to ameliorate that conflict, with all that that implies.
The Syrian regime, most dangerous of Israel’s neighbours, would, in the absence of Iranian support, have to make accommodations, indeed find new allies.
North Korea’s chief conduit into the illicit Middle Eastern arms trade would be lost.
The principal external threat to Iraq would be removed, along with sponsorship of Iraq’s own domestic insurgencies. Afghanistan would also be more secure.
In economic terms, the threat of a world crisis provoked by the interdiction of oil shipments from the Persian Gulf would disappear. …
Michael Gerson says Obama reminds of George Bush the elder. Can you say Chicken Kiev?
PRESIDENTS dealing with foreign uprisings are haunted by two historical precedents. The first is Hungary in 1956, in which Radio Free Europe encouraged an armed revolt against Soviet occupation, a revolt that the US had no capability or intention of materially supporting. In the contest of Molotov cocktails v tanks, about 2500 revolutionaries died; 1200 were later executed.
The second precedent is Ukraine in 1991, where the forces that eventually destroyed the Soviet Union were collecting. President George HW Bush visited that Soviet republic a month before its scheduled vote on independence. Instead of siding with Ukrainian aspirations, he gave a speech that warned against “suicidal nationalism” and a “hopeless course of isolation”.
William Safire dubbed it the “chicken Kiev” speech, which fit and stuck. The first Bush administration was so frightened of geopolitical instability that it managed to downplay American ideals while missing a strategic opportunity. Ukrainian independence passed overwhelmingly.
In President Barack Obama’s snail-mail response to Iran’s Twitter revolution, he has tended toward the chicken Kiev model, which should come as no surprise. During the presidential campaign, Obama summarised his approach to foreign affairs: “It’s an argument between ideology and foreign-policy realism. I have enormous sympathy for the foreign policy of George HWBush.” …
Samizdata notes bizarre happenings at Newsweek.
Unlike the dismal Economist, Newsweek magazine does not claim to be a free market supporting publication.
Henry Hazlitt stopped writing for Newsweek back in 1966 and his replacement, as a free market voice, Milton Friedman was fired (asked to stop writing for the magazine – which is being ‘fired’ as far as I am concerned) many years ago – which is the reason I stopped subscribing to Newsweek, which I had done as a youngster.
In recent years Newsweek magazine has been fairly openly socialist (although it does not formally admit this). …
Popular Mechanics says there are things in your back yard that want to have you for lunch.
… When Europeans settled the New World, they dealt with predators by showing them the business end of a gun. Wherever pioneers settled, populations of large predators—mountain lions, bears, wolves, alligators—plummeted or disappeared entirely. That search-and-destroy mission continued virtually unabated until the rise of the environmental movement in the 1960s and ’70s, when the national attitude began to evolve. People came to believe that what was left of wilderness and its inhabitants should be preserved for future generations.
This ideology has clearly worked: Since the passage of the Endangered Species Act of 1973, 14 species of animals that were on the brink of extinction have recovered. Alligators were removed from the list in 1987; gray wolves in 2009. The grizzly bear, confined mostly to Yellowstone National Park in the lower 48 states, was delisted in 2007. As for once heavily hunted mountain lions, some 50,000 of the big cats now inhabit North America, with populations in the United States as far east as North Dakota. Experts predict that lions eventually will reinhabit the Adirondacks in New York, the Maine woods and the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee.
Few people anticipated that rebounding populations would create a new problem: an increase in animal attacks as predators returned to former ranges now occupied by humans. In August 2002, a black bear killed a 5-month-old girl in the Catskills, a hundred miles northwest of New York City; the baby had been sleeping in a carriage on the porch. In January 2004, a mountain lion killed a male bicyclist in Whiting Ranch Wilderness Park in Orange County, Calif., then attacked a 31-year-old woman a few hours later. Other bicyclists managed to save the victim, but not before she sustained serious injuries. In October 2007, an alligator snatched and killed an 83-year-old woman outside her daughter’s home in Savannah, Ga. The next day, her body was found in a pond, hands and a foot missing. And, in May 2008, a coyote bit a 2-year-old girl playing in a Chino Hills, Calif., park and attempted to drag her off.
Though the trend is worrisome, the absolute number of attacks remains small. Fatal black bear attacks on humans have doubled since the late 1970s, increasing from one to just two incidents per year. (About six people are injured each year.) Between 1890 and 2008, there were 110 mountain lion attacks in North America; half of the 20 fatalities resulting from these attacks occurred in the past two decades. Despite an alligator population too large to count, the U.S. had just 391 attacks and 18 fatalities between 1948 and 2005. Coyotes have caused only one known fatality in the U.S.
Still, the relationship between animals and humans is proving to be more complex than simply kill ’em all or love ’em all—even though some of the old, romantic ideas about living at one with nature linger. …
The humor section starts with a review of a book about Jimmy Carter’s presidency. You know, the one the One is imitating.
On July 15, 1979, Jimmy Carter spoke to the nation from the Oval Office about the energy crisis then gripping America. The address has become known as “the malaise speech” even though Mr. Carter never once spoke the “m” word. It is now the subject of Ohio University history professor Kevin Mattson’s excellent “What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?”
Mr. Carter had already tried to raise consciousness about energy with a speech two years earlier, in April 1977. “This difficult effort,” he said then, “will be the moral equivalent of war.” Moral equivalent of war led to the unfortunate acronym MEOW, which seemed especially apt when neither congressional action nor public mobilization ensued. …
… Jimmy Carter was elected largely because he promised never to lie to the American people. Of all the un-Nixons on offer in 1976—the Democratic primary field included Sens. Frank Church and “Scoop” Jackson—Mr. Carter was the most convincing. But his administration never seemed to gel managerially; most of his programs went nowhere legislatively; and he turned out to be aloof and a little prickly. (He confided to his diary: “It’s not easy for me to accept criticism and to reassess my ways of doing things.”) Democratic leaders worried that Mr. Carter was turning into Nixon, but without the charm. By 1978, a movement to draft Ted Kennedy for the 1980 presidential race was flourishing. By May 1979, Vice President Walter Mondale was contemplating resigning. …