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In the Weekly Standard blogs, Gabriel Schoenfeld posts on the choices in facing the Iranian nuclear threat.
Iran is pressing forward with its nuclear program. The Obama administration is dithering. Bent upon getting a Security Council resolution rather than assembling a coalition of the willing, the White House and American policy is being held hostage by Russia and most of all by China. Here’s an informed prediction: if Beijing does come around and support a new round of sanctions, it will be hailed by the White House as a major breakthrough: peace in our time. But the actual sanctions will be weak to worthless. China has too much at stake in Iran as a source of energy. It also sees an opportunity to poke us in the eye. …
In Newsweek, Sumit Ganguly thinks India should be treated with more respect.
…India won’t wait indefinitely for the White House to put the relationship back on track. Instead, it is cutting deals with nations that respect its significance. Russia, which had let old Soviet ties to India wither, is now dramatically renewing the connection. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin recently visited India and went home with multiple agreements, including deals on civilian nuclear energy and more than $1.5 billion worth of advanced naval aircraft. Obama’s inattention is what makes Russia’s advance possible.
It’s hard to understand why Washington would continue to neglect such a valuable ally. India is a vast and growing market, a significant military player in South Asia, a growing force in global talks on climate change and nuclear nonproliferation. So instead of ignoring or publicly upbraiding India, Washington needs to find a way to avoid the acutely sensitive issue of Kashmir, while enhancing counterterrorism cooperation and actively seeking India’s input into the larger discussion on Afghanistan. Doing so will help secure Washington’s relationship with a nation that is too important to keep on the sidelines.
Roger Simon gives another reason why he calls Obama - President Weirdo.
…The President of the United States — whose most important duty is to protect the citizens of this country — is publicly abjuring the use of nuclear weapons if we are attacked by chemical or biological weapons — both of which are known to all of us as Weapons of Mass Destruction, the dreaded WMDs.
…Now I detest nuclear weapons as much as the next person, but this approach seems — I hate to repeat myself, but I will — deranged. It also has very little to do with actually reducing nuclear weapons in the world. Again, it seems like the act of an extreme narcissist, someone who wants to parade himself as anti-nuke while ignoring the checks and balances that have, in fact, kept nuclear weapons in their silos for decades. …
Tunku Varadarajan discusses the president’s stubborn anti-Bush stance as misguided and unprincipled foreign policy.
…There is also an unseemly side to the pragmatism that is Obama’s international leitmotif. Paradoxically for a man who incarnates the progress of civil liberties in his own country, the president has literally banished human rights (that quintessentially liberal and Democratic concern) from U.S. foreign policy—just because Bush took up the cause. Of rights in China, Egypt, and elsewhere, the Obama administration has spoken only with an excessive, and dispiriting, circumspection.
So one wonders—as Putin embraces Chavez and Karzai plays host to Ahmadinejad; as Russia asserts the right to repudiate any nuclear-arms reduction treaty and China gives us the bird on the yuan; as the alliance with India languishes and the one with Britain experiences unprecedented atrophy; as Israel expresses acrid disagreement with us and Japan seeks to rip pages out of its postwar rulebook—what all the pragmatism has really, truly accomplished…
…other than give our delighted adversaries a free pass and our friends a very rude wakeup call.
John Hinderaker comments on the president’s anti-nuclear policy. Amateur, thy name is Obama.
…On its face, that is unbelievably stupid. A country attacks us with biological weapons, and we stay our hand because they are “in compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty”? That is too dumb even for Barack Obama. The administration hedged its commitment with qualifications suggesting that if there actually were a successful biological or chemical attack, it would rethink its position. The Times puts its finger on what is wrong with the administration’s announcement:
“It eliminates much of the ambiguity that has deliberately existed in American nuclear policy since the opening days of the cold war.”
That’s exactly right. The cardinal rule, when it comes to nuclear weapons, is keep ‘em guessing. We want our enemies to believe that we may well be crazy enough to vaporize them, given sufficient provocation; one just can’t tell. There is a reason why that ambiguity has been the American government’s policy for more than 50 years. Obama cheerfully tosses overboard the strategic consensus of two generations.
Peter Wehner says that history will not judge Obama kindly.
…Why Mr. Obama made this fateful decision is hard to tell. He is a person of unusual ideological rigidity. The president is undeniably committed to expanding the size, scope, and reach of government. …
….This is what this moment demanded of this president and this Congress. Instead, we got the opposite. Rather than tapping the fiscal brakes and eventually nudging us into reverse, they have hit the accelerator and are leading us over a cliff. …
…The majority of the Obama presidency is still before us. Nevertheless, it’s not too early to say that on this vital front, Barack Obama has been, and will eventually be judged to be, a significant failure. He not only missed history’s calling, he mocked it. He placed his own statist ambitions above the needs of the nation he was elected to serve. Soon enough, and perhaps on a scale he cannot now imagine, Obama and his party will be held accountable for having done so.
The Streetwise Professor comments on the most recent attack on free markets from the Left, brought to you by Senator Christopher Dodd.
…And just what are the apparatchiks in the SEC going to do in that 120 days? Just what knowledge and expertise can they bring to bear in evaluating the funding plans? The question answers itself; this adds costs and delay, for no perceivable benefit. And what reason is there to restrict the free flow of capital from consenting adults with over $1mm to startups?
The American system of financing entrepreneurial startups is one of the world’s wonders. It has played a central role in stimulating amazing technological innovation that has brought us amazing new products and contributed to substantial productivity growth in the ’90s and ’00s. It is in no way implicated in the financial crisis. …
Nile Gardiner has more on the Obami’s destruction of the US economy.
The relentless drive by the Obama administration to undercut economic freedom in the United States continued yesterday with Paul Volcker’s call for the possible introduction of European-style value-added taxes as well as energy or carbon taxes. Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chief, is currently the most powerful economic adviser to the president after Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and sits as the chairman of the president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.
This is not empty, throw away rhetoric, but a call to arms by an aggressively interventionist and uncompromisingly left-wing US administration that is actively seeking to refashion the United States in the image of the European Union, both in terms of foreign and economic policies. …
Jennifer Rubin’s commentary is on the money.
James Klein of the American Benefits Council writes in opposition to the attacks by the administration and Rep. Henry Waxman that corporations’ write-downs of losses due to ObamaCare are some sort of political scare tactics …
…As Klein notes, it is the frenzied ObamaCare defenders who are playing politics with the tax code, and worse — berating corporations to defraud shareholders. (”As for the government’s assertion that companies are failing to adequately account for all the savings they will enjoy from health-care reform, isn’t that exactly the kind of “creative” accounting that got Enron in trouble?”)
This is the administration that promised to take the politics out of science and the ideology out of foreign policy. But in fact everything — including the tax code — is merely part of the Chicago machine, which threatens to mow down any rule, any entity, and any critic standing in its way. Lacking internal restraint and humility, this administration and the country would surely benefit from some robust legislative scrutiny and oversight. The voters in November will have an opportunity to check the voracious power of an administration of bullies.
Charles Krauthammer helps the president answer Doris the factory worker in much less than 17 minutes.
On President Obama’s 17-minute answer to a question at the town-hall meeting in Charlotte about Obamacare raising taxes:
I don’t know why you’re so surprised. It’s only nine times the length of the Gettysburg Address, and Lincoln was answering an easier question: the higher purpose of the Union and [of the death of] soldiers who fell in battle.
The president had an easy answer. He could have said: I wanted to make history with health care and to do it, I have to raise your taxes. Sure, it’s not a good time economically in the middle of a recession, but politically, I had to, because I have a majority in Congress and I’m going to lose it in November. End of answer.
Debra Saunders gives us her take on the president and Doris.
In June, comedian Bill Maher complained of President Obama, “You don’t have to be on television every minute of every day – you’re the president, not a rerun of ‘Law & Order.’ ”
I get paid to listen to politicians tell the same old jokes, repeat the same canned sound bites and – as often occurs – not answer questions. But I do not think it too much to ask that, now that Obama has signed legislation to overhaul the health-care system, he ditch the health-care spiel.
To watch Obama nine months after Maher’s quip is to live in rerun hell. …
David Harsanyi says the food fascists are coming. Actually, now that Obamacare has passed, you’re not allowed to be fat. To help citizens lose weight, the government will impose a VAT tax that will make food much more expensive, so people won’t be able to afford to eat as much.
…And if Washington can’t dictate calorie counts in school vending machines, or tax soda pops, or force elementary schools in Topeka to stock their cupboards with USDA-approved nutritional fare, then, really, why do we have a federal government in the first place?
As we speak, legislation is wiggling through Congress that would ban candy and sugary beverages in local schools — bake sales, a la carte lunches, Halloween goodies, birthday cupcakes — and stipulate that suitable chow be offered. It’s legislation that can’t be stopped. It’s for the children. …
John Stossel explains how libertarianism is compassionate.
…Besides, says Wendy McElroy, the founder of ifeminists.com, “government aid doesn’t enrich the poor. Government makes them dependent. And the biggest hindrance to the poor … right now is the government. Government should get out of the way. It should allow people to open cottage industries without making them jump through hoops and licenses and taxing them to death. It should open up public lands and do a 20th-century equivalent of 40 acres and a mule. It should get out of the way of people and let them achieve and rise.” …
The Economist has a piece on the ethical problems with drone warfare.
…Ronald Arkin of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Interactive Computing has a suggestion that might ease some of these concerns. He proposes involving the drone itself—or, rather, the software that is used to operate it—in the decision to attack. In effect, he plans to give the machine a conscience.
The software conscience that Dr Arkin and his colleagues have developed is called the Ethical Architecture. Its judgment may be better than a human’s because it operates so fast and knows so much. And—like a human but unlike most machines—it can learn.
The drone would initially be programmed to understand the effects of the blast of the weapon it is armed with. It would also be linked to both the Global Positioning System (which tells it where on the Earth’s surface the target is) and the Pentagon’s Global Information Grid, a vast database that contains, among many other things, the locations of buildings in military theatres and what is known about their current use. …
And we have a link to the world’s most beautiful waterfountains.