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Charles Krauthammer gets around to his column on Israel’s 60th birthday.
… Six months before Israel’s birth, the United Nations had decided by a two-thirds majority that the only just solution to the British departure from Palestine would be the establishment of a Jewish state and an Arab state side by side. The undeniable fact remains: The Jews accepted that compromise; the Arabs rejected it.
With a vengeance. On the day the British pulled down their flag, Israel was invaded by Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan and Iraq — 650,000 Jews against 40 million Arabs.
Israel prevailed, another miracle. But at a very high cost — not just to the Palestinians displaced as a result of a war designed to extinguish Israel at birth, but also to the Israelis, whose war losses were staggering: 6,373 dead. One percent of the population. In American terms, it would take 35 Vietnam memorials to encompass such a monumental loss of life.
You rarely hear about Israel’s terrible suffering in that 1948-49 war. You hear only the Palestinian side. Today, in the same vein, you hear that Israeli settlements and checkpoints and occupation are the continuing root causes of terrorism and instability in the region.
But in 1948, there were no “occupied territories.” Nor in 1967 when Egypt, Syria and Jordan joined together in a second war of annihilation against Israel. …
David Warren on the world’s most despicable socialist regime. Now that’s saying something.
… While, to my knowledge, substantial efforts have been made by the U.S. and Australia to assist in moving supplies, they have learned their lesson, and the noise and posturing about Burma’s non-cooperation is therefore coming chiefly from the diplomatic corps of the European Union — with their long history of generating heat without action.
My answer to correspondents has been, “What does one say?” The value of hand-wringing is limited. It is an appropriate expression of lamentation at funerals, but it does not bring the dead back to life, nor in this case prevent the spread of death among a people who have had the misadventure to fall under one of the world’s most despicable socialist regimes. Comment is almost out of place, and the best journalistic effort must be to report and document accurately what has happened. For a day will come when Burma’s current masters have migrated from earth to hell, and their survivors will need assistance in recovering their own history.
The officially-stated “Burmese Road to Socialism” was embarked upon after a coup in 1962, and the country has been effectively sealed ever since. It does not occupy a vacuum, however. The very journalists who have heaped comparative praise on China’s own relief operations after last week’s earthquake in Sichuan — mostly sight unseen — should note that it was the Chinese politburo, as usual, employing its veto at the U.N. Security Council, to prevent even a discussion of what its brother politburo in Burma has done.
Margaret Thatcher, the lady who put the backbone in Bush 41, gets a cool statue at Hillsdale College
Mark Steyn comments on the reaction to Bush’s Knesset speech.
… President Bush was in Israel the other day and gave a speech to the Knesset. Its perspective was summed up by his closing anecdote – a departing British officer in May 1948 handing the iron bar to the Zion Gate to a trembling rabbi and telling him it was the first time in 18 centuries that a key to the gates of the Jerusalem was in the hands of a Jew. In other words, it was a big-picture speech, referencing the Holocaust, the pogroms, Masada – and the challenges that lie ahead. Sen. Obama was not mentioned in the text. No Democrat was mentioned, save for President Truman, in the context of his recognition of the new state of Israel when it was a mere 11 minutes old.
Nonetheless, Barack Obama decided that the president’s speech was really about him, and he didn’t care for it. He didn’t put it quite as bluntly as he did with the Rev. Wright, but the message was the same: “That’s enough. That’s a show of disrespect to me.” And, taking their cue from the soon-to-be nominee’s weirdly petty narcissism, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, Joe Biden and Co. piled on to deplore Bush’s outrageous, unacceptable, unpresidential, outrageously unacceptable and unacceptably unpresidential behavior.
Honestly. What a bunch of self-absorbed ninnies. …
Steyn Corner Post on what the Dems think is acceptable military service this year.
I confess I find it hard to keep up to speed with the Democrat view of military service.
As I understand it, when veterans like Bush Sr and Bob Dole are running against Bill Clinton, then military service is of no value and Vietnam draft-dodging is irrelevant if not, in fact, the principal qualification for being Commander-in-Chief.
On the other hand, when Bush Jr is running against John Kerry, then nothing less than a combat veteran who says he’s “reporting for duty” will do in the White House and a fellow who flew fighter jets over Texas in the Air National Guard is a contemptible draft-dodging chickenhawk.
Four years on, the term “chickenhawk” seems to have dropped out of the Dem lexicon and one assumes Senator Obama will not be “reporting for duty” at this summer’s convention. So what’s the party’s current position? …
Gerard Baker of the London Times says the media are fitting Obama for a halo.
… But it’s fairly clear now that, with the near-certain nomination by the Democrats of Barack Obama everything is in place for the media to indulge in one of the greatest, orgiastic media fiestas of hero-worship since Elvis Presley.
You will not see a finer example of the genre than the cover story of this week’s Newsweek, which was entitled “The O Team”. This rhapsodic inside account of Senator Obama’s campaign reads a little like a cross between Father Alban Butler’s Life of St Francis and the sort of authorised biography of Kim Jong Il you can pick up in any good bookshop in Pyongyang.
Mr Obama is portrayed throughout as an immanently benevolent figure. Not human really, more a comforting presence, a light source. He is always eager to listen to all aides of an argument, always instilling confidence in the weak-willed, resolutely sticking to his high principles and tirelessly spurning the low road of electoral politics. I stopped reading after a while but I’m sure by the end he was healing the sick, comforting the dying, restoring sight to the blind and setting prisoners free.
The panegyric included the now conventional wisdom in the media that Republicans have only ever won elections in the past 40 years through lies and fearmongering – smearing their opponents and spreading false fears that a vote for a Democrat would open the country to foreign invasion.
To be fair, the Newsweek credo was only the latest and perhaps most shameless phase of the pro-Obama liturgy in the media. Some cable TV channels prostrate themselves nightly before him. Most newspapers worship at the altar. They have already set up a neat narrative for the election between Senator Obama and John McCain in November – the Second Coming versus Old Grouchy, The Little Flower of Illinois up against the Scaremongering Axeman from Arizona. …
Good post from Michael Barone about Douglas Feith’s Iraq book.
In trying to understand news about the conflicts in Iraq, I work to keep in mind the difference between what we know now about decision-making in World War II and what most Americans knew at the time. From the memoirs and documents published after the war, we’ve learned how leaders made critical judgments. But at the time, even well-informed journalists could only guess at what was going on behind the scenes.
Today we’re only beginning to learn about what went on behind the scenes on Iraq. One important new source is the recently published War and Decision by Douglas Feith, the No. 3 civilian at the Pentagon from 2001 to 2005. Feith quotes extensively from unpublished documents and contemporary memorandums, just as in the late 1940s Robert Sherwood did in Roosevelt and Hopkins and Winston Churchill did in his World War II histories. The picture Feith paints is at considerable variance from the narratives with which we’ve become familiar.
One such narrative is “Bush lied, people died.” The claim is that “neocons,” including Feith, politicized intelligence to show that Saddam Hussein’s regime had weapons of mass destruction. Not so, as the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Silberman-Robb Commission have already concluded. Every intelligence agency believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and the post-invasion Duelfer report concluded that he maintained the capability to produce them on short notice. There was abundant evidence of contacts between Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Given Saddam’s hostility to the United States and his stonewalling of the United Nations, American leaders had every reason to believe he posed a grave threat. Removing him removed that threat. …
Dick Armey says the GOP should not surrender on health care.
Hillary Clinton’s presidential aspirations may have died in North Carolina last week, but her most famous bad idea is alive and well in Washington, D.C. With likely increases in Democrat ranks in the House and Senate, and a Democrat (possibly) in the White House, plan on a big fight in 2009 over who – you or the federal government – will control your family’s health-care decisions.
We won this fight last time around. One of the GOP’s shining moments was our principled opposition to HillaryCare in 1994. The first lady’s overreach helped lay the groundwork for the Republican takeover of Congress that November.
We may not be so lucky next time. While the Democratic Party appears unified under the banner of big-government health care, the GOP seems conflicted and running scared. This is a classic case of Republicans being afraid that the public will not understand good policy reforms. Rather than promoting the principles of consumer choice, individual responsibility and provider competition that would transform our broken health-care system, key Republicans are bowing to political pressure and signing on with the government-run health-care Democrats.
Emblematic of this phenomenon is Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, who, as the Finance Committee’s ranking Republican, will play an influential – perhaps crucial – role in next year’s debate. …
Denver Post’s David Harsanyi on the drug war.
It could be argued that the most useless job in Washington, D.C., is held by John Walters, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. He’s otherwise known as the country’s Drug Czar.
And when you consider the spectacular number of useless jobs in Washington, that’s quite an accomplishment.
No one is saying, of course, that it’s easy being a figurehead of a cost-inefficient organization charged with implementing the biggest domestic policy disaster since Prohibition. After all, it means advocating that thousands of non-violent offenders be sent to prison — quite often after paramilitary raids have reeled them in.
It means denying citizens dying of cancer, AIDS and other painful diseases the medical marijuana they claim alleviates their pain. It means ignoring the will of citizens in states like California and Colorado, where medical marijuana was legalized.
Being the Drug Czar means overstating and misleading Americans with so-called studies. He’s not alone. From the Centers for Disease Control to the Surgeon General, government agencies are under the impression that when their view of some “greater good” is at stake, concocting studies to propagate flawed policy is acceptable. …