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James Kirchick thinks critics need to give Israel the same pass they give to Muslim leaders.
With Benjamin Netanyahu set to become Israel‘s prime minister, critics around the world are proclaiming the death of the peace process. And the fact that Avigdor Lieberman – who has called for all Israeli citizens (not just Arabs) to swear a loyalty oath and supports population transfers with the Palestinians – may become Israel’s foreign minister has only exacerbated the fervor of these predictions.
In this analysis, it is the incoming conservative government of Israel which poses a threat to regional stability, not Palestinian rejectionism or the machinations of Iran and Syria and their proxies Hamas and Hezbollah. The height of this thinking was apparent at Tuesday night’s White House press conference, when Agence France-Presse reporter Stefan Collison asked President Obama, “How realistic do you think those hopes [for Middle East peace] are now, given the likelihood of a prime minister who is not fully signed up to a two-state solution and a foreign minister who has been accused of insulting Arabs?”
When was the last time a journalist asked the leader of a democratic country whether Muslim states’ not being “fully signed up” to the existence of Israel and having ministers in its employ who “insult” Jews threatened Middle East peace? …
Roger Simon posts on the anti-Semitic cartoon in the Washington Post.
… this whole state of affairs makes me very sad indeed, because reasoning with, even getting through to, the Oliphant’s of the world – reminding them that it was the Israelis who voluntarily left Gaza only to have their towns bombarded month after month, that Gaza is ruled by a regime of religious fanatics who are pathologically misogynistic and homophobic and believe the entire globe should be Islamic, etc., etc. – is hopeless. Oliphant and company are unreachable, permanently reified. It is all depressing beyond words.
David Brooks thinks we can win in Afghanistan.
… the people who work here make an overwhelming case that Afghanistan can become a functional, terror-fighting society and that it is worth sending our sons and daughters into danger to achieve this.
In the first place, the Afghan people want what we want. They are, as Lord Byron put it, one of the few people in the region without an inferiority complex. They think they did us a big favor by destroying the Soviet Union and we repaid them with abandonment. They think we owe them all this.
That makes relations between Afghans and foreigners relatively straightforward. Most military leaders here prefer working with the Afghans to the Iraqis. The Afghans are warm and welcoming. They detest the insurgents and root for American success. “The Afghans have treated you as friends, allies and liberators from the very beginning,” says Afghanistan’s defense minister, Abdul Rahim Wardak.
Second, we’re already well through the screwing-up phase of our operation. At first, the Western nations underestimated the insurgency. They tried to centralize power in Kabul. They tried to fight a hodgepodge, multilateral war. …
Robert Kagan likes Obama’s Afghan moves too.
Hats off to President Obama for making a gutsy and correct decision on Afghanistan. With many of his supporters, and some of his own advisers, calling either for a rapid exit or a “minimal” counterterrorist strategy in Afghanistan, the president announced today that he will instead expand and deepen the American commitment. He clearly believes that an effective counterterrorism approach requires an effective counterinsurgency strategy, aimed not only at killing bad guys but at strengthening Afghan civil society …
WSJ Editors likewise. Now we will see if Obama has the courage of George W. Bush.
President Obama unveiled his strategy for the war in Afghanistan yesterday, and there is much to like in it. Our main question — and, we suspect, the world’s — is whether the new Commander in Chief is really prepared to devote the resources and political capital that his plan will need to succeed. …
… Mr. Obama’s strategy takes some important steps. The most significant is to reclaim the battle from NATO, which never really wanted the job. The U.S. will create a new command in Southern Afghanistan, where U.S. and Afghan troops will apply the lessons of Iraq. The irony here is that Mr. Obama is asserting U.S. primacy from the failing “multilateralism” of the Bush Administration, which made the mistake of assuming Europeans really believed in the fight. In the end, as usual, the 60,000 or so Yanks will have to do the bloodiest fighting and the Germans can man the supply lines out of harm’s way. …
And Abe Greenwald and Peter Wehner are pleased with Obama’s Afghan moves.
The Brit blog Samizdata provides a transcript and links to MEP Daniel Hannan’s rip of Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
The truth, Prime Minister, is that you have run out of our money. The country as a whole is now in negative equity. Every British child is born owing around £20,000. Servicing the interest on that debt is going to cost more than educating the child. …
… You cannot spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt. And when you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we’re well placed to weather the storm, I have to tell you, you sound like a Brezhnev-era Apparatchik giving the party line. You know, and we know, and you know that we know that it’s nonsense. Everyone knows that Britain is the worst placed to go into these hard times. The IMF has said so. The European Commission has said so. The markets have said so, which is why our currency has devalued by 30% – and soon the voters, too, will get their chance to say so.
They can see what the markets have already seen: that you are a devalued Prime Minister, of a devalued Government.
Mark Steyn says soon there will be no escape from Mega-Gov as Tim Geithner tries for global reach.
… “We can’t,” he continued, “allow institutions to cherry pick among competing regulators and ship risk to where it faces the lowest standards and weakest constraints.”
Just as a matter of interest, why not? If you don’t want to be subject to the punitive “oversight” of economically illiterate, demagogic legislators-for-life like Barney Frank, why shouldn’t you be “allowed” to move your business to some jurisdiction with a lighter regulatory touch?
Borders give you choices. Your town has a crummy grade school? Move 10 miles north, and there’s a better one. Sick of Massachusetts taxes? Move to New Hampshire, as thousands do. To modify the abortionists’ bumper sticker: “I’m Pro-Choice And I Vote With My Feet.” That’s part of the self-correcting dynamism of capitalism: For example, Bono, the global do-gooder who was last in Washington to play at the Obama inauguration, recently moved much of his business from Ireland to the Netherlands, in order to pay less tax. And good for him. To be sure, he’s always calling on governments to give more money to Africa and whatnot, but it’s heartening to know that, when it comes to his wallet as opposed to yours, Bono, like Secretary Geithner, has no desire to toss any more of his money into the great sucking maw of the government treasury than the absolute minimum he can get away with. I’m with Bono and Tim: They can spend their money more effectively than hack bureaucrats can. We should do as they do, not as they say.
If you listen to the principal spokesmen for U.S. economic policy – Obama and Geithner – they grow daily ever more explicitly hostile to the private sector and ever more comfortable with the language of micromanaged government-approved capitalism – which, of course, isn’t capitalism at all. They’ll have an easier time getting away with it in a world of “global oversight” where there’s nowhere to move to. ..
David Harsanyi wants to know if the government bailouts will ever end.
“Most men die of their remedies and not of their diseases,” a smart-alecky Frenchman once observed. At this point many Americans might be pondering a similar thought: What’s worse — the recession or the prescription?
It began with the federal government rescuing financial institutions because they were, allegedly, too big to fail. Somewhere along the line treating this ailment included cajoling perfectly healthy financial institutions into accepting taxpayer medicine (some of those have returned the TARP funds) for the common good. …
John Stossel wants the government to drop the drug war.
Corner post on a premature explosion in jihadi land. Good start to the humor section.
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