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Charles Krauthammer gives us the back story on Sarkozy’s response to Obama’s speech on nuclear disarmament at the UN. Sarkozy was also sending a pointed message to Obama for holding back on the Qom news. Sarkozy’s comments were posted by Maura Flynn on BigGovernment.com, which Pickings carried on September 28th.
…Confusing ends and means, the Obama administration strives mightily for shows of allied unity, good feeling and pious concern about Iran’s nuclear program — whereas the real objective is stopping that program. This feel-good posturing is worse than useless, because all the time spent achieving gestures is precious time granted Iran to finish its race to acquire the bomb.
Don’t take it from me. Take it from Sarkozy, who could not conceal his astonishment at Obama’s naivete. On Sept. 24, Obama ostentatiously presided over the Security Council. With 14 heads of state (or government) at the table, with an American president at the chair for the first time ever, with every news camera in the world trained on the meeting, it would garner unprecedented worldwide attention.
Unknown to the world, Obama had in his pocket explosive revelations about an illegal uranium enrichment facility that the Iranians had been hiding near Qom. The French and the British were urging him to use this most dramatic of settings to stun the world with the revelation and to call for immediate action.
Obama refused. Not only did he say nothing about it, but, reports the Wall Street Journal (citing Le Monde), Sarkozy was forced to scrap the Qom section of his speech. Obama held the news until a day later — in Pittsburgh. I’ve got nothing against Pittsburgh (site of the G-20 summit), but a stacked-with-world-leaders Security Council chamber it is not.
Why forgo the opportunity? …
… ”The administration told the French,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “that it didn’t want to ‘spoil the image of success’ for Mr. Obama’s debut at the U.N.” …
Jennifer Rubin also looks at the Sarkozy speech and says the speech is a blueprint for conservatives to spur the White House to action based on reality.
…Sarkozy’s speech is a finely constructed argument against Obama’s open-ended scheme of negotiations and willful ignorance about the events that are unfolding. For conservatives, it provides the necessary building blocks for an alternative foreign policy. Obama has his eyes on the distant horizon; conservatives should urge us to see what’s happening in front of our eyes. Obama would rather skip over inconvenient facts and unhelpful history; conservatives should highlight them and extract relevant lessons. Obama is wary of employing leverage or defining his position; conservatives should insist he do both. And while Obama appeals to some mythical “international community” (as if there actually existed a world composed of nations that shared the same values and aspirations), conservatives would do well to point out that other nations in the world as it is (replete with bad actors and nervous allies) are watching Obama, evaluating his conduct, and making assessments about their own conduct.
The question remains: Will the West follow Sarkozy’s worldview, or Obama’s? Those concerned about a nuclear-armed Iran and a regional nuclear-arms race had better hope it is the former.
David Warren compares Obama and Gorbachev, as two leaders presiding over nations in trouble.
…Yet they do have one major thing in common, and that is the belief that, regardless of what the ruler does, the polity he rules must necessarily continue. This is perhaps the most essential, if seldom acknowledged, insight of the post-modern “liberal” mind: that if you take the pillars away, the roof will continue to hover in the air.
Gorbachev seemed to assume, right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall and then beyond it, that his Communist Party would recover from any temporary setbacks, and that the long-term effects of his glasnost and perestroika could only be to make it bigger and stronger.
There is a corollary of this largely unspoken assumption: that no matter what you do to one part of a machine, the rest of the machine will continue to function normally.
A variant of this is the frequently expressed denial of the law of unintended consequences: the belief that, if the effect you intend is good, the actual effect must be similarly happy.
Very small children, the mad, and certain extinct primitive tribes, have shared in this belief system, but only the fully college-educated liberal has the vocabulary to make it sound plausible.
With an incredible rapidity, America’s status as the world’s pre-eminent superpower is now passing away. This is a function both of the nearly systematic abandonment of U.S. interests and allies overseas, with metastasizing debt and bureaucracy on the home front.
And while I think the U.S. has the structural fortitude to survive the Obama presidency, it will be a much-diminished country that emerges from the “new physics” of hope and change.
Last week three certifiable liberals turned on Obama. Today we have two more; Martin Peretz and Margaret Carlson.
Martin Peretz reports on Hillary’s efforts to protect women, and notes that there are many women in Afghanistan that need our protection.
Hillary Clinton has become the president’s secretary for women’s affairs, and she’s done a good job at it–within the severe limits of what realistically can be done to protect females from sexual violence in war zones. On Wednesday, the U.N. Security Council met, with Hillary in the chair, and as the Associated Press put it, “adopted a resolution … condemning sexual violence in war zones.” The resolution passed unanimously which is always a bad sign because it signals inadequate measures, which are the only ones that will get support from the five permanent members.
Mrs, Clinton appealed “for global action to end the scourge.” The council created a “special envoy” (my, how many special envoys there are around the world) to combat the use of rape as a weapon of way. The resolution also mandates the U.N. secretary general “to dispatch a team of experts to advise governments on how best to prosecute offenders.”
Clinton told the council:
It is time for all of us to assume our responsibility to go beyond condemning this behavior to taking concrete steps to end it, to make it socially unacceptable, to recognize it is not cultural, it is criminal … We must act now to end this crisis. …
…PS: In the meantime, while the president and his secretary of state are worrying about women, there is one decision to be made at the White House that will affect the very lives and dignity of more than 14 million women. It is the decision over Afghanistan where we–that is, our soldiers and the soldiers of our NATO–have freed millions of Afghan women from a humiliating form of degradation and slavery. Their fates are also at stake in the issue of whether we stay and fight or not. But almost nobody has them in the equation.
Margaret Carlson, in Bloomberg News, compares Obama’s trip to the IOC meeting with Nero’s fiddling.
Most of the time those complaining that President Barack Obama is doing too much really wish that he were doing nothing at all. It’s not that he is spreading himself too thin but that he is spreading himself too wide — over health care, executive bonuses and kid’s homework, while pandering to dictators at the United Nations. …
…I rarely have common ground with Republican Senator Kit Bond of Missouri. … Still, Bond has a point when he says “it’s baffling that the president has time to travel to Copenhagen, to be on ‘Letterman’ and every channel except the Food Network, and, yet, he doesn’t have time to talk with and listen to his top general.” …
…Let’s hope General Stanley McChrystal, the commander in Afghanistan, wasn’t hoping for a meeting tomorrow. That’s when Obama will be busy upstaging Brazil’s soccer star Pele and Japan’s Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama. According to Bond, who is keeping track, it’s been more than two months since the president had the kind of face time with McChrystal that he’s giving the International Olympic Committee. …
Andrew Stuttaford has a clever post on the Corner.
Chicago is a fine city and a place that I always enjoy visiting. It deserves better than to have the Olympics foisted upon it. What I cannot understand is why President Obama is joining in with the effort to bring this scourge to his home town. The Olympics after all, is a festival of bureaucratic arrogance, financial irresponsibility, internationalist vacuity, and politically correct blather.
Oh . . .
The Boston Globe editors think Obama should have left the IOC well enough alone.
Acting as if he were head of the Chicago chamber of commerce, not the leader of the United States, President Obama is traveling hat in hand to meet with the International Olympic Committee in Copenhagen today. He’s pushing for his hometown to host the 2016 Games. In case the judges aren’t dazzled by him and his wife, Michelle, he’s got Oprah Winfrey to help seal the deal. Chicago has much to gain from the Olympics, and no doubt all Americans would love to see the Games on US soil. Obama may help deliver the prize. But he risks diminishing the prestige of his office by mobilizing it behind this narrow cause. And it seems at least possible that some judges will feel so put off by his hard sell that they’ll opt for one of the other finalists.
Obama gained support during the presidential campaign by staying cool amid an economic meltdown, while John McCain marched into Washington in an attempt to show a spirit of action. Instead, McCain showed his futility. Americans don’t like to see their leaders appearing rash or weak. If the Olympic committee rejects the president, Obama becomes just another failed salesman. It’s a mistake for him to sink so much into a cause that may not even need his help. He should have stayed home.
In The National Journal, Stuart Taylor believes that specialized health courts would have better results than tort reform.
…Other states encourage doctors to admit errors, apologize, and offer out-of-court settlements, without fear that such actions will be used against them in court. Some scholars propose tying early offers and settlements to limits on contingent legal fees, with less work for the lawyers to do. These are good ideas — but again, they provide no remedies for groundless claims or defensive medicine.
The most promising proposal is to send malpractice suits to new, specialized health courts that have expert judges and no juries. By efficiently separating valid from invalid claims, health courts could award malpractice victims more-timely, more-certain compensation, with far lower legal and administrative costs.
Health courts would also better protect blameless doctors and thus reduce defensive medicine. By issuing written opinions consistently enforcing reasonable standards of care, they could enable doctors to safely forgo medically unnecessary tests and other interventions.
The health court idea has been championed by the Harvard School of Public Health and by Common Good, a law-reform group headed by Howard. Supporters include consumer groups such as AARP as well as medical organizations and political leaders ranging from former Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J., to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga.
The trial lawyer’s lobby and its allies hate the idea. They see juries as an essential safeguard for victims of negligent conduct. Although there is some truth to this view, juries lack the expertise to evaluate complex medical judgments, especially when the plaintiffs are severely injured and the doctors are not to blame. In addition, different juries apply wildly inconsistent standards in different cases, and they are not asked to explain their reasoning. …
Even though it was fought in the 19th Century, the American Civil War was the opening event in 20th Century warfare. The Economist reviews The American Civil War: A Military History by John Keegan, looking at how previous European wars influenced the US, and how the Civil War influenced future European wars.
A British military historian, even one as distinguished as Sir John Keegan, is hard put to say something new about America’s civil war. Fine American scholars, such as Bruce Catton, Shelby Foote and James McPherson, have explored every inch of its blood-sodden battlefields. Sir John’s achievement is to bring an international perspective to a conflict which, in the number of casualties in relation to population, “bears comparison only with the European losses in the Great War and Russia’s in the Second World War.”
In the 1860s the French army was regarded as supreme by the staff at the American military college at West Point and both sides in the war respected French generalship. Napoleon’s crushing victories at Austerlitz and Jena influenced the South’s Robert E. Lee as he aspired to end the war with a climactic Napoleonic battle. The North’s George McClellan was inspired by the Anglo-French campaign on the Black Sea in the Crimean war (1853-56) when he mounted an amphibious assault on Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy. …
…As well as looking back at European influences, Sir John looks forward to how the civil war changed European warfare. Relatively primitive trench warfare on the Confederacy’s northern front in Virginia presaged the slaughter of trench warfare on the Somme and at Passchendaele. General William Tecumseh Sherman’s spoliation of Georgia and the Carolinas “inaugurated a style of warfare that boded the worst sort of ill for peoples unable to keep a conqueror at bay, as Hitler’s campaigns in eastern Europe 75 years later would testify.” …
…As a Southern gentleman, Robert E. Lee is seen by Sir John as peerless, though not as a general, where he rates him inferior to his Unionist counterpart, Ulysses Grant. He praises Lee for his purity of character and describes him as a devout Christian and noble soldier who spared his reunited country the horrors of protracted guerrilla warfare when he accepted defeat with grace. But it was Sherman, not Lee, who set the pattern for modern warfare