I hope not for Romania's sake

We shall have to wait and see what the election of Klaus Iohannis will actually mean for Romania as they have not had a great deal of joy with previous Presidents. There is something ominous about the comparisons being made between him and Barack Obama.

Iohannis is Romania's newly-elected president.

After his surprise win on Sunday (16 November), when the German-speaking, Lutheran mayor of Sibiu became the first Romanian president from an ethnic and religious minority, he is being compared to Barack Obama - the first black president of the US.

On Facebook, he has just passed 1.1 million fans, more than German leader Angela Merkel or Italy’s Matteo Renzi.

But despite his popularity, he is neither a populist, nor, like Obama, a gifted orator.

In his victory speech on Monday, Iohannis, a 55-year old physics teacher, was as down-to-earth as it gets, his main message being: “The campaign is over. Let's get to work now”.

That does not sound like too bad a speech to me.

Obama populist and gifted orator. How very nostalgic. Nobody can possibly believe either of those statements any more. President Obama is highly unpopular as the latest mid-term elections showed and it has long ago been recognized that he is lot without his teleprompter.

In fact, given that Barack Obama is turning out to be one of the worst Presidents the United States has ever had it is to be hoped that Romanian President Iohannis will not emulate him in any way.

Let us not forget that, unlike President Obama, President Iohannis is a member of our real government.

And here we are again

This week-end saw a wave of protests in Russia against the war with Ukraine and some support for them in the West. I shall blog about it in due course and about the fact that President Putin with his Chekists seem unexpectedly nervous. I am not sure that the news of him signing a "decree restoring the title "Dzerzhinsky Division" to an elite police unit that was previously named after the founder of the Bolshevik secret police" is a sign of defiance or just whistling in the dark. Interesting, nonetheless, but hardly surprising. Perhaps, he, a mid-ranking KGB/FSB officer would like to see himself as a latter day version of Iron Felix.

Meanwhile, President Obama has announced new airstrikes against the "Islamic State" in Syria and the war in the Middle East that he was going to end successfully as it had been entirely President Bush's fault is spiralling out of anybody's control.

Also meanwhile, and unsurprisingly given the situation in eastern Europe, Poland is buying missiles from the US. I have no doubt our Nige will be wagging his finger at them any minute now and telling them that they should stop annoying the Bear. Or some such foolishness.

I wish I could leave the subject alone

There was this vague hope that I might be able to write about something that is not Syria today but that will have to wait. There were too many articles, blogs and columns as well as cartoons in the media for me to link to them all or even most but one or two stand out in interest.

First of all, however, I should like to express some surprise and annoyance with the hacks, both as writers and as cartoonists, who appear to think that being voted down by the House of Commons is a shameful thing for David Cameron to have to endure. From being Obama's poodle (untrue) he is being described as going on to being the Commons' poodle. That is a curious view of what representative democracy and a balance of power between the legislative and the executive might be. In fact, we do not have proper balance of power but last week's vote made a tiny step towards creating one, a tiny step in the centuries' long struggle that our media hacks do not seem to have heard of.

I am even less impressed by the suggestion that once Congress has voted (I am coming to that) and voted the "right" way, the Commons should be asked to vote again. Perhaps they would have changed their minds by then. Ahem. Isn't there a political construct that does just that: makes people vote again and again until they come up with the required answer? Is that what representative parliamentary democracy is in these people's opinion?

In yesterday's posting I wrote at length that I do not think our position in the world requires us or depends on us rushing into every war or civil war that happens to have good photographers around (even if the photos sometimes get muddled like those of the bodies in Syria .... ahem ... Iraq did), adding that, despite John Kerry's posturings and President Obama's obvious dislike of this country, the Anglo-American special relationship is likely to survive and flourish in the future.

Which brings me to a curious development. It would appear that President Obama is following in the Boy-King's footsteps, possibly hoping for the same outcome. Although it is not required by the US Constitution and although the President has stated that the US was about to launch an attack on Syria, he is, nevertheless, going to seek Congress's approval on September 9. Apparently, this last-minute decision surprised his advisers, who told him that he can go ahead without consulting Congress. How will this affect the forthcoming fiscal negotiations with Congress? There was a suggestion in The Hill that the strike on Syria would help the President "to reverse the automatic spending cuts to the Pentagon known as sequestration". That, however, was written before the decision to seek Congress's approval for military intervention of whatever kind.

Fraser Nelson says that President Obama's decision to consult Congress is a compliment to David Cameron who went to Parliament. Possibly. It could easily be the action of a desperate man who simply cannot make up his mind what to do.

There are only two other links I want to put up. One to a somewhat unimpressive article by Charles Moore, who thinks the world has not become a better place because of Thursday's vote, a ridiculous and meaningless statement. The world is never a good place and rarely becomes better as a result of political decisions by a country. But then, he also says

Yesterday morning, Britain woke up and found it no longer had a functioning foreign policy. “We might as well turn all our embassies into car showrooms,” one Cabinet minister told me bitterly.

Dear Mr Moore, we have not had a functioning foreign policy for quite a long time and, as long as we stay in the EU, we do not need or require embassies. If there were not so many people in the FCO who need appointments abroad we could have closed them down long ago with nobody noticing the difference. In the end, Mr Moore seems to come to no obvious conclusion as to whether the vote and the control it exerted over the Prime Minister and the Royal Prerogative was a good thing or a bad.

Finally, there is a well argued though very angry piece by Caroline Glick, with whom I do not always agree but whose thoughts in this case are very well worth reading. Interestingly, she along with numerous Israeli commentators, does not think that an American strike would be a good idea. Supporting the rebel groups is not in anyone's interests and one cannot strike at Assad without doing that.

Which brings me very neatly to my last point. This afternoon I took part in a programme on the BBC Russian Service, a large part of which was a discussion of Syria and the various reactions to the crisis, including that vote. I had a good deal of fun explaining that to Russian listeners.

There was also a long discussion with a Syrian journalist who lives and works in Beirut but keeps in close contact with his home country and who could speak good Russian as well as an Israeli journalist who spoke excellent Russian.

Neither of them could explain clearly the various groups and divisions in Syria, especially as far as the rebels were concerned. The Syrian expressed the view that Assad's rule was highly unpopular and people served in his forces only for financial reasons. Nevertheless, he repeated several times, nobody wants Western intervention either. This has been echoed by other Syrian commentators as well.

The Israeli journalist talked of the situation in her country, which is not, she maintained, nearly as difficult as the media makes out. The mobilization has been on a very small scale and, while there are queues in shops and for gas masks, the atmosphere was no longer one of panic. To the question of whether the Israeli government preferred Assad to stay as many of the rebels were Islamists and linked to Al-Qaeda she said two interesting things, one of which I have heard before.

As has been said in various places, people with wounds of various kinds have been crossing the Israeli border to be treated in their far superior hospitals by their far superior doctors. Treatment is given to all and no questions are asked as to where the particular fighters had come from. I would like to think that, while doctors ask no questions, other people in different uniforms also turn up to find out one or two things about what really goes on in Syria.

Secondly, she said that it is well known that the Israeli government has been making contact with one or two of the bigger rebel groups' leaders. That is hardly surprising. Unlike Western governments and commentators the Israelis will have to live with the outcome of the present crisis, whatever it might turn out to be. They can have no exit strategy.

Too much emotion

There are times when emotion is appropriate. I am certain that I shall feel very emotional when I attend Professor Minogue's Memorial Service towards the end of September and so will everybody else there. In fact, I shall fill my bag and pockets with tissues just in case I tear up more than once. But that is what funerals and memorial services are for. Politics, on the other hand, ought to dispense with emotionalism as far as possible. Yet it was clear on Thursday,  in the wake of the Parliamentary debates about possible military intervention in Syria and the close vote [scroll down for Main Question] in the House of Commons against it that there is just too much emotion about the whole subject on both sides and for reasons I cannot quite understand. (Here is the full text of the debate in the House of Commons and here of the one in the House of Lords, where no vote was taken but the sense of the House was very clear.)

Almost immediately after the result was announced one started seeing and hearing weeping and gnashing of teeth among those who thought we should intervene though they were still unable to specify how and for what purpose we should do so and equally insane rejoicing among those who were against it, not to mention those who thought that this would signal the end of Cameron's leadership for reasons I fail to understand. I am, of course, glad that we are not going to be engaged in this open-ended, badly defined, ill-thought out military adventure but I see no particular reason for jumping up and down with joy. (A reminder of what I wrote about it a couple of days ago.)

A couple of days ago Brendan O'Neill put up a piece on Spiked in which he argued that

War used to be the pursuit of politics by other means. Today, if the statements made by the Western politicos and observers who want to bomb Syria are anything to go by, it’s the pursuit of therapy by other means. The most startling and unsettling thing about the clamour among some Westerners for a quick, violent punishment of the Assad regime is its nakedly narcissistic nature. Gone is realpolitik and geostrategy, gone is the PC gloss that was smeared over other recent disastrous Western interventions to make them seem substantial, from claims about spreading human rights to declarations about facing down terrorism, and all we’re left with is the essence of modern-day Western interventionism: a desire to offset moral disarray at home by staging a fleeting, bombastic moral showdown with ‘evil’ in a far-off field.

I could not help agreeing with him and thought of the article again as I waded through the acres of sticky emotionalism last night and today or tried to engage in some rational discussion. The reasons as to why the MPs betrayed us all, betrayed the people of Syria and of every other country you could name and created a world-wide desolation were various but all displayed a "nakedly narcissistic nature". All arguments about the nature of the rebels, the lack of British interest, the lack of clear understanding as to what is going on or what we might achieve were swept aside in a general cry of "Assad is such a terrible man" or, in one case (I kid you not) "MPs can now watch the Syrian children suffer". (I did say rather coolly that if it was about the children we should go in against both sides since there is good evidence of children being maltreated by the rebels. There was no response.)

The whole discussion reminds me of the endless arguments about foreign aid in which all rational objections of any kind are brushed aside with an highly emotional and at the same time self-centred cry of "but we cannot just sit back". It is all about us not about them.

So where are we now? First of all, that vote was not, in my opinion, catastrophic for David Cameron. Intervention in Syria is not core government policy and there is no particular reason why a government should not be defeated from time to time. It used to happen in the past and can happen again. In fact, it has just happened. The defeat was not exactly surprising (and neither were the arguments expressed in the House of Lords). It does not take a great deal of political nous to realize that the proposed military adventure is highly unpopular in the country and the arguments for it have not been presented at all cogently.

Then again, wars are never popular but until recently, declaration of them had not needed parliamentary approval (and Blair had it in full over Iraq) because it is issued, as this article explains, under a Royal Prerogative that is now effectively vested in the government of the day. David Cameron did not have to go to Parliament over the Syrian adventure but he could not really avoid it for political reasons. He can now, with some justification, proclaim himself to be a true parliamentarian who does not act in a high-handed fashion but listens to the people and to Parliament. Indeed, he has already done so and the chances are he will play on it in future.

The Opposition could now call for a vote of no confidence but I doubt if they will as they might win, in which case there will be an election, which they have not a chance of winning at the moment. Actually, the government would win that vote. Governments usually do.

The Lib-Dims came out rather poorly. Having consistently opposed the war in Iraq they (like a number of leftie luvvies in this country and in the US) have suddenly become bellicose and anxious to see a nasty tyrant punished though, presumably, not toppled. Nick Clegg is now of even less importance than he has been until now.

The other losers are UKIP and, for once, it is not their fault. Nigel Farage has made it clear that their policy was strong and absolute opposition to any intervention in Syria. A number of UKIPers then produced the usual statist, socialist mantra about the money spent on any foreign adventure and how it is needed to build more hospitals, schools and so on. Even the Labour Party stopped saying that.

A number of analysts (not all of them UKIP members) said before the debate that if the Commons vote for military action, UKIP's popularity would go up. That would not necessarily be true as the Lib-Dims had not benefited from their opposition to the Iraq war even when that became unpopular. As it happens, the vote went against military intervention and UKIP is once again on the sidelines, calling for a confidence vote, resignations and assuring anyone who will listen that they were the ones who achieved this result.

While Mr Cameron is reported to be contemplating a few enforced resignations in his Cabinet and a general reshuffle, we are getting an emotional chorus of people in and around politics, led by the Lord Ashdown, about Britain's diminished role in the world and the death of the special relationship with the United States. All absolute piffle. If Britain has any sort of a role to play in international politics it is not likely to be enhanced by a Pavlovian need to get embroiled in any war and civil war that happens to have good photographers around.

At the height of Britain's power and influence it managed to keep out of numerous wars and even more civil wars, not considering it necessary to become embroiled unless there was some interest in doing so. The man who is generally thought of being the strongest imperialist among political leaders and one who always had his eye on promoting Britain's role and interests, Benjamin Disraeli, the Earl of Beaconsfield, can be said to have had his finest hour when he refused to involve the country  in a Balkan war but negotiated a peace to its advantage. When Bismarck was congratulated on achieving agreement after days of difficult negotiations in 1878 in Berlin, he insisted that the achievement was Disraeli's, famously and admiringly saying: "Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann."

In fact, all those rather over-wrought individuals who are comparing Assad with Hitler and saying that we should go to war as we did in 1939 as well as those who displaying fears that this might another 1914, should study the events of 1876 to 1878 when, in the wake of atrocious behaviour by the Turks in response to an uprising in the Balkans Mr Gladstone, the Leader of the Opposition, published his highly influential Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East. Even then there were pictures and reports from some parts of the world and many people became angry.

However, the situation was different. For one thing, those massacred were Christians and Gladstone, himself a devout man, could appeal to feelings of solidarity for co-religionists. If there is any of that around in the discussions about Syria, they cannot be on the side that is calling for the punishment of Assad as it is the far more Islamist rebels who seem to have attacked, murdered and generally abused the Syrian Christians.

Secondly, Gladstone could point to the British government as being partially at fault. Disraeli was determined to retain the alliance with the Ottoman Empire against the Russians and Gladstone, whose campaign was considerably more popular than any calls for intervention in Syria are now, called for a change in policy. He did not call for direct military intervention (which Russia was supplying in any case) but for a change in foreign policy. Even in 1876, at the height of Britain's strength and power, it was not considered to be necessary to become militarily involved in every war going, not even for a good cause. In the end, as we have seen, Disraeli won and the Treaty of Berlin stabilized the region but did not precisely punish any wrongdoers.

In the meantime, President Obama, unlike his much maligned predecessor seems unable to build a coalition of the willing and may decide to go it alone, largely because he, foolishly in most people's opinion, drew those lines in the sand or red lines or whatever lines and can now either bomb Syria with no-one to back him or climb down on his threats. Neither is a good option for him or for the United States.

To be fair, it looks like France is ready to support any action and even become involved in it though not for the purpose of overthrowing Assad, merely to punish him (and to ensure that some Raffaele Rafale planes are bought by somebody in the regions).

Secretary of State John Kerry, who, in the not too distant past voted for the Iraqi war before he voted against it, made a speech in which he called France America's oldest ally, which is technically correct, as France helped the winning side in the War of Independence. Not sure it means anything really as the special relationship whose death is once again proclaimed by all and sundry is a somewhat more complicated affair and exists on many more levels than politicians can grasp. If it survived Harold Wilson's government, it will survive President Obama's posturing.

John Kerry's speech (analyzed here and published in full here) appears to be using language and arguments that are very familiar. I was not the only one who was transported back to 2003 when similar arguments were given by President Bush and Secretary of State Powell for an attack on Iraq (which I still think was the right thing to do but that is for another time) and which was later furiously attacked by Democrats and their left-wing supporters, some of whom are now finding time to attack Parliament for that vote. Well, if you lost Mia Farrow, you have really lost your position in the world. Or so she thinks, I have no doubt.

Could John Kerry suddenly be against the military adventure (it is hard to know what to call it after all the chopping and changing) after he is for it?

Tomorrow will bring new developments, I've no doubt. At least, I hope so as I am due to discuss them on the BBC Russian Service in the afternoon. But as things stand, President Obama has not built his coalition of the willing and has found himself in a pickle as a result of his more than confused policy in the Middle East. Britain is not going to be bombing Syria and that is not a bad thing as open-ended, ill-defined military adventures whose purpose is unclear and which are likely to help someone equally nasty are a bad idea. This does not mean that Britain's position in the world will change or that the special relationship with the US is over. Maybe it will mean that there will be an effort to define what that position might be but I do not have high hopes of that. However, the rather emotional rejoicing about the vote is equally insane. The situation in Syria and the Middle East is not such as to bring joy to anyone. In fact, it has become considerably worse than it was in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected and promised to sort out all the nasty problems that his predecessor had allegedly created. And the moral of that story is that no politician should ever believe the hype produced by the media.

A missed anniversary

Once again, I have had a finger-wagging from a regular reader of the blog and I deserve it. How could I forget the thirtieth anniversary of this speech?

 

 President Ronald Reagan addressing the nation on the subject of defence. Investors.com puts that seminal speech into perspective. President Obama has just returned from his Middle Eastern tour during which his "achievement" seems to have been to allow Israel and Turkey do what they wanted to do anyway and sort out their differences. Those two countries have been allies for a long time and are both more than a little worried about Iran.

Islamofascist Iran is now, according to the White House, a year away from nuclear arms, and the "Arab Spring" Obama's apologies helped spawn has turned Egypt from a U.S. ally into a possible foe under the control of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Compare Obama's failure to realize the havoc he was wreaking to the astonishing prescience of Ronald Reagan.

Addressing the nation, he asked, "What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?"

He knew missile defense was "a formidable technical task, one that may not be accomplished before the end of this century."

But by committing America to it, Soviet communism was a few years later relegated to "the ash-heap of history," as Reagan had promised the year before.

Read the whole article and weep.

Catching up on Russia

I am aware of not having covered the Magnitsky saga recently and shall do so very soon, particularly as it involves the unhappy fate of the Conservative Friends of Putin Russia.

For the moment, let me just direct readers of this blog to an article in the Wall Street Journal [if the link does not work properly go through Google].

The so-called Magnitsky Law, named after Sergey Magnitsky, imprisoned, tortured and murdered for his attempts to do his duty as a lawyer employed by a British firm, is part of a larger bill to normalize trade with Russia. This piece of legislation, whose aim is to prevent specific abusers of human rights in Russia from entering the USA was passed by the Senate last week by 92 votes against 4 but is still awaiting President Obama's signature. There has already been what might be termed an  organized response from Russia.

On its Twitter account, the foreign ministry in Moscow called the human rights statute "something out of the theater of the absurd." Another tweet said, "It is perplexing and preposterous to hear human rights complaints from the US, where torture and kidnapping are legal in the 21st century." And: "This biased approach is nothing but a vindictive desire to counter Russia in world affairs."

Same old, same old.

The Kremlin has for months made vague threats of retribution against the U.S. if the Magnitsky law passed. And on Thursday Russian President Vladimir Putin denounced the law and recommended to the Duma some "adequate but not exorbitant" retaliation.

As the WSJ says:

Please fume away, Mr. Putin. Let the Russian people know that the U.S. continues to care about rights and democratic freedoms. They might have gotten the wrong impression in recent years.

They might still get the wrong impression:

Throughout the first term President Obama has pushed a "reset" in relations with Russia, muting criticism of Mr. Putin's slide to authoritarianism. The Administration tried to kill the Magnitsky Act, and in his statement on its passage Mr. Obama pointedly failed even to mention Magnitsky or the provision named after him in the new law. We can be grateful that at least Congress was willing to stand up for American values.

UPDATE: President Obama has signed legislation "granting normal trade relations to Russia, which angered Moscow by including sanctions targeting alleged Russian human rights abusers". The Magnitsky Act is now in place in the United States.

Meanwhile, in Russia

A former Russian policeman has been sentenced to 11 years in a prison camp for his role in the 2006 death of an anti-Kremlin journalist.

Friday's sentencing of Dmitry Pavlyuchenkov by the Moscow city court came at the end of a plea bargain process that qualified him for a reduced sentence in exchange for his co-operation in the case.

Pavlyuchenkov was accused of tracking Anna Politkovskaya so she could be assassinated and of giving the shooter the gun with which the journalist was killed.

Having confessed his guilt, the defendant was ordered to pay $98,000 to the victim's family.

Unsurprisingly, Politkovskaya's family is unhappy with this turn of events. They do not mind Pavlyuchenkov being sentenced (though one wonders how many of those 11 years he will serve) but they dislike the idea of the plea bargaining as that meant he did not have to testify. No testimony - no evidence about who actually was behind the killing. (Here are the previous postings on the Politkovskaya case.)

Spreading

Across the Middle East where yet more people have been killed and even to London where, astonishingly enough, two people have been arrested. Amazing, how many people across the world have seen a film that nobody has even heard of until a few days ago.

Michelle Malking calls President Obama "the Hip-Hop President". One can't help feeling she has a point. She quotes various sources (so the links are there) that say the same thing - there were warnings, this was a prepared operation for 9/11 and ... the President has been skipping intel briefings. The country and, indeed, the West is in the very best of hands.

Just a couple of links

It is some time since I have written about American politics, which is a great mistake as things are so much more interesting there. For the time being, here are a couple of links people might like to read.

Reuters summarizes the White House damage limitation after a week of self-created pitfalls by President Obama, particularly his extraordinary challenge to the Supreme Court, which in itself demonstrates that he could not have taught constitutional law. An American constitutional lawyer, first and foremost, knows the Constitution and the various components of it. He does not make crass comments about the Supreme Court never challenging a law passed by Congress (though, only barely, and without any Republican support). He does not drivel about people who are elected being more important than those who are not. The Legislative, Executive and Judiciary have their roles and positions and these must be fulfilled. President Obama is already regretting his outburst.

His other outburst was against the GOP budget, which, as is the case with most of these budgets, is not really all that tough but is not to President Obama's taste. So, he accused the authors of it of being "social darwinists", as nasty a slur as ever there was one. Did the media faint with horror? Did it heck. Never mind. Here is a nice piece on Cato blog by David Boaz.

Not sure what is more disturbing

1.) That the President of the United States assumes that his election is as much of a given as that of the "re-elected" President of Russia.

or

2.) That the President of the United States hastily promises things to the temporary President of Russia that are clearly not in the interests of his own country as long as he is given "space" by the real President of Russia.

or

3.) That the President of the United States is one of those dumb politicians who are incapable of checking whether the mike near them is still open when they make comments they don't want the world to hear. 

I leave it to this blog's readers to work it out. 

An excellent analysis

Arnold Ahlert provides an excellent and highly amusing (the man is almost as good at cold sarcasm as this blog is) of the Sarkozy-Obama open mic debacle with a particularly nasty jab at the media.

Yet according YNet News if it were up to the journalists who heard the exchange, Wasserman-Schultz wouldn't have needed any luck at all:

"The surprising lack of coverage may be explained by a report alleging that journalists present at the event were requested to sign an agreement to keep mum on the embarrassing comments. A Reuters reporter was among the journalists present and can confirm the veracity of the comments."

"A member of the media confirmed Monday that "there were discussions between journalists and they agreed not to publish the comments due to the sensitivity of the issue."

"He added that while it was annoying to have to refrain from publishing the information, the journalists are subject to precise rules of conduct."

What conduct? Because Sarkozy's office asked journalists not to turn on their headsets until the conference began, the comments were considered private, according to French media "traditions."

That excuse ostensibly covers the collective behinds of the French reporters. What about everyone else? What reporter in his right mind would sign anything that prevents him from reporting on a story made available, not by subterfuge or anything else resembling illegality, but by the carelessness of two world leaders? Since when did a legitimate "gotcha" moment become off limits to the press?

You may well ask.

Are we allowed to talk about glass houses?

French Prime Minister Sarkozy must see himself as a latter-day George Washington who cannot tell a lie or, at least, someone who can call other people liars with a straight face. Or so it would seem from the story that was suppressed by faithful journalists at first but has surfaced on French websites and has now been confirmed by Reuters.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy branded Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "a liar" in a private conversation with U.S. President Barack Obama that was accidentally broadcast to journalists during last week's G20 summit in Cannes.

"I cannot bear Netanyahu, he's a liar," Sarkozy told Obama, unaware that the microphones in their meeting room had been switched on, enabling reporters in a separate location to listen in to a simultaneous translation.

"You're fed up with him, but I have to deal with him even more often than you," Obama replied, according to the French interpreter.

The technical gaffe is likely to cause great embarrassment to all three leaders as they look to work together to intensify international pressure on Iran over its nuclear ambitions.

The conversation was not initially reported by the small group of journalists who overheard it because it was considered private and off-the-record. But the comments have since emerged on French websites and can be confirmed by Reuters.

Obama's apparent failure to defend Netanyahu is likely to be leapt on by his Republican foes, who are looking to unseat him in next year's presidential election and have portrayed him as hostile to Israel, Washington's closest ally in the region.

It is also, by a strange coincidence the only democracy in the region but that is not likely to worry either Sarko or Obama.

However, the behaviour of journalists who decided that this particular conversation was private and off the record and was, therefore, not to be broadcast to all and sundry is curious. Would it have happened with other politicians in slightly different circumstances? Somebody broke ranks, clearly.

Netanyahu's office refused to comment, presumably because they could not stop laughing long enough.

Obama "clarifies" his position

As President Obama starts his hastily arranged state visit to Britain and Ireland (James Delingpole's take on the subject is completely accurate in my opinion), Hot Air reminds us that before leaving he had tried to clarify his position on the Middle East (well, on Israel and her relationship with Hamas and Fatah).

Basing his account on Philip Klein's report, Ed Morrissey comes to the conclusion that

So, we can’t expect Israel to try to negotiate with Hamas, but we can blame them for a failure to try to negotiate with Hamas? Is the US position that Israel has “no option” but to negotiate with terrorists that no one expects them to negotiate with?

Somewhere in these two statements is an explanation of smart power, I’m sure.

Uh-huh! This is, of course, what a number of "liberal" i.e. pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli analysts take when they try to explain why Israel is at fault for not wanting to be destroyed. Somehow one expects something better from the President of the United States, particularly one who was billed as being ultra-smart and ultra-knowledgeable. It's not like this was something difficult like the number of states in his country.

Change? What change?

As President Obama comes up with another fatuous speech about the Middle East, showing that he seems not to have understood anything about recent events there or North Africa and promises lots more aid to countries with dubious governments, the question I asked on whether anything has changed in our media because of the "Arab spring" remains valid.

According to a report by JustJournalism the period before the various uprisings was characterized by serious under-reporting from Arab countries and over-concentration on Israel. As a consequence events in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and other countries sent journalists scrambling for information that they ought to have been collecting for some time and publishing. Of course, it is far easier to report from Israel than any other country in that area.

The question of whether anything will change remains. Clearly, President Obama has made up his mind that, despite everything that took place in the last few months, it is Israel that he needs to pressurize into surrender. Whether he will be successful is questionable.

Meanwhile, Phyllis Chesler reports that Facebook groups that call for mass invasion of Israel (anything to turn attention away from what is going on in Syria, Bahrain, Egypt etc etc) are proliferating.

The Third Palestinian Intifada on Facebook seems to have at least twenty different groups or pages, each with hundreds or thousands of fans. One group has 365,000 fans. According to Yedioth Ahronoth (YNet), these sites are now urging all Arabs to “rush the Israeli borders” after Friday prayers on May 20.

Look: This could be the work of one nerdy Palestinian in a basement in Ramallah. The fans could also be people who exist only in cyberspace.

But, these Third Palestinian Intifada websites could also be the work of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hizbullah, Syria, and the Palestinian Authority, all of which have problems of their own and for whom a diversion would be mighty fine. In fact, I think they are. Thus, this promised new aggression must be taken seriously and stopped in its tracks.

Well, you can see the logic: we have no freedom, democracy, economic development, good education, rule of law, scientific and technological achievements, so let's destroy the one country in the area that has all those. That will solve our problems. Right!

Michelle Malkin takes us through the Fog of Fog

This is truly inspired. Michelle Malkin points out that what we have here is not the Fog of War but the Fog of Fog.

Errors happen. Miscommunications happen. Confusing the name of which of bin Laden's myriad sons died (Hamza, not Khalid), for example, is no biggie.

But the hourly revamping of key details of Sunday's raid suggests something far beyond the usual realm of situational uncertainty that accompanies any military operation. The Navy SEALs did their job spectacularly. The civilians tasked with letting the world know about the mission, however, have performed like amateur dinner theater actors in a tragi-comic production of "Rashomon-meets-The Blind Men and the Elephant-meets-Keystone Kops."

Mind you, with material like that anyone can be a comic writer. Read the whole piece. Very well worth it.

Yet another last word

I fear I have to return to the big story briefly as I had an interesting exchange on the subject with a journalist friend. Let's get the news out of the way: President Obama has decided not to release pictures of Osama dead or being made dead though there are, apparently, some genuine pictures of the compound after the raid around. His argument is that those nasty pictures will simply heighten hatred of America. A spurious argument, I would say. Those that hate America will go on doing so and those who think there is a conspiracy around the whole episode will go on doing so. Others might accept what happened and many on the famous Arab street might actually admire a decisive action on the part of the Great Satan. Besides, back in 2009 Obama had no problems about releasing pictures of maltreatment of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet, if there is one thing that intensifies hatred of America it is the sight of American servicemen dealing with their prisoners with less than total gentleness and civility.

Talking of conspiracy theories, I have now distinguished three but shall be glad to hear of any I have missed.

Theory number one is that bin Laden is still alive and the American government, the CIA, the US Navy SEALS and the entire world media has taken an enormous gamble in publicizing the story while the man can pop up at any moment and announce that reports of his death have been greatly exaggerated. (I am sure he reads Mark Twain.) On the other hand, bin Laden has, for some reason best known to himself, seems to have gone along with the hoax. Perhaps, he has, in reality asked for asylum and entered one of those special programmes for people who turn state evidence.

Theory number two is that bin Laden was killed some time ago but for some reason (unspecified) this was not made known and for some other reason (also unspecified) has now been released.

Theory number three, much favoured by some Russian bloggers and a few nutters in the West, is that the man never existed at all.

The beauty of all this is that they are all mutually exclusive and we can argue about them for ever. But to go back to the exchange I had with the journalist friend: we both disliked the sight of Obama and his immediate circle (or some of it) watching the raid in live-time, as if it were a film in the cinema as my friend said. It reminded him of being in the audience for public hanging, a gruesome thought. On the other hand, public hangings were immensely popular and I am not at all sure they would not be that again if they were, so to speak, resurrected.

I think there is something more here and that is the strange personality of President Obama. Whatever the issue - fall of the Berlin Wall, end of World War II - he, notoriously, always brings his statements and discussions back to himself. All narratives are about him. It seems to me that he truly believed that what people wanted to see was him watching the raid; that, he assumed, was the only important part of the whole event. This is going beyond the usual politician's habit of using everything for self-promotion. Obama does that, too, but his apparent inability to understand that not all narratives are about him is truly bemusing.

UPDATE: It seems that what President Obama et al were watching with the world watching them was not live footage. So, what were they watching? What scared Hillary so?

Been hearing this a lot lately

The most unexpected people, such as Oxford academics are beginning to mutter that, perhaps, there is something to be said for George W. Bush in matters foreign, particularly as one looks at his successor's ineptitude. Indeed, people are saying that maybe, just maybe, it is President Bush's freedom for the Middle East agenda that is being played out now, however awkwardly, through much of the Arab world.

Charles Krauthammer's article in The Washington Post may not come into the category of the unexpected ones but is, as one would expect, cogently argued.

Voices around the world, from Europe to America to Libya, are calling for U.S. intervention to help bring down Moammar Gaddafi. Yet for bringing down Saddam Hussein, the United States has been denounced variously for aggression, deception, arrogance and imperialism.

A strange moral inversion, considering that Hussein's evil was an order of magnitude beyond Gaddafi's. Gaddafi is a capricious killer; Hussein was systematic. Gaddafi was too unstable and crazy to begin to match the Baathist apparatus: a comprehensive national system of terror, torture and mass murder, gassing entire villages to create what author Kanan Makiya called a "Republic of Fear."

...

No matter the hypocritical double standard. Now that revolutions are sweeping the Middle East and everyone is a convert to George W. Bush's freedom agenda, it's not just Iraq that has slid into the memory hole. Also forgotten is the once proudly proclaimed "realism" of Years One and Two of President Obama's foreign policy - the "smart power" antidote to Bush's alleged misty-eyed idealism.

It began on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's first Asia trip, when she publicly played down human rights concerns in China. The administration also cut aid for democracy promotion in Egypt by 50 percent. And cut civil society funds - money for precisely the organizations we now need to help Egyptian democracy - by 70 percent.

This new realism reached its apogee with Obama's reticence and tardiness in saying anything in support of the 2009 Green Revolution in Iran. On the contrary, Obama made clear that nuclear negotiations with the discredited and murderous regime (talks that a child could see would go nowhere) took precedence over the democratic revolutionaries in the street - to the point where demonstrators in Tehran chanted, "Obama, Obama, you are either with us or with them."

Read the whole thing as it also provides the necessary links to the other articles.

I would, however, like to add one thing. Under President Obama the United States appears to have abandoned its role and there have been rather silly comments about power seeping away from it to .... well, nobody quite knows where. Europe is no longer the preferred successor, China and India have rather a lot of internal problems and the rest is nowhere. Yet, even with this inept politician at the helm (when he bothers to show up) there is no question in anybody's mind which is the only country that could, conceivably, make a difference in a tricky situation like the one in Libya.

What a good thing we no longer have that crass cowboy in the White House

It is a good thing, isn't it? Isn't it? I mean we have now a smart, sophisticated dude who really knows how to make America and Americans popular. Doesn't he? Well, apparently not.

Amid President Obama's vow to enact "smart diplomacy" and to raise U.S. stature overseas, it's never been more dangerous to be an American abroad. From Tehran to Havana, tyrants are taking U.S. hostages.

One after another, our nation's enemies are moving to make an example of Americans abroad. Ostensibly it's about the rule of law. But with trumped-up charges, these acts are provocations.

It may be because Obama's "smart diplomacy" amounts to shunning friends, appeasing tyrants, deferring to international law and imagining America as no more special than any other nation. Fact is, Americans are being singled out because rogue regimes are confident that they have nothing to fear from us any longer.

Go figure, as they say on the other side of the Pond.

Hurrah!

TOTUS is back.

The really irrational religion

Anyone who has read Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, which now has its own Wikipedia page, will know about the menace of what is known as progressivism though one could argue that it has nothing progressive about it in the real sense of the word.

On Pajamas Media Jeff Perren has an interesting article, which starts off by asking why President Obama keeps saying stupid things and, eschewing the obvious answer that he might not be all that bright but thinks he is, explains that he cannot help it as he is a fully paid up progressivist.

In the process Mr Perren discusses progressivism as the least rational of all religions. This should strike a cord with people on both sides of the Pond.

Unlike even semi-rational philosophies, progressivism is built on sheer fantasy. Other doctrines may make errors, some of them very serious, but most are built on at least some foundation of real-world evidence and logical analysis. Progressivism is one of the few that is actually anti-evidence and anti-logic.

That assertion is not a wild-eyed interpretation by a crazed right-winger. It’s the official view of progressive intellectuals themselves. Merging with its offshoot of postmodernism, progressivism holds that people are unable to grasp evidence first-hand or to be objective about its interpretation.

Postmodern philosophers from Hegel to Dewey to Heidegger, Herbert Marcuse, and Richard Rorty have said so. Their students and followers are just applying what they’ve been taught. Those individuals are the ones who shaped Obama, nurtured his education and careers, and helped get him elected.

But we needn’t rely on obscure philosophers or their abstruse writings for proof. Just read the comments of the majority of hard-core left-wingers. No matter what evidence is presented, no matter how things turn out when their wishes are followed, they continue to cling to their core beliefs and offer again the same ruinous recommendations.

There follow a number of examples from recent American history including the difference between the way a Depression was treated in the early twenties and the thirties:

In the early to mid-20th century, Herbert Hoover and FDR implemented progressive-inspired legislation that aimed left and more left, justified on the basis of “helping the Nation recover.” The result was the longest, deepest Depression in American history. By contrast, in response to the sharp, deflationary recession of the early 1920s, Warren Harding and Congress (ignoring Commerce Secretary Hoover’s advice) took almost no action, apart from cutting the federal budget in half. As a result, that severe contraction is barely remembered today because it was so short.

Well, nobody is going to say that about the present difficulties.

Mutatis mutandis, let us think about the endless arguments we have with our own progressivists, no matter which party they happen to favour with their membership and support on such subjects as international aid, ring-fenced by the Cleggeron Coalition. No argument about its immorality, no evidence of its failure, no appeal to practical considerations works against the endless repetition of the progressivist mantra: there is a problem and it can be solved only be some form of state hand-out.

James Taranto makes the point

So why did nearly everybody construe the Friday remarks as a strong endorsement of the Ground Zero mosque? Blame the professional left, which, in its characteristic neo-McCarthyite style, has sought to portray all criticism of the mosque project as, to quote Sargent, "un-American" and the critics as an undifferentiated lunatic fringe that rejects the First Amendment, at least as it applies to Islam.

Obama is a man of the left, so when he deployed the left's rhetoric about the First Amendment, allies and adversaries alike assumed that he also intended to level this accusation at the mosque's critics. They might well have been right about this, but if so, the president quickly made clear he does not have the courage of his convictions.

In doing so, and despite himself, he managed to make an important point. It is not a "clever little dodge" but a principled position to say that while the mosque's developers have a right to build it near Ground Zero, doing so is not the right thing to do. Freedom of religion does not mean freedom from criticism.

Read the whole piece.