No it is not over yet, not by a long chalk

On another forum someone pointed out that it must be at lest 2,500 years since Iran (a.k.a. Persia) and Greece dominated the headlines to the extent they have been doing for the last week or so. That is true with some exceptions: there was the time six months ago, and a year ago, and two years ago and so on. Nor have the two stories gone away. President Obama may be lauding the nuclear agreement and pretending that it has nothing to do with Congress (memo to the Prez: read that Constitution at last) but Congress does not think so and there are a good many unhappy people in the region, starting with Israel and continuing with most Arab states. So that one will run and run.

What of Greece? Did the runner from Brussels bring the good news as the one from Marathon had done? Not exactly. On the one hand there will be a third bail-out (anyone who is surprised by that has not been paying attention) but on the other hand the terms imposed on Greece are about the same if not worse than the ones they voted against in that referendum. And this time the Prime Minister has accepted them because he had no alternative.

To his and the Greek population's surprise it emerged that they were not holding the whip hand. Far from it: they voted against the austerity plan on the assumption that they will still be getting a bail-out and emergency funds to keep going in the style they seem to have accustomed themselves to. (Well, maybe not quite in that style as anyone who has a transferable skill is leaving or planning to leave the country.) The trouble with that reasoning as I have pointed out before, is that you cannot vote democratically or otherwise about something you cannot control. In other words, for the Greeks to vote in favour of getting more money from other EU member states was pointless - it is the other states that were going to decide on that and they, too, have people and electorates.

The sad truth is (well, sad from the Greek point of view) that it is they who are desperate to stay in the eurozone while the other members do not seem to care all that much. My suspicion is that most of the big banks and government departments in German, France and the other countries have been making various plans for a Grexit and will be more or less prepared. Not fully, of course, as one can never be fully prepared for something like that, but more or less. Whether the Greek government has made any plans remains a moot point. For the time being they are hanging on in there and I do mean the eurozone.

Will the Greek government survive in Greece? That remains to be seen but I predict that they will. No other real alternative is being presented. Tsipras is facing a rebellion in Syriza but is being supported by the opposition parties. A good deal of hysterical nonsense is being spouted:

Greek Energy Minister and Left Platform leader Panagiotis Lafazanis said yesterday, “Our so-called partners led by the German establishment, behaved towards our country as being their colony and they are nothing more than brutal blackmailers and financial assassins.”

Clearly, even elementary knowledge of economic facts is not a requirement in the Greek government. As for political understanding, don't even think of it. Greece has been a colony of the EEC/EC/EU ever since it joined and its own political establishment, backed by its electorate has done nothing to change that situation.

Meanwhile, the agreement might (though probably won't) be scuppered by the German Bundestag who seem to think that democracy and voting is not just for the Greeks.

“The package is neither credible nor viable,” centre-right MP Klaus-Peter Willsch told Tagesspiegel.

MPs from the larger of the two centre-right parties, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Wolfgang Bosbach and Willsch announced their intentions to vote “no” on Friday, just as they have in previous votes regarding Greek aid.

Still, most of the Bundestag’s centre-right, Social Democrats and Greens are expected to vote “yes” on a mandate the German government needs for negotiations on a third bailout for Greece. The Left Party is expected to reject the plan. In a second vote, the Bundestag would later have to agree to the new assistance programme.

The agreement established on Monday (13 July) morning in Brussels is a further attempt to “patch-up cracks in the system with a lot of money”, Willsch said. Among other things, he criticised the scope of the planned €50 billion trust fund. This was already recorded as a privatisation target in the first bailout package, but not even 10% of it was actually achieved.

Hans-Peter Friedrich, the deputy chair of the centre-right group in the Bundestag, expressed his doubts over reform pledges from Greece’s left-wing government.

“I do not believe one word the Greek communists say anymore,” Friedrich told Bild.

Looking at it from another point of view, I cannot help wondering whether the sort of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth that is to be seen on the left of our own political spectrum, especially among the europhiliacs, has anything to do with the fact that the Greek government that is allegedly being "humiliated" is of the fairly extreme left-wing variety. Would we see the same if it had been of the right?

Brendan O'Neill has written an excellent piece on the born again left-wing eurosceptics who are in agony because the poor Greeks and their left-wing government is being so badly treated.

But I’m not feeling very welcoming to these latter-day doubters, currently live-tweeting their Euro-existential angst and clogging their newspaper columns with tortured questions about whether the EU really is a ‘great achievement of enlightened internationalism’. (Answer: no, you donuts.) For two reasons.

Firstly because it’s just too late. Where the hell were you guys in 2001, when the Irish people rejected the Nice Treaty and were subjected to a tirade of abuse from EU officials before being made to vote again? Where were you in 2005, when the Dutch and French peoples were libelled by EU officials as racists and xenophobes and ‘the generally pissed off’ for having the temerity to reject the EU Constitution? Where were you in 2006 and 2007 when some of eastern Europe’s elected leaders were told by Brussels to tone down their political rhetoric or face being found in contravention of EU obligations? Greece is far from the first European nation to have its democratic impulse nulled by Brussels bureaucrats.

I’ll tell you where you were back then: you were on the side of the Eurocrats sneering at the pesky masses. You treated criticism of Europe as a kind of mental malaise: Europhobia. And you let it be known that all good people, like you, back the EU, whereas only bad people — racists, nationalists, fat blokes with the St George’s Cross tattooed on their arses — oppose it. You formed a chattering-class ring of steel around the EU, deflecting all critical jabs and barbs as the unhinged mutterings of the generally pissed-off. So, yeah, your Damascene conversion to the cause of Euro-questioning is a tad irritating, to be frank.

The second reason I’m not rolling out the red carpet for these people coming around to a way of thinking they once branded a phobia is because they’re doing it wrong. They aren’t genuinely opposed to the EU; they’re just really angry with Germany. In fact, much of this oh-so-late Euroscepticism, especially from the left, is really anti-German sentiment in disguise. It’s the return of the British disease: a hives-like allergy to all things German and a rash fear that this nation is once again plotting to subject all of Europe to its black, unforgiving boot.

As a matter of fact I, too, am fed up with the stupid cry of "Nazi Germany marches again" and "Merkel is just like Hitler". No, this Germany is not Nazi, Merkel is nothing like Hitler, the country is a democracy and has to pay attention to its own people and, in any case, the other putative donors (there is no point in pretending that these are loans) are not too happy with Greece either.

This is what I said on the anniversary of the bringing down of the Berlin Wall:

And now, my fellow eurosceptics, let us do a little bit of maths. The Federal Republic of Germany, popularly known as West Germany, became a constitutional democracy in May 1949, that is sixty-five years ago. That democracy was strong enough to take in twenty-five years ago a section of Germany that had been a Communist country for forty years. Since then united Germany has had many problems (haven't we all?), both economic and political but it has remained a democracy and there seems not possibility of it being anything else. As against that, the Nazi regime lasted for twelve years. That's twelve years against sixty-five and twenty-five. Could we now stop talking about Germany as being always and for ever potentially Nazi?

Obviously no, we cannot get out of that stupid rut for if we did we might have to think a little more seriously about the present and the future.

Many of the people who have been raising the wicked Germans oppressing the Greeks cry found themselves spluttering with fury when it became apparent that Britain would have to contribute £1 billion to the short-term funding (there really is no money there). The UK is, therefore, opposing any immediate solution that would involve British taxpayer's money. As I am one of them I have no objections to that stance (though it ignores certain other funds) but I am a little perplexed by people's attitude of being generous at Germany's and other eurozone countries' expense.

A diplomatic source said Monday that Poland too would oppose the use of EFSM to provide emergency cash for Greece.

The source added that even some eurozone countries are wary of the bridge-funding idea, saying Greece has enough money to meet its short-term needs.

Other solutions to provide the bridge-funding have been aired, for instance, the use of SMP profits - the profits made on Greek bonds by the ECB and eurozone national banks - or bilateral loans to Greece from countries including France and Italy.

"I foresee those negotiations being very difficult because I don't see many countries having a mandate to give money without any conditions", Finnish finance minister Alex Stubb said Monday.

Arriving at the Ecofin meeting on Tuesday, Luxembourg finance minister Pierre Gramegna said there is "no ready product on the table yet" and that ministers would listen to experts from the euro working group who have been tasked to work on the issue.

According to Germany's Handelsblatt newspaper, German finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble proposed at Monday's Eurogroup that Greece issues IOUs to repay its debt to the IMF and ECB.

Well, that should solve it. Would IOUs be acceptable to Greek pride about which we have been hearing so much recently?

Just to make things worse, the IMF tells us that they are actually worse than we think. Much worse.

A secret International Monetary Fund study showed Greece needs far more debt relief than European governments have been willing to contemplate so far, as Germany heaped pressure on Athens on Tuesday to reform and win back its partners' trust.

The IMF's stark warning on Athens' debt was leaked as Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras struggled to persuade deeply unhappy leftist lawmakers to vote for a package of austerity measures and liberal economic reforms to secure a new bailout.

The study, seen by Reuters, said European countries would have to give Greece a 30-year grace period on servicing all its European debt, including new loans, and a dramatic maturity extension. Or else they must make annual transfers to the Greek budget or accept "deep upfront haircuts" on existing loans.

That is a complex, technical way of saying that Greece is going to be kept going by the rest of us, that debts will not be repaid, that no reforms will be sufficient to solve the problems and .... that we shall all have to keep them going. Even colonies are stronger economically than that.

Is there a solution to any of this? I am not sure anybody knows what it might be. Certainly leaving the eurozone might be a starting point for Greece but it will still have the debts and an dysfunctional economy. Leaving without some idea of what to do next will solve nothing.

As I said, it is not over, not by a long chalk.

Keep her for entertainment, say I

I have been told by one of the less entertaining readers of this blog that I have out-Thornberried Ms Emily Thornberry of whom I had actually heard even before the low-grade scandal she was involved in that made her name so well known. Not many other people had. As insults go it is not much. I have had far better ones in my life but I do think a short paragraph about the former Shadow Attorney-General is a good way of starting a posting about entertainment in politics.

The whole Thornberry saga showed her stupidity, the ease with which her Leader could be thrown into panic and the general dullness and, as I said above, low grade of politics in this country. That, as it happens, is a good thing. Dull politics enlivened by the odd bout of entertainment is an excellent system to live under. A good many countries are envious of that, their politics being considerably more exciting and frightening. I do not wish to change things, not even to satisfy the People's Will.

All the same, entertainment is needed from time to time and the departure of Cherie Blair from the public scene has taken a good deal of it away. That is why we are so grateful to Ms Thornberry for brightening our days (just a few of them, to be sure, but it is better than nothing) as the new recruits to the People's Army are not likely to do that.

There is, however, another female politician who provides some entertainment (not on the Cherie scale but that was a superlative effort). I speak, of course, of the egregious Cathy Ashton or Baroness Ashton as she is better known, former High Panjandrum of the EU's Common Foreign Policy and before that many things, particularly Treasurer of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament though, apparently, she had no idea but none at all, where some of the funds came from.

As this blog mentioned before, la Ashton may have been superseded as the High Panjandrum but was staying on to "complete" the negotiations with Iran. Readers of this blog will not be surprised to hear that although, according to Secretary of State Kerry the negotiations have gone on very well, the deadline has again been pushed forward to next July.

The EU is now wondering what to do with la Ashton. Do we keep her till then, assuming that the deadline will undoubtedly have to be extended again?

For her part, Ashton - the EU’s former foreign policy chief, who has chaired the nuclear talks for the past 12 months - on Monday read out a joint EU-Iran statement and left the press room without taking questions.

She stepped down from her EU post on 1 November, but was kept in the nuclear talks until Monday’s initial deadline.

Her new boss, Italy’s Federica Mogherini, told press in Strasbourg the same day that she is consulting with the US and Germany on whether to keep Ashton in place until July.

“That’s for me to consider”, Mogherini noted. “It will be decided in the coming days”.

She added there is “a little bit of disappointment, we were all hoping for an agreement tonight [but there is] … also a little bit of hope”.

"It's important that negotiations will continue”.

Federica Mogherini is the new High Panjandrum and she has already provided us with one good story: on November 7 RFE/RL reported that her chief spokesperson, Catherine Ray, married a partner in a Brussels public relations firm that lobbied for Gazprom. Love, of course, can blossom in the most unlikely conditions but is there not a hint of a clash of interests here? Goodness me, no, announced the EU. Everything is ship-shape and Bristol fashion. I am rather looking forward to what else Signora Mogherini and her office might produce by way of entertainment.

However, we cannot rely on them solely or on Ms Thornberry whose days as a comedienne may well be over. We need Baroness Ashton as well. We also do not want her back in the House of Lords, demeaned though it has been by this and the Blair governments. Keep her on as negotiator-extraordinaire with Iran, say I.

The view from over here - 1

The lunchtime meeting today had been organized by the Henry Jackson Society, the Left's particular bugbear, in the House of Commons (luckily in one of the committee rooms where the acoustics were good and the mikes worked). The guest was the eminent academic and commentator, Professor Walter Russell Mead and his topic was an obvious riff on a once highly influential book by Professor Francis Fukuyama: The Crisis in Europe: the Return of History and what to do about it.

As one would expect, Professor Mead gave a very cogent and exhilarating analysis of the many problems the world is facing today but, as a journalist from Die Welt pointed out, we have all heard a great many depressing talks and read a great many even more depressing articles of that kind recently. What did Professor Mead think were some of the answers?

Professor Mead's main solution was (and, to be fair, we were coming to the end of the session but, to be equally fair, that was supposed to be part of the presentation) that the US should restore its interest in Europe and re-engage in a dialogue with its European partners. Or, in other words, as he said the Lone Ranger, having ridden away, should now return (no word of how Tonto might feel about  that).

The European Union, Professor Mead explained, was American foreign policy's greatest accomplishment; it had been one of the aims of the Marshall Plan (some stretching of history here), had been supported diplomatically and politically throughout its history but has, to some extent been left to its own devices in the last few years. The US underestimated the difficulties European weakness and lack of cohesion will cause to it. Having, as it thought, defeated the bad guys (twice, presumably), knocked all the European heads together, the US announced that it will do what the European had always said they wanted and that is leave them all alone. Apparently, that is not what the Europeans wanted deep down and it is time to recognize this fact.

We'll be over, we're coming over
And we won't come back till it's over, over there.

Well, that's fine, except that it would appear that it is never going to be over, over here. We saw that when Yugoslavia disintegrated into a series of wars in the nineties, the EU though the egregious Jacques Poos announced that "this was Europe's hour" only to plead with the Americans to come back and sort the mess out after all. It seems that they will have to come back again in the sense of taking greater interest in this pesky little continent and its pesky problems.

Is that really the answer? Obviously, as an Atlanticist and an Anglospherist I want to see a continuation of the existing links between certain European countries and the United States, adding Canada, Australia and New Zealand into that network. But would a greater involvement by the US in the EU's problems really help anyone? Somehow, I doubt it.

Let us go back to the beginning of Professor Mead's talk. We are, he said, facing the greatest geopolitical crisis since the 1960s with President Putin's Russia displaying the most obvious signs of naked aggression since the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. (Whatever happened to Afghanistan in 1979 and, more recently, Georgia?)

Facing this growing aggressiveness we have a West that is in some disarray, both politically and economically; in fact, in most disarray since the 1930s.

I have a problem with these shock-horror announcements because they seem to be so wobbly in their evidence. Are we facing the greatest crisis since the thirties or the sixties? Is this the biggest geopolitical upheaval since 1918, 1945, 1989 or last year?

Not long ago Legatum Institute tweeted a link to a discussion by various global thinkers, put together by Foreign Policy whose premiss was that "the world as we know it fell apart in 2014". This was said on a number of occasions at the Institute's events by no less a person as Anne Applebaum Director of Transitions Forum and author, among other books, of an excellent history of Eastern Europe in the immediate post-war period. She has also written about the Gulag. It seems to me that compared to what she described in those books makes the events of 2014 rather small potatoes.

As the presentation went on, Professor Mead narrowed down the time scale and focused on three countries that are unhappy with the world order that was established in 1989 - 91, that is after the fall of the Soviet Union, and are ready to challenge it. So we are really talking about a possible world order that is twenty-five years old. Could it be that there was no world order established in those years but that events were the beginning of the break-up of the post-Second World War order and that break-up is still going on? That is one explanation of events.

The three countries that are challenging the world order, according to Professor Mead, are China, Iran and Russia. Of these China is the most powerful and capable with the greatest long-term potential. It is, however, already interdependent with the existing world order and benefits from it greatly; therefore, its challenge is unlikely to be a particularly destructive one. There are issues on which it feels aggrieved but, on the whole, it has had less effect on the surrounding area than the other two countries.

When challenged on this subject during the discussion by a somewhat long-winded China expert, Professor Mead, defended himself robustly. China, he reiterated, has not made any real changes in the geopolitical structures close to her, partly because she faces stronger countries than Iran and Russia and partly because its leadership miscalculated in  2008 - 9: the US had not been weakened quite as much as they thought and the sudden aggressive reaction alarmed various countries like Japan who now have a far more active foreign and defence policy.

To the point that China was now the second largest economy (that keeps changing and it is never clear to me how these things are defined) Professor Mead replied that the connection between GDP and world influence is not all that straightforward, pointing to the fact that in the mid-nineteenth century France's GDP was greater than Britain's but that did not lead to French domination of the world.

Moving on to Iran, the picture is a little odd. That country has the least long-term potential of the three yet it is the one that has made the greatest changes, in its favour, in the area that immediately surrounds it. When one looks at the situation in Iraq and Syria one cannot argue with that. Turkey, Iran's rival for influence in the Middle East, has retreated. But Hezbollah is, as far as one can tell, not as strong or powerful as it used to be. For all of that, Iran has done well and that is without going into the convoluted negotiations it has been conducting for decades about its nuclear power.

To a great extent the reason is the basic weakness and unsustainable structure of its immediate neighbours (Israel being the one exception but they are satisfied with keeping a watching brief for the time being), made worse by the events of the so-called Arab Spring.

Does this affect the rest of the world? Well, not so that you'd notice at present though that may change if Iran really does develop a nuclear bomb.

That brings us to Russia, which is, according to Professor Mead betwixt and between those two. It ought to be very powerful, in possession of a nuclear arsenal (whose efficacy is not altogether clear) and in possession of a vast reserve of oil and gas. But unlike China, Russia has not been able to use these advantages to strengthen its economic base even if we ignore the various rumours and news items that indicate a greater weakness in the former than has been assumed.

Russia is alienated from the existing world order in a more fundamental way than China and that is despite the enormous efforts made after the collapse of the Soviet Union to integrate the country into that world order: G7 turned into G8, membership of G20, various agreements with NATO, membership of WTO and so on. For reasons that were obviously beyond the scope of the talk Russia has not managed to take advantage of any of it and has returned to her historic distrust of the West.

When one adds to that the obvious fact that most of the countries that border on Russia have weak governments, chaotic economic policies and, for the most party, dysfunctional structures, one can see that Russia is in a better position than China to make geopolitical changes as well as being more willing to do so.

Of course, one needs to add a few points. Russian interference in those countries has contributed to those weaknesses as well as to Russia's own stagnation. Furthermore, not all countries fall to her machinations. The Baltic States are managing reasonably well for the time being and even Georgia has recovered from the last war sufficiently well to look to the West again.

[This is becoming rather a long blog. So, I shall stop here and write up Professor Mead's comments about the European Union in a separate posting.]

Just checking

Berlusconi is still promising to step down but that, apparently, is not going to save Italy and her economy.

Italy's borrowing cost has soared to a record high, despite Silvio Berlusconi's promise to step down as prime minister.

Mr Berlusconi had said he wanted to show global markets that the country was "serious" about sorting out its finances.

But on Wednesday morning, Italy's 10-year government bond yield - the rate the country pays in interest to borrow money - rose above 7% for the first time since entering the euro.

Italian President Giorgio Napolitano called for an immediate commitment to economic reforms to restore confidence in panicked financial markets.

Bond yields of more than 5% are considered unsustainable in the long term as governments cannot afford to pay that much over a long period.

Would it have been different if the man had paid any attention to his job and/or stepped down earlier? Quite possibly.

The Boy-King has come out fighting (well, sort of) for the beleaguered (I believe that is the correct expression) Theresa May. Her position thus becomes unassailable. Let me say that again, unassailable.

Hereditary Prime Minister Papandreou is all set to resign and this time he will really, really, do it. Well, he has to; after all, he told Sarko. In the fullness of time he will tell the people of Greece as well.

What with all this going on plus the IAEA officially announcing that Iran is becoming something of a problem, it is not surprising that the students' march for more money to be handed out against those terrible cuts in education has somehow disappeared from people's consciousness. Bad luck chaps and chapesses. And just a hint: try not to display Socialist Worker placards quite so prominently.

Whom to believe?

The Washington Post tells us that

Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says he intends to grant a “unilateral pardon” to two Americans who have been jailed on charges of espionage for two years and release them this week.

“I am helping to arrange for their release in a couple of days so they will be able to return home,” Ahmadinejad told The Washington Post in an hour-long interview at his office here. “This is of course going to be a unilateral humanitarian gesture.”

Setting aside the fact that they were not spies but young idiots who decided to hike along the Iran-Iraq border, there is something missing from this story.

The Telegraph puts it differently:

Bail for two US hikers held on espionage charges in Iran has been set at $500,000 (£315,000) each, their lawyer has said, after Iran's president said they would be released "in two days."

Indeed, their friend, Sarah Shourd who had been released on medical and humanitarian grounds last September had also had the same "bail" paid for her.

It comes to something when the Daily Telegraph is more accurate than any other newspaper in the more or less free world but even they have it wrong. I know bail is a shorter word than ransom and easier to spell but for all of that, what was paid over was ransom. Those idiot kids were ransomed. Let us call a spade a spade and a ransom a ransom.

Makes sense to me

Given the past history of various extremely unpleasant totalitarian governments and just plain autocracies getting all worked up about other countries' malfeasances it makes perfect sense to me that Iranian President Ahmadinejad, in whose countries demonstrators are dealt with in summary fashion, has condemned the killing of protesters in Libya. The people he declared ought not to be killed but listened to. Indeed. As they are in Iran, of course.

As UN Watch reports he has gone even further:

“Iran called for the UN Human Rights Council to form a committee to examine [the] situation in Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and Libya,” reported the state-sponsored ISNA news agency today.

“The Head of Iranian Parliament Human Rights Committee Zohreh Elahian in a letter to the UN Human Rights Council President Sihasak Phuangketkeow urged formation of a committee to examine [the] situation in Bahrain, Bahrain, Yemen and Libya to find cases of human rights violations. She then demanded that criminals be introduced to the court to stand trial.”

“Fire is opened on people of the countries who are staging civil and peaceful anti-government protests only to revive their natural and lawful rights,” the letter read. “Iranian Parliament Human Rights Committee condemns violence against these people by their rulers and supports certain rights of protestors,” it read.

It is a joy to know that the Iranian Parliament has a Human Rights Committee. Stalin would have been proud of them.

This is fun

Look what the satellite image of the Airline of the Islamic Republic of Iran, also known as Iran Air, taken by Google Earth, has shown up.

It is left-wing feminist groups who are silent

Toby Young asks today: Why have Western feminists been so muted in their criticisms of Iran? in connection with the case of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, the woman who has already received 99 lashes for adultery, has now admitted to all sorts of other crimes on Iranian TV and has been sentenced to being stoned to death. To be fair to Mr Young he does make it clear in his article that he is speaking of left-wing feminists, a subject this blog has broached a few times. Health warning: the comments on the article are quite remarkably stupid.

The Goo-Goo Genocidaires

That is the best expression Walter Russell Meade has come up with: the goo-goo genocidaires or, in other words, the peaceniks, the well-meaning fools who always "understand" the other side however murderous and tyrannical it might be, the people who are indirectly responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths, for labour camps, torture chambers and so on.

The people I have in mind are the ‘goo-goo genocidaires,’ the willfully blind reformers, civil society activists, clergy, students and others whose foolishness and ignorance was a necessary condition for tens of millions of deaths in the last hundred years. Unreflective, self-righteous ‘activists’ thought that to espouse peace was the same thing as to create or safeguard it. As a result, tens of millions died. Unless this kind of thinking is exposed and repudiated, it is likely to lead to as many or more deaths in the 21st.

Mind you, like most American adorers of Churchill, he is not exactly right about what was happening in Britain in the thiries (rearmament did go on, you kno, despite the Labour Party and the unions). But you can't argue with this comment:

These days we are pretty good at pillorying the bad guys in America’s history: Tories, slave owners, segregationists, opponents of womens’ right to vote all get nailed in our textbooks. But somehow the creeps and frauds of the peace movement get a free pass. “We are the folk song army,” the satirist Tom Lehrer once wrote, mocking the moral pretensions of ‘peace activists’; “Every one of us cares. We’re all against poverty, war and injustice — unlike the rest of you squares.”

It is just not true, historically speaking, that ‘peace movements’ lead to peace or, for that matter, support policies that will bring peace. More often than not, the opposite is true. Winston Churchill was a grizzled old British imperialist of the worst kind, but if Britain had listened to him instead of to its peace campaigners in the 1930s there most likely would never have been either a World War Two or Cold War. We can be very grateful that Ronald Reagan and the NATO leadership turned a deaf ear to the nuclear freeze movement; had those besotted idealists had their way the Soviet Union and the Cold War might be still with us today — along with nuclear arsenals much larger and much more dangerous than anything the US and Russia now have.

Not so long ago we had a word in our society for tiger-strokers: people who thought that if you soothed the savage passions of irrational dictators by treating them with respect and giving them treats then the dictators would become less dangerous.

We called them ‘appeasers’.

Appeasing Iran, Mr Mead thinks will not give us peace any more than previous appeasements did. In fact, all it is doing is helping to oppress the people of Iran and allowing some nasty bullying in the Middle East.

And I blamed George Bush

It seems I was wrong. Bush is not at fault. And neither is man-made global warming or the rise of Nick Clegg as the man the Conservatives love to hate. Nope, not one of them is the cause of earthquakes. Especially not in Iran where President (so-called) Ahmadinejad has predicted one for Teheran.

According to the Iranian cleric Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi what causes that and other earthquakes is women not dressing modestly. And before there are any jokes about the earth moving for you, let me explain that he seems to think that earthquakes are caused simply by them not wearing whatever the mullahs tell them to wear by way of black bags all over their heads and bodies. No other action is necessary for the earthquake to occur.

I wonder if this is what they teach in Iranian schools.

Anyone seen the left-wing feminists recently?

Readers of this blog and of EUReferendum will know that I am an admirer of Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, Editor and Publisher of the Bangladeshi anti-jihadist newspaper, The Weekly Blitz. Actually, I am an admirer of all those who work on that newspaper or write for it. It is easy for me to say what I want to say - nobody is about to arrest me, beat me up, torch my home, destroy my computer. To fight for freedom in Bangladesh is a most admirable thing to do.

Shoaib sent me his latest article about Iran and women, reasoning correctly that I would be particularly interested in the plight of women, not being a left-wing feminist. In his message he called the article Today inside Iran: tears of women. In the newspaper it is called a little more sedately Iran: clerics or pimps? Well, maybe not that sedately.

Among other matters he talks of a slightly unexpected business that the Iranian mullahs appear to be involved in: pimping.

In the 1970s, Bostonians looking for a proverbial good time went to the "Combat Zone" and New Yorkers flocked to 42nd Street; in contemporary Iran, the holy city of Qom is known [unofficially] as a place of "both pilgrimage and pleasure." There, prostitutes wearing veils and even chadors mill about temples or sit together in public courtyards where men can inspect them. Sometimes a male go-between [most of them are clerics]offer "introductions," at which point the prostitutes pull aside their headgear so the potential client can get a glimpse, but the whole process is fairly subtle. For an outsider, it's difficult to pick a street girl out of a crowd. Qom may have become a prostitution hot spot due to the abundance of shrines. Young female runaways with no shelter come to the city knowing they can take refuge at holy sites by sleeping in rooms intended for pilgrims. They have no way of making a living, so after awhile they get involved with the sex trade. The city's young theological students and transient tourists form the main clientele.

Hmm. I wonder if that ranks as high in categories of female oppression as wearing a bikini [the quote from Jamie Glazov towards the end].

There is a good deal more in Shoaib's article. It is long and quite harrowing but for those with a strong stomach well worth a read.

I wonder if President Obama will mention this

Regardless of what is going on in the world and the debate that will not die about the honesty of scientific research that is feeding the warmist panic, President Obama intends to go to Copenhagen to offer various unfulfillable guarantees. Then he will travel to Oslo (presumably by bicycle and rowing boat in order to show how serious he is about the subject). He will be receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded to him for his achievements in the first ten days of his presidency.

The question is, will he mention what is happening in Iran in his acceptance speech. The Iranian government has confiscated the medal awarded to the Iranian human rights lawyer, Shirin Ebadi, awarded to her in 2003.

Ebadi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her efforts in promoting democracy. She has long faced harassment from Iranian authorities for her activities — including threats against her relatives and a raid on her office last year in which files were confiscated.

The seizure of her prize is an expression of the Iranian government's harsh approach to anyone it considers an opponent — particularly since the massive street protests triggered by hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's disputed June 12 re-election.

Acting on orders from Tehran's Revolutionary Court, authorities took the peace prize medal about three weeks ago from a safe-deposit box in Iran, Ebadi said in a phone interview from London. They also seized her Legion of Honor and a ring awarded to her by a German association of journalists, she said.

Authorities froze the bank accounts of her and her husband and demanded $410,000 in taxes that they claimed were owed on the $1.3 million she was awarded. Ebadi said, however, that such prizes are exempt from tax under Iranian law. She said the government also appears intent on trying to confiscate her ome.

Ebadi, the first Muslim woman to be awarded the peace prize and the first female judge in Iran, said she would not be intimidated and that her absence from the country since June did not mean she felt exiled.

Whatever she may feel, if she has any sense at all, she will stay in geographic if not spiritual exile.

The Norwegian Peace Prize Committee is in shock. This has never happened before. Will this year's winner of the prize refer to it, I ask again.

His record on the subject of human rights is not good. His behaviour during the Iranian protests and demonstrations did not make one feel that he valued the ideas of freedom or was, in any way, ready to support those who were fighting for it.

Another test came when he was in China. Would he talk about human rights in the country that is, possibly, the worst offender. Sadly, even Der Spiegel was unimpressed. Then again, they were unimpressed by the entire Obama jaunt in Asia or, indeed, his foreign policy in general.

The White House did not even stand up for itself when it came to the question of human rights in China. The president, who had said only a few days earlier that freedom of expression is a universal right, was coerced into attending a joint press conference with Chinese President Hu Jintao, at which questions were forbidden. Former US President George W. Bush had always managed to avoid such press conferences.

President Bush, the great hate figure of the last eight years, is beginning to be missed by all sorts of people.

I am afraid this concerns us all

I seem to end up writing a good deal about American politics. Partly that is because of it being more interesting than our own rather parochial in-fighting but partly because developments on the other side of the Pond concern us all.

So I was rather disturbed to see on Instapundit these two linked stories.

The first leads us to an article in the Weekly Standard, which tells us of America’s new-found multilateralism that consists on sucking up (there is no other way of describing it and I apologize for the language) to some of the nastiest regimes in the world.

Not only has the United States now decided to be a full member of the despicable, anti-Western, anti-democratic and anti-Semitic Council of Human Rights “despite the fact that the Organization of the Islamic Conference holds the balance of power and human rights abusers are among its lead actors, including China, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia”, it has also scuppered Canada’s attempts to pilot through a resolution on free speech (not that it would have made any difference).

Instead, the newly “engaged” American diplomats have co-sponsored a resolution with Egypt, not a country known for its adherence to free speech.

Privately, other Western governments were taken aback and watched the weeks of negotiations with dismay as it became clear that American negotiators wanted consensus at all costs.

In introducing the resolution on Thursday, October 1--adopted by consensus the following day--the ranking U.S. diplomat, Chargé d'Affaires Douglas Griffiths, crowed:

"The United States is very pleased to present this joint project with Egypt. This initiative is a manifestation of the Obama administration's commitment to multilateral engagement throughout the United Nations and of our genuine desire to seek and build cooperation based upon mutual interest and mutual respect in pursuit of our shared common principles of tolerance and the dignity of all human beings."

His Egyptian counterpart, Ambassador Hisham Badr, was equally pleased--for all the wrong reasons. He praised the development by telling the Council that "freedom of expression . . . has been sometimes misused," insisting on limits consistent with the "true nature of this right" and demanding that the "the media must . . . conduct . . . itself in a professional and ethical manner."

The new resolution, championed by the Obama administration, has a number of disturbing elements. It emphasizes that "the exercise of the right to freedom of expression carries with it special duties and responsibilities . . ." which include taking action against anything meeting the description of "negative racial and religious stereotyping." It also purports to "recognize . . . the moral and social responsibilities of the media" and supports "the media's elaboration of voluntary codes of professional ethical conduct" in relation to "combating racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance."

In other words, as various Islamic countries have made it clear, this is a resolution that aims to control free speech, a particularly dangerous idea when we look at activists, journalists, bloggers and just ordinary dissidents in oppressive states. They will now be imprisoned and punished in the name of the UN’s resolution on freedom of speech.

Even the normally feeble European Union tried to salvage the American capitulation by expressing the hope that the resolution might be read a different way. Speaking on behalf of the EU following the resolution's adoption, French Ambassador Jean-Baptiste Mattéi declared that "human rights law does not, and should not, protect religions or belief systems, hence the language on stereotyping only applies to stereotyping of individuals . . . and not of ideologies, religions or abstract values. The EU rejects the concept of defamation of religions." The EU also distanced itself from the American compromise on the media, declaring that "the notion of a moral and social responsibility of the media" goes "well beyond" existing international law and "the EU cannot subscribe to this concept in such general terms."

I suppose that is something to feel cheerful about.

The other story is even more disturbing. After all, who really cares about UN resolutions? Michael Rubin reports on the National Review site that

The Clinton State Department has decided to cut off all funding for the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center (IHRDC), which was compiling lists of protestors imprisoned in this summer's unrest, as well as those who were killed in the crackdown.

IHRDC is what human-rights advocates should be: methodical, precise, and apolitical in their work. And yet, the Obama administration has, without explanation, cut off all federal funding to the group which has consistently fulfilled its mandate.

Anyone, across the political spectrum who has any interest in human rights in Iran keeps the IHRDC reports on their desks.

God forbid that there should be any accurate information about what the Ahmadinejad regime is up inside the country. After all, we might want to help the opposition for political as well as moral reasons.

Glenn Reynolds agrees with Bret Stephens’s bitterly ironic article in the Wall Street Journal that this is yet another step towards a complete sell-out to the Iranian regime. As that regime’s nuclear capability intensifies while its grip on the country becomes more tenuous; as the rumours of a possible Israeli strike circulate, it seems a little unwise for the US Administration to move so close to the Iranian government. For, after all, which country is being sold out by the United States as part of its new buddy-buddy relationship with the UN?

What a shame

The Guardian weighs in on the "is Ahmadinejad of Jewish descent or not" controversy (well, all right, discussion). Meir Javedanfar in the Comment is Free section explains why that is not true; far from being embarrassed about the family, Ahmadinejad is a proud Shiite. Of course, that does not precisely explain why he avoids discussing the change of name. To be fair, Sabourjian sounds Armenian rather than Jewish, so maybe there is a Christian element in the family background. You pays your money and you takes you choice.

You can laugh or you can cry

No, not about Ireland and that wretched treaty. As I said before, this battle has been lost but Napoleon took Moscow and Hitler nearly did. Then they found themselves in trouble. I shall blog about Ireland later today but now let us have a look at our favourite ranter, President Ahmadinejad.

It would appear that the man has been hiding something. According to the Daily Telegraph and a picture of him holding up his ID card (not a good idea, those ID cards) it would appear that the man's family was Jewish before they converted, the original name being Sabourjian.

The Sabourjians traditionally hail from Aradan, Mr Ahmadinejad's birthplace, and the name derives from "weaver of the Sabour", the name for the Jewish Tallit shawl in Persia. The name is even on the list of reserved names for Iranian Jews compiled by Iran's Ministry of the Interior.

Experts last night suggested Mr Ahmadinejad's track record for hate-filled attacks on Jews could be an overcompensation to hide his past.

Ali Nourizadeh, of the Centre for Arab and Iranian Studies, said: "This aspect of Mr Ahmadinejad's background explains a lot about him.

"Every family that converts into a different religion takes a new identity by condemning their old faith.

"By making anti-Israeli statements he is trying to shed any suspicions about his Jewish connections. He feels vulnerable in a radical Shia society."

Mark Steyn, needless to say, finds the story highly amusing. But I think Fausta has it right:

Good; maybe the little rat will wipe himself off the map

One can but hope.

The timing is a little unfortunate

If I thought that President Obama or his advisers knew any history I would suggest that the day was picked deliberately. But evidence suggests that neither he nor anyone around him knows even American history, let alone that of some “far off country” neither he nor the people he talks to have ever heard of.

Therefore, one must exempt him from deliberately choosing the seventieth anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland to announce that he is definitely reversing President Bush’s policy and abandoning the idea of stationing missile defence systems in the Czech Republic and Poland, though Defence Secretary Robert Gates “said negotiations were under way with both Poland and the Czech Republic about deploying upgraded SM-3 interceptors from 2015”. Maybe. Will the Czech and Polish governments believe Secretary Gates or President Obama?

The Poles are certainly worried that this Administration will pay no attention to its East European allies. Czech Prime Minister Topolanek expressed his regrets that the integration of the East European countries in the Euro-Atlantic structures is slowing down.

Some links here on the story: Nile Gardiner writing a Daily Telegraph clog blog; Sister Toldjah quotes another idiotic comment by the Vice-President who seems to find it difficult to work out what day of the week it is; an excellent response on Public Secrets, which reminds readers that President Bush had offered possibilities of co-operation on the missile shield to the Russian government and it was haughtily refused; Fausta does her own inimitable round-up.

For Obama the most important consideration was that the Russian government did not like the policy and, he has inferred, if America gives in and ignores its East European allies, maybe President Prime Minister Putin and his mishka, President Medvedev, will give Russian support to American policy, whatever it might be, over Iran. And pigs might fly.

As Glenn Reynolds puts it, the possibility of another Carter Administration is beginning to look like the best case scenario.

Even Der Spiegel is dubious.

Moscow is triumphant over Obama’s decision to cancel his missile defence shield plan. But it is no foregone conclusion that that Russia will harden its line against Iran. And Poland and the Czech Republic will also expect overtures from the United States.

What those overtures might be is unclear despite Robert Gates’s statements. But, naturally, the Russian leaders are triumphant. The new Russo-American relationship is proceeding very nicely: first there was that idiotic “button” brought by Hillary, then Obama’s visit to Moscow when his hosts refused to discuss anything he wanted to put on the agenda and now this.

It has been the Russian line for some time that Iran is not a danger; now it is becoming the American line despite evidence being produced by everybody’s favourite organization, the IAEA.

There is not the slightest chance that Russia will do anything but follow her own policies on Iran, which seem to consist of stirring up trouble in the region as long as there is no actual nuclear missile there. President Medvedev appears to be President Ahmadinejad’s second best friend, the first one being Hugo Chávez.

Iran buys Russian arms and other military supplies. Russia provides the Iranian government and the Revolutionary Guards with surveillance systems for their struggle against the various opposition groups.

Of course, the Russians are playing with fire. They know full well that the Iranians are arming and financing various terrorist groups, of which Hezbollah is the largest and best known. Some of those groups are playing games in Central Asian countries where there are Russian soldiers stationed. Any help the Russian rulers give the Iranian ones may result in the death of Russian soldiers though, traditionally, that is not a consideration that weighs heavily with Russian rulers. Neither do feelings of gratitude if that is what President Obama reckoning on.

ADDENDUM: Neo-neocon reminds us that this is not the first of Obama's "Polish jokes". (American readers will know instantly what I mean but I hope it will be clear on this side of the Pond as well.) There was the unfortunate episode of the Gdansk meeting to remember the German invasion of Poland that started the Second World War and to which President Obama sent National Security Adviser Gen. James L. Jones instead of going himself or sending the Veep or the Secretary of State. This decision was taken after several months of silence though the formal invitation had been received and a number of slightly off-hand responses.

Liberal and illiberal revolutions

John O'Sullivan, quondam speech writer to Margaret Thatcher, editor of National Review and, subsequently, of The National Interest, at present Executive Editor of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and a man I seem to quote fairly frequently, had a recent article on NR digital [to which one needs a subscription so I am not linking], entitled "Revolutionay Types"

This is not an analysis of personalities like Mikhail Bakunin or Pyotr Tkachev, not even of the usual suspects, Lenin, Mao, Hitler and Che but of the types of revolutions the modern world has seen. There are, Mr O'Sullivan points out, quoting among others, former Italian President Francesco Cossiga who, back in 1991 spoke about two kinds of revolution: liberal and illiberal with the East European "velvet" ones being definitely in the first category. (Since then Signor Cossiga has made some rather more controversial statements.)

The article's starting point is the recent and still fitfully continuing Iranian uprising, which will have to be judged fully in the future but which, at present, shows signs of being at the very least the starting point of a liberal revolution unlike that of the 1979 one, which was from the very beginning an illiberal one.

If violence is the test in Iran, it points clearly to two conclusions: The 1979 Iranian Revolution was an anti-liberal revolution and the 2009 demonstrations may be at least the start of a liberal one. The first point scarcely needs arguing — Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution used violence to topple the shah, violence to entrench its rule, violence against original supporters whom it exiled, and violence against the Iranian people at regular intervals. Its current use of violence against people demonstrating peacefully in opposition to the stealing of an election merely underlines its anti-liberal nature. What is less clear is whether the 2009 revolution is liberal in
character.

Khomeini's 1979 revolution established what an earlier age would have described as "a mixed regime." It combined a limited democracy with a supervisory system of religious guardians. These ensured that any political debate or reform would take place within the regime's rules of Islamist orthodoxy. Thus, candidates were allowed to compete in this year's presidential
election only on condition that they were supporters of the Islamic revolution. If there was a difference between them before the election — and there was — it was over economic topics, on which the main challenger, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, represented a pragmatic approach and Ahmadinejad a more populist one.

That was before the election, however. Since then the street demonstrators have shouted slogans that clearly indicated a rejection of the current Islamist rule in favor of some sort of moderate liberal democracy (probably one with Islamic tinges, on the model of the AKP government in Turkey). The supreme leader's brutal rejection of these complaints has liberalized the crowds still further. It looks as if they now want the end of the anti-liberal Islamist regime. And Mousavi, a moderate revolutionary in the anti-liberal camp, finds himself marching at the head of a liberal revolution.

Let us, however, look at the wider issues. The three obviously liberal revolutions were the 1688 Glorious Revolution in Britain, the 1776 one in America and the 1989-1990 ones in Eastern Europe. The two main illiberal revolutions were the French Revolution of 1789 and the Bolshevik coup of 1917 (the actual Revolution of 1917 being liberal in intent but becoming anarchy immediately).

There is a problem with the French Revolution in that its early leaders thought that they were actually enacting liberal British and American ideas but these did not have the same outcome in France for a number of reasons. Subsequent developments turned those early days of liberalism into a totalitarian nightmare.

Mr O'Sullivan defines the basic difference thus:

Whereas the Anglo-Americans saw liberty as a system of government that allowed people to pursue different ways of life, their Continental imitators saw it as a particular way of life that, if necessary, might have to be imposed on those mistakenly enslaved to tradition, religion, inequality, or whatever. Eradicating tradition, religion, inequality, or anything else to which people are strongly attached, however, requires abolishing their freedom, usually bloodily. Hence the revolution of 1789 became more plainly anti-liberal and more violent as it
ground relentlessly on.

There are other issues such as the different views of violence: an unfortunate necessity to be used very sparingly or a concept to be worshipped for its own sake. However, one cannot deny the crucial difference between the two understandings of liberty.

Unfortunately, it is no longer possible to insist that those two concepts are as separate as one would like them to be, no matter what British eurosceptics might repeat ad nauseam. Looking at the growing tea-party movement in the United States and the ever stronger grass-roots opposition to Obamacare (a proposed health care system that is going to be considerably more socialist and oppressive than the British one) I would say that these ideas are alive and well on the other side of the Pond.

(According to Jammiewearingfool, who quotes various sources, President Obama has been reduced to using the Violet Elizabeth Bott argument. "I'll thcream and thcream until I am thick." Let us hope Congressmen are made of sterner stuff than Mr and Mrs Bott or the Outlaws who generally let Violet Elizabeth get away with everything.)

In Britain, on the other hand, we have a serious problem with almost all political parties, the entire MSM and a good deal of the rather frivolous blogosphere as well as public opinion.

We are frequently told in a somewhat lachrymose fashion that Britain fought two wars (as if Britain's fighting was limited to just two wars) to preserve freedom and democracy. Well, that's as may be.

We have also been told that the second of those two wars (which were the only ones Britain fought in this century until she got to Iraq and Afghanistan and pigs might fly) was also fought to create "a new order", "a new Britain". That certainly happened. The consensus of the time, wrong as a consensus always is, that there was no way back to the old values and the new kind of war that included the whole population deserved a new kind of peace.

Well, we got that new kind of peace and are still living with it. Unfortunately, it really did mean what it said: a discarding of all the old values, the notion of "liberty as a system of government that allowed people to pursue different ways of life". Liberty is now seen as a particular system, a set of rights and privilieges granted by the government to the people.

Just how long are we going to go along with it?

Dangerous times

By and large I do not agree that the world is more dangerous now than it has ever been, any more than I accept that the relationship between the West and its various enemies, such as militant Islam is now worse than ever in history. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries spring to mind.

As far as powerful and determined totalitarian states are concerned, the twentieth century was far worse for all concerned. However, what we are grappling with at this moment is a complete lack of leadership in the West. Not weak leadership, not poor leadership but no leadership.

In Britain we have a Prime Minister who is completely uninterested in foreign matters and a Foreign Secretary who is incapable of saying anything; the Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition seems not to understand that there is more to the world than the odd skiing resort. I have no time now to go into another set of vituperations about the Shadow Foreign Secretary, whose one idea of policy is let us detach ourselves from the United States. Everything else is covered in mist.

We can discard the EU and most of its member states. The ones that do try to speak up for freedom and democracy (not Britain) are shouted down (by Britain among others).

That leaves the United States. President Bush was mocked for his speeches in which he exalted freedom and democracy. Well, now we have President Obama and the less said about his speeches on foreign affairs the better.

Both in Cairo and in Moscow he has produced the sort of vapid, unhistorical bilge that we have come to expect from the man who cheerfully spoke of 57 states, people speaking Austrian and mentioned twice that his uncle helped to liberate Auschwitz.

Claudia Rossett analyzes the Moscow speech and gives it very low marks. (Barack's Teleprompter is also unimpressed by the Big Guy's memory failure about his first meeting with Michelle.)

President Obama seems to treat his official visits as family holidays, refusing to spend more time than is absolutely necessary with his hosts, in order to have romantic dinners with Michelle in Paris or chill out with his family in Moscow. That is not funny. Why is he dragging his daughters round these trips? If he thinks they are too young to be left with the various nannies and their grandmother in the White House he should have waited till they were older before pounding so hard after the presidency. Neither the Russian negotiators nor the Russian people are likely to be impressed by behaviour that reminds them all of their own leaders at their worst.

His behaviour over Honduras and the support he has given automatically to President Zelaya who is best friends with Hugo Chavez and was working towards undermining the Honduran constitution and democratic structure is chilling.

The lack of reasonable response to North Korea and Iran is frightening and the lukewarm support for the brave and persistent opponents of Ahmadinejad makes one long for the days of almost any other president of recent decades. The question is, what motivates Obama in all this? Does he genuinely not know or understand what is going on or does he really prefer dictators wherever they happen to be?

Caroline Glick, not my favourite columnist, is, for once, quite restrained. Like many others, she compares Obama's behaviour with that of President Reagan when the Communist world began to shake. Not surprisingly, she finds the Messiah somewhat wanting in ability, understanding and clarity.

The models for overthrowing the regimes in Teheran and Pyongyang are not new. Modified versions were successfully implemented just twenty-odd years ago. The model for Iran is Poland circa 1981. The model for North Korea is East Germany in 1989.

Unfortunately, whereas in the 1980s the leaders of the Free World were committed to winning the Cold War against the Soviet Union by securing the freedom of those who lived under Communism's jackboot, today, led by Obama, the Free World behaves as though the Berlin Wall fell of its own devices. The will of free men and women risking everything to oppose tyranny had nothing to do with it, we are told. If we care about peace, we should appease the likes of Ahmadinejad and Kim, not bring them down.

Of course, there were many who thought at the time that we should be appeasing Soviet leaders instead of supporting their opponents. They are, unfortunately, have not gone away and in President Obama as well as Secretary of State Clinton they have acquired politicians who will listen to them, being themselves natural appeasers.

As my American friends say, it's going to be a long four years. The last six months feel very long.

No need for military confrontation

The response of many to suggestions that President Obama could have been just a teensy-weensy bit more supportive of the anti-Mullah movement in Iran was the usual one of "what, you want America to invade Iran". Well, no. There are many points between vacillating the way the President of no vision has done and actual invasion, which is not being planned, would not be a good idea and, incidentally, was not planned under President Bush either, despite endless reports of people "in the know".

The Wall Street Journal reminds its readers of the way President Reagan managed to help Poland and the independent trade union Solidarność. It made a great deal of difference and, as we know, helped to bring down Communism in Eastern Europe without an invasion.

Of course, that needed a leader of vision. Sadly, it does not look like the United States has one of those at the moment.

Read the article in full.

It really doesn't matter what one says

President Obama has shown himself to be a complete neophyte in foreign affairs, which is very amusing since part of his and his acolytes' campaign was the mantra that he was sophisticated internationalist unlike the hicks Bush and McCain and all because in Germany a huge crowd applauded wildly at some of the statements.

One of the things somebody is going to have to explain to the POTUS (maybe the TOTUS can take it upon himself) that out there in the big bad world people do not necessarily react they way they are supposed to and are much more likely to react the way they have always done.

It did not help the President that he pussyfooted round the Iranian events, saying very mild things but not really criticizing until the very end: he has still been attacked by President Ahmadinejad for allegedly interfering in Iranian affairs (because no Iranian could possibly think of such concepts of free and fair elections by himself or, in this case, herself).

It did not help that the State Department kept the invitation to the White House July 4 barbeque, issued to Iranian diplomats open as long as possible, an invitation the diplos in question did not reply to, not knowing whether they would still be in DC by then. (Scott Johnson traces the story on Powerline.) They and the President are still being warned not to interfere or criticize again.

There must be some cries of "why me" and "what did I do" resonating in the White House if the POTUS can tear himself away from the latest Vanity Fair photoshoot long enough to pay attention, that is.

As Jennifer Rubin says on Pajamas Media: "Reality bites, doesn't it Mr President".