LFTC - Letter From The Capitol

LFTC - Index 10/16/09

4 posts: (1) Afghan War: Counterinsurgency Blues--Wobble Watch; (2) Pakistan Nuclear Weapons Security--Wobble Watch; (3) Pakistan Visit: A Reporter's Journal--Wobble Watch; (4) Pakistan: Big Doings Afoot--Wobble Watch.

LFTC - Afghan War: Counterinsurgency Blues

The Washington Times reports that a "dead" al-Qaeda terrorist, thought to have been killed by a Sept. 7 Predator drone strike, has surfaced on the radio.  So much for VP Joe Biden's stand-off strikes war model.  The UK Times Online reports that Italian troops sandbagged their French successors in one Afghan region.  Seems the Italians made a deal with the Taliban, paying them off so as to prevent attacks on Italian positions; but they neglected to disclose this to the French successors, who found themselves ambushed when payments ceased.  The French went into a "safe" area lightly armed and were set upon by Taliban.  Casualties were growing when US special forces came to the rescue with air strikes.  Read the full article for a case study in Italian fecklessness.

In Commentary, Max Boot explains why counterinsurgency works better as a strategy than stand-off counterterrorism targeting.  He starts by defining the terms:

The terms counterterrorism and counterinsurgency have become common currency this decade in the wake of September 11, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the war in Iraq. To a layman’s ear, they can sound like synonyms, especially because of our habit of labeling all insurgents as terrorists. But to military professionals, they are two very different concepts. Counterterrorism refers to operations employing small numbers of Special Operations “door kickers” and high-tech weapons systems such as Predator drones and cruise missiles. Such operations are designed to capture or kill a small number of “high-value targets.” Counterinsurgency, known as COIN in military argot, is much more ambitious. According to official Army doctrine, COIN refers to “those military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by a government to defeat insurgency.” The combined approach typically requires a substantial commitment of ground troops for an extended period of time.

Boot continues with General McChrystal's explanation:

The case against a counterterrorism approach in Afghanistan is laid out most clearly in the Counterinsurgency Guidance. McChrystal’s focus is on explaining why conventional military operations cannot defeat the insurgency in Afghanistan, but the same arguments apply to counterterrorism generally, which is a smaller-scale version of the same conceit—that the U.S. military can defeat an insurgency simply by killing insurgents. McChrystal writes that the math doesn’t add up:

From a conventional standpoint, the killing of two insurgents in a group of ten leaves eight remaining: 10 - 2 = 8. From the insurgent standpoint, those two killed were likely related to many others who will want vengeance. If civilian casualties occurred, that number will be much higher. Therefore, the death of two creates more willing recruits: 10 minus 2 equals 20 (or more) rather than 8.

He goes on to note that the “attrition” approach has been employed in Afghanistan over the past eight years by a relatively small number of American forces and their NATO allies. Yet, he writes, “eight years of individually successful kinetic operations have resulted in more violence.” He continues: “This is not to say that we should avoid a fight, but to win we need to do much more than simply kill or capture militants.”
What else, then, must coalition forces do? McChrystal’s answer:

An effective “offensive” operation in counterinsurgency is one that takes from the insurgent what he cannot afford to lose—control of the population. We must think of offensive operations not simply as those that target militants, but ones that earn the trust and support of the people while denying influence and access to the insurgents.

Boot then notes that the payoff comes after taking higher casualties up front:

While counterintuitive to a conventional military mind, such thinking is hardly novel for anyone familiar with the history of counterinsurgency. McChrystal’s advice to embrace the population and be sparing in the use of firepower has been employed by successful counterinsurgents from the American Army in the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century; to the British in Malaya in the 1950s and Northern Ireland from the 1970s to the 1990s; to, more recently, the Americans in Iraq. By contrast, counterinsurgency strategies that rely on firepower have usually failed, whether tried by the French in Algeria, by the U.S. in Vietnam, or by the Russians in Afghanistan.

The risk of the counterinsurgency approach—which helps to explain why it has not been adopted in Afghanistan until now or in Iraq until 2007—is that, in the short term, it will result in more casualties for coalition forces. Placing troops among the people and limiting their expenditure of firepower makes them more vulnerable at first than if they were sequestered on heavily fortified bases and ventured out only in heavily armored convoys. But in the long term, as the experience of Iraq shows, getting troops off their massive bases is the surest way to pacify the country and bring down casualties, both for civilians and security forces.

Boot adds several pages of analysis to the above, in an 8-pager well worth reading in full.

Bottom Line.  To have a chance to prevail in Afghanistan, we will need to accept more casualties now, and also build a stable Afghan government that does not alienate the locals.

LFTC - Pakistan Nuclear Weapons Security

A Congressional Research Service paper, Pakistan's Nuclear Weapons: Proliferation and Ssecurity Issues (July 30, 2009, 18 pages), examines the issue that scares more thinking Americans than any other in Southwest Asia.  Ex-CIA agent Reuel Marc Gerecht sees Pakistan & Iran as future WMD threats, being more educated than Arab Islamists:

No doubt bin Laden and Mr. Zawahiri would probably prefer to have the central front again in the Arab world. But in Afghanistan and Pakistan they have wars that their side might win. Now, or in the not-too-distant future, it may be impossible operationally and philosophically to tell the difference between Arab Al Qaeda and Afghan and Pakistani radical groups, which have as a lodestar the Pashtun militants who make up the neo-Taliban on both sides of the border. The foot soldiers of this cause are not as worldly as their Arab forerunners; they do not have any noteworthy thinkers drawing large crowds.

But they do offer the promise of great success, and within Pakistan and India are highly educated Muslims who just might join the cause. Arab Al Qaeda never enlisted first-rate – or even second-rate – scientific talent. Pakistan and India, with vastly better educational establishments than the Arab world, might just provide what modern holy warriors have so far lacked: the requisite skill to deploy weapons of mass destruction against the United States.

Pakistan, indeed, has become one of the great battlegrounds of the Muslim civil war. It's not an Arab-only endeavor. Pakistan and Iran, the most dynamic laboratory of Islamic political thought, and post-Saddam Hussein Iraq are the guides to a better (or worse) future for believers. They are trying to rework the way modernity and religion have, so far, unsuccessfully married. They are trying to work democracy effectively into the faith, and with it the promise of less easily traumatized mores.

LFTC - Pakistan Visit: A Reporter's Journal

Cliff May, former NY Times reporter & founder of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, offers his report on his latest visit to Pakistan.  His 4-pager is a mixture, more downer than upper.  But he is a sharp reporter, so read his take closely.

LFTC - Pakistan: Big Doings Afoot

The New York Times reports that an unholy alliance of Taliban, al-Qaeda & other Islamist groups is stepping up a campaign to bring down the Pakistani government.

The following article is repirnted with permission from Stratfor:

Pakistan: The South Waziristan Migration

October 14, 2009

By Scott Stewart

Pakistan has been a busy place over the past few weeks. The Pakistani armed forces have been conducting raids and airstrikes against the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and other foreign Islamist fighters in Bajaur Agency, a district inside Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), while wrapping up their preparations for a major military offensive into South Waziristan. The United States has conducted several successful missile attacks targeting militants hiding in areas along the Afghan-Pakistani border using unmanned aerial vehicles.

Threatened by these developments — especially the actions of the Pakistani military — the TTP and its allies have struck back. They have used larger, vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs) in attacks close to their bases in the Pakistani badlands to conduct mass-casualty attacks against soft targets in Peshawar and the Swat Valley. They have also used small arms and small suicide devices farther from their bases to attack targets in the twin cities of Rawalpindi and Islamabad, the respective seats of Pakistan’s military and civilian power.

Initially, we considered devoting this week’s Security and Intelligence Report to discussing the tactical details of the Oct. 10 attack against the Pakistani army headquarters. But after taking a closer look at that attack, and the bigger mosaic it occurred within, we decided to focus instead on something that has not received much attention in the media — namely, how the coming Pakistani offensive in South Waziristan is going to have a heavy impact on the militants currently living and training there. In fact, we can expect the Pakistani offensive to cause a large displacement of militants. Of course, many of the militants who are forced to flee from South Waziristan, the epicenter of Pakistan’s insurgency, will likely land in areas not too far away — like Balochistan — but at least some of the militants who will be flushed out of South Waziristan will land in places far from Pakistan’s FATA and North-West Frontier Province.

The Coming Offensive

The Pakistani military has been preparing for the coming offensive into South Waziristan for months. They have positioned two divisions with some 28,000 troops for the attack, and this force will be augmented by paramilitary forces and local tribal militias loyal to Islamabad. As seen by the Pakistani offensives in Swat and Bajaur earlier this year, the TTP and its foreign allies are no match for the Pakistani military when it turns its full resources to address the problem.

The Pakistanis previously attempted a halfhearted offensive in South Waziristan in March of 2004 that only lasted 12 days before they fell back and reached a “negotiated peace settlement” with the militant leaders in the area. A negotiated peace settlement is a diplomatic way of saying that the Pakistanis attempted to pay off Pakistani Taliban leaders like Nek Mohammed to hand over the foreign militants in South Waziristan and stop behaving badly. The large cash settlements given to the militants did little to ensure peace and instead allowed the Taliban leaders to buy more weapons, pay their troops and essentially solidify their control in their areas of operation. The Taliban resumed their militant activities shortly after receiving their payments (though the most prominent leader, Nek Mohammed, was killed in a U.S. missile strike in June 2004).

This time, the South Waziristan offensive will be far different than it was in 2004. Not only do the Pakistanis have more than four times as many army troops committed to it, but the Pakistani military has learned that if it uses its huge airpower advantage and massed artillery, it can quickly rout any serious TTP resistance. In Bajaur, the Pakistanis used airstrikes and artillery to literally level positions (and even some towns) where the Taliban had tried to dig in and make a stand. Additionally, in January 2008, the Pakistani army conducted a successful offensive in South Waziristan called “Operation Zal Zala” (Earthquake) that made excellent progress and resulted in the loss of only eight soldiers in four days of intense fighting. This offensive was stopped only because Baitullah Mehsud and his confederates sued for peace — a truce that they quickly violated.

The lessons of past military operations and broken truces in South Waziristan, when combined with the recent TTP strikes against targets like the army headquarters, have served to steel the will of the government (and particularly the military). Pakistani government sources tell STRATFOR that they have the intent and the ability to “close the case for good.” This means that there should be no negotiated settlement with the TTP this time.

Of course, we are not the only people who can anticipate this happening. The TTP and others like the al Qaeda core leadership know all too well what happened in Bajaur and Swat. They have also been watching the Pakistani military prepare for the South Waziristan offensive for months now. The TTP leadership realizes that if they attempt to stand and fight the Pakistani military toe-to-toe they will be cut to shreds. Because of this, we believe that the TTP will adopt a strategy similar to that used by the Taliban in the face of overwhelming U.S. airpower following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, or that of the Iraqi military following the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Rather than fight in set-piece conventional battles to the bitter end and be destroyed, after some initial resistance the TTP’s fighters will seek to melt away into the population and then conduct insurgent and terrorist strikes against the Pakistani military, both in the tribal regions and in Pakistan’s core regions. This is also the approach the TTP leadership took to the Pakistani offensive in Swat and Bajaur. They made noises about standing and fighting in places like Mingora. In the end, however, they melted away in the face of the military’s offensive and most of the militants escaped.

Contrary to popular perception, the area along the Afghan-Pakistani border is fairly heavily populated. The terrain is extremely rugged, but there are millions of Pakistanis living in the FATA, and many of them are extremely conservative and hostile toward the Pakistani government. This hostile human terrain poses perhaps a more significant obstacle to the Pakistani military’s operations to root out jihadists than the physical terrain. Accurate and current population numbers are hard to obtain, but the government of Pakistan estimated the population of South Waziristan to be nearly 500,000 in 1998, although it is believed to be much larger than that today. There are also an estimated 1.7 million Afghan refugees living on the Pakistani side of the border. This human terrain should enable many of the TTP’s Pashtun fighters to melt into the landscape and live to fight another day. Indeed, the militants are already heavily embedded in the population of South Waziristan, and the TTP and its rivals have controlled much of the area for several years now.

We have seen reports that up to 200,000 people have already fled areas of South Waziristan in anticipation of the coming military operation, and it is highly likely that some TTP fighters and foreign militants have used this flow of displaced people as camouflage to leave the region just as they did in Swat and Bajaur. Whether the coming offensive is as successful in destroying the TTP as our sources assure us it will be, the military action will undoubtedly force even more militants to leave South Waziristan.

The Camps

In the wake of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the many militant training camps run by al Qaeda and other organizations in Afghanistan were destroyed. Many of the foreign jihadists who were at these camps fled to Pakistan with the Taliban, though others fled to Iran, Iraq or elsewhere. This migration shifted the focus of jihadist training efforts to Pakistan, and South Waziristan in particular. Quite simply, there are thousands of foreign jihadists who have traveled to Pakistan to receive paramilitary training at these camps to fight in Afghanistan. A smaller number of the trainees have received advanced training in terrorist tradecraft, such as bombmaking, in the camps.

Due to the presence of these transplanted training installations, South Waziristan is “jihadist central,” with jihadists of all stripes based in the area. This confluence will complicate Islamabad’s attempts to distinguish between “good” and “bad” Taliban elements. Both the good Taliban aligned with Islamabad that carry out their operations in Afghanistan and the bad Taliban fighting against Islamabad are based in South Waziristan, and telling the difference between the two factions on the battlefield will be difficult — though undoubtedly elements of Pakistani intelligence will attempt to help their Taliban friends (like the Haqqani network and Mullah Omar’s network) avoid being caught up in the coming confrontation.

There are literally thousands of Arab, Uzbek, Uighur, Chechen, African and European militants currently located in the Pakistani badlands, and a good number of them are in South Waziristan. Many of these foreigners are either teaching at or enrolled in the jihadist training camps. These foreigners are going to find it far harder to hide from the Pakistani military by seeking refuge in Afghan refugee camps or small tribal villages than their Pashtun brethren.

Some of these foreigners will attempt to find shelter in North Waziristan, or perhaps in more heavily — and more heterogeneously — populated areas like Quetta (Mullah Omar’s refuge) or Peshawar. Others may try to duck into the Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan, but there is a good chance that many of these foreign militants will be forced to leave the Pakistan-Afghanistan area to return home or seek refuge elsewhere.

This exodus will have mixed results. On one hand it will serve to weaken the international jihadist movement by retarding its ability to train new jihadists until replacement camps can be established elsewhere, perhaps by expanding existing facilities in Yemen or Africa. On the other hand, it will force hundreds of people trained in terrorist tradecraft to find a new place to live — and operate. In some ways, this migration could mirror what happened after the number of foreign jihadist began to be dramatically reduced in Iraq — except then, many of the foreigners could be redirected to Pakistan for training and Afghanistan to fight. There is no comparable second theater now to attract these foreign fighters. This means that many of them may end up returning home to join insurgent movements in smaller theaters, such as Chechnya, Somalia, Algeria and Central Asia.

Those with the ability and means could travel to other countries where they can use their training to organize militant cells for terrorist attacks in much the same way the foreign fighters who fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s and left after the fall of the Soviet-backed government there went on to fight in places like Bosnia and Chechnya and formed the nucleus of al Qaeda and the current international jihadist movement.

The Next Generation

There is a big qualitative difference between the current crop of international fighters in South Waziristan and those who fought with the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s. During the earlier conflict, the foreigners were tolerated, but in general they were not seen by their Afghan counterparts as being particularly valiant or effective (though the Afghans did appreciate the cash and logistical help they provided). In many engagements the foreigners were kept out of harm’s way and saw very little intense combat, while in some cases the foreign fighters were essentially used as cannon fodder.

The perception of the foreigners began to change during the 1990s, and units of foreigners acquitted themselves well as they fought alongside Taliban units against the Northern Alliance. Also, following the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the foreign jihadists have proved themselves to be very effective at conducting terrorist attacks and operating in hostile territory.

In fact, over the past several years, we have witnessed a marked change in the ways the Afghan Taliban fight. They have abandoned some of their traditional armed assault tactics and have begun to employ al Qaeda-influenced roadside IED attacks and suicide bombings — attacks the Afghan fighters had previously considered “unmanly.” It is no mere coincidence that the number of suicide attacks and roadside IED attacks in Afghanistan increased dramatically after al Qaeda began to withdraw its forces from Iraq. There is also a direct correlation between the IED technology developed and used in Iraq and that now being employed by the Taliban in Afghanistan.

All this experience in designing and manufacturing IEDs in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan means that the jihadist bombmakers of today are more highly skilled than ever, and they have been sharing their experience with foreign students at training camps in places like South Waziristan. Furthermore, the U.S. presence in Iraq and Afghanistan has provided a great laboratory in which jihadists can perfect their terrorist tradecraft. A form of “tactical Darwinism” has occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan as coalition firepower has weeded out most of the inept jihadist operatives. Only the strong and cunning have survived, leaving a core of hardened, competent militants. These survivors have created new tactics and have learned to manufacture new types of highly effective IEDs — technology that has already shown up in places like Algeria and Somalia. They have been permitted to impart the knowledge they have gained to another generation of young aspiring militants through training camps in places like South Waziristan.

As these foreign militants scatter to the four winds, they will be taking their skills with them. Judging from past waves of jihadist fighters, they will probably be found participating in future plots in many different parts of the world. And also judging from past cases, they will likely not participate in these plots alone.

As we have discussed in the past, the obvious weakness of the many grassroots jihadist cells that have been uncovered is their lack of terrorist tradecraft. They have the intent to do harm but not the ability, and many times the grassroots cells end up finding a government informant as they seek help acquiring weapons or constructing IEDs. When these inept “Kramer terrorists” manage to get linked up with a trained terrorist operative, they can cause considerable damage.

The possibility of these militants conducting attacks or bringing much-needed capability to grassroots cells means that the South Waziristan migration, which has almost certainly already begun, will give counterterrorism officials from Boston to Beijing something to worry about for the foreseeable future.

LFTC - Index 10/15/09

5 posts: (1) Nuclear Arms: Moscow Pre-Empts--Us v. Them; (2) Guantanamo's's Detainee Travels--The Home Front; (3) ObamaCare: 8 Fables & Delayed Costs--The Home Front; (4) Climate Change Gets Cool--"It's the Earth Stupid!"; (5) Alfred Nobel: Life & Legacy--Wobble Watch.

LFTC - Nuclear Arms: Moscow Pre-Empts

Breitbart reports that a senior Russian official publicly stated that Moscow reserves the right to conduct pre-emptive nuclear strikes to protect against aggression.  Yes, pre-emptive strikes that may also be nuclear strikes.  Meanwhile, Tsar Vlad the Bad warned the West against "intimidating Iran" & called sanctions "premature."  So for bypassing Poland & Czech Republic, these are President Obama's wages of ally betrayal.

LFTC - Guantanamo's Detainee Travels

If Guantanamo is closed, where do we house the detainees?  This question apparently did not receive much attention from Team Obama prior to its announcement that it plans to close Gitmo within one year.  Some Yemeni detainees have been sent to Saudi Arabia, but the Saudis are hardly eager to take more.  Meanwhile, in Michigan residents of Standish, the town slated for possible housing of Gitmo detainees, staged a rally protesting the idea.  There is located the Standish Maximum Correctional Facility.  Local folks do not think the outside personnel, let alone the detainees, will fit in, and they worry about floods of visitors.  Residents of Leavenworth, Kansas are no more eager.

LFTC - ObamaCare: 8 Fables & Delayed Costs

Health care maven Robert Goldberg offers 8 Team Obama claims that are fables, showing traps laid for hte unwary supporter of ObamaCare.  Further, the Baucus bill passes 2010 entirely, to give a zero-cost year, and takes effect in 2010, with most costs loaded on to the second decade.  This analysis pegs the 20-year 2011-2030 HC cost for BaucusCare at a cool $4 trillion.

More bad news for Team Obama: Aen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) announced he will not support BaucusCare.  As WSJ ace John Fund notes in his online comment, after conference in the House the result will cost more money than the Baucus product, and Lieberman will like it even less.  If HC passes, it will have to be via "reconciliation"--50-votes needed instead of 60.

WSJ's Best of the Web author James Taranto offers "death panel" language from ObamaCare supporter Robert Reich (Clinton era Secretary of Labor):

"I will actually give you a speech made up entirely--almost at the spur of the moment, of what a candidate for president would say if that candidate did not care about becoming president. In other words, this is what the truth is, and a candidate will never say, but what candidates should say if we were in a kind of democracy where citizens were honored in terms of their practice of citizenship, and they were educated in terms of what the issues were, and they could separate myth from reality in terms of what candidates would tell them:

"Thank you so much for coming this afternoon. I'm so glad to see you, and I would like to be president. Let me tell you a few things on health care. Look, we have the only health-care system in the world that is designed to avoid sick people. [laughter] That's true, and what I'm going to do is I am going to try to reorganize it to be more amenable to treating sick people. But that means you--particularly you young people, particularly you young, healthy people--you're going to have to pay more. [applause] Thank you.

"And by the way, we are going to have to--if you're very old, we're not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It's too expensive, so we're going to let you die. [applause]

"Also, I'm going to use the bargaining leverage of the federal government in terms of Medicare, Medicaid--we already have a lot of bargaining leverage--to force drug companies and insurance companies and medical suppliers to reduce their costs. But that means less innovation, and that means less new products and less new drugs on the market, which means you are probably not going to live that much longer than your parents. [applause] Thank you."

Bottom Line.  It will take fables galore to pass ObamaCare.  The more voters learn the less they will like it, so keep them in the dark as long as possible, if you want ObamaCare to pass.

LFTC - Climate Change Gets Cool

Investors Business Daily editors see a cool future for climate in recent auguries.  Both poles are in net cooling phases.  And the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) now is in a cooling phase, after a three decade warming phase.  Here is more on why the climate has been cooling since 1998.  Montana is freezing with record lows.  Austria has seen record October highs & lows within a week.  Eco-maven Bjorn Lomborg sees cool air coming to December's Copenhagen mega-palaver on climate change.

LFTC - Alfred Nobel: Life & Legacy

The Nobel Committee's website's Alfred Nobel webpage is well worth a visit.  Exploring its sub-pages yields numerous nuggets--the full story is well worth reading.  Here, for the time-pressed, are highlights.  Alfred Nobel was born in 1833 and died in 1896.  His father, Immanuel Nobel, originally built bridges, in which he used gunpowder to help.  But in mid-life he went to St. Petersburg, Russia to work for Tsar Nicholas I--the Tsar nicknamed "the cudgel" for his crushing the liberal Decembrist revolt upon taking power in 1825, establishing the Pale of Settlement in 1837 to confine Russia's Jews and starting the Crimean War in 1854, one year before (finally) he passed on.

Immanuel Nobel built gunpowder sea mines to thwart the British Royal Navy during the Crimean War by sealing off the Gulf of Finland.  Immanuel went into arms manufacture.  He moved his family to St. Petersburg and saw that his children received a classical education.  Alfred Nobel loved poetry, but became a chemist.  In Paris he met the inventor of nitroglycerine.  This subpage concisely explains how in 1867 Alfred Nobel invented dynamite to tame the volatile nitro, which was used in blasting rock for tunnels, canals & mining operations.  A prolific inventor, Nobel had 355 patents upon his death.

Alfred Nobel's will contains this clause establishing his eponymous awards and the applicable criteria:

"The whole of my remaining realizable estate shall be dealt with in the following way: the capital, invested in safe securities by my executors, shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind. The said interest shall be divided into five equal parts, which shall be apportioned as follows: one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics; one part to the person who shall have made the most important chemical discovery or improvement; one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine; one part to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction; and one part to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses. The prizes for physics and chemistry shall be awarded by the Swedish Academy of Sciences; that for physiology or medical works by the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm; that for literature by the Academy in Stockholm, and that for champions of peace by a committee of five persons to be elected by the Norwegian Storting. It is my express wish that in awarding the prizes no consideration be given to the nationality of the candidates, but that the most worthy shall receive the prize, whether he be Scandinavian or not."

Let us separate the peace prize language from the rest of the clause:

"one part to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."

Put simply, this means preferring to award the prize to folks who go to big meetings, prattle on about world disarmament and peace and world government and the like.  The quintessential individual winner was Norman Angell (1872-1967), the Englishman who in 1910 wrote about how commerce had made war impossible in Europe.  Angell lived long enough too see two World Wars and more.  (Coincidentally, Claudia Rosett's latest Forbes column covers Nobel's life & legacy too; great minds think alike.)

And when did the Nobel Prize go to Angell?  The Norwegian Storting (parliament) awarded Angell the prize in 1933.  This was 15 years after the end of World War I., the war Angell said could not happen, that did and destroyed the flower of European youth.

And what else happened in 1933?  Fittingly for the obtuseness of peace activism everywhere, in 1933 German voters elected Adolf Hitler as their new leader.  Timing, as they say, is everything....

LFTC - Index 10/14/09

4 posts: (1) Finding Bombs--9/11, 3/11 & N/11; (2) More on MOPS--Us v. Them; (3) Mexican Drug War: Inconvenient Truth--The Home Front; (4) Obama Misses Second Nobel!--Wobble Watch.

LFTC - Finding Bombs

A Los Angeles Times front-pager reports on the challenge of detecting bombs before they detonate over here.  Some detectors we seek are perhaps five years away.  This is a solid 4-page read.

LFTC - More on MOPS

Dr. William Schneider, former chairman of the Defense Science Board, told Fox News that the Massive Ordnance Penetrator superbomb (profiled in the Iran entry Monday on LFTC) will be very precise and deadly, due to technology advances: it will land within a few meters of aim point, use new powerful chemical explosives and rely upon advanced blast effect simulation models to maximize damage to the target while minimizing collateral damage.

LFTC - Mexican Drug War: Inconvenient Truth

Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O'Grady interviewed George Shultz recently.  The former Reagan-era Secretary of State offered politically super-incorrect thoughts on the Drug War--namely,. that the problem is primarily one of American demand, not foreign supply.  Said the sage, proposing a strong domestic education effort:

"If we want to get serious about this issue, we should start with a gigantic campaign to persuade people that drugs are bad for them. And it has to be based on solid factual material. You can't try to mislead people."

O'Grady continues:

Yet that's been difficult because of the taboo. Mr. Shultz recalls what happened shortly after he left government, when his view that interdiction is not the solution came up after a speech to a Stanford alumni group.

Then, as now, he believed that we need to look at the problem from an economic perspective and understand what happens when there is high demand for a prohibited substance. When his comment hit the press, he says he "was inundated with letters. Ninety-eight percent of them agreed with me and over half of those people said I'm glad you said it, but I wouldn't dare say it. The most poignant comment was from [a former member of the House of Representatives] who wrote and said I was glad to see your statement. I said that a few years ago and that's why I'm no longer a congressman!"

I asked Mr. Shultz if he thinks a more sensible approach might come from the states. He says "people can express themselves a little better at the state level." And, with respect to some liberalization of the drug-possession laws at the state level, "I regard these developments as a distinctive statement by people that the present system is not working very well and they want to change it."

Read the entire, excellent interview.

LFTC - Obama Misses Second Nobel!

MarketWatch reports that President Obama failed to win this year's Nobel Prize for Economics.  Here is a story on the actual economics prize winners.  But Bret Stephens has the biggest news: Looking at the Nobel Peace Prize's 108-year roster of winners, President Obama does in fact richly deserve his award.  44, writes Stephens, is "a perfect pick" in light of a long record--and not just in recent decades, as I had thought--of Nobel awards going to peaceniks, terrorists, blowhards, and others who fit what Oriana Fallaci called "Goodists"--do-gooders who do little good and carp at those who actually do good.  No peace prize for FDR, Churchill, Truman, nor for Ronald Reagan (Gorbachev got one).  Frank Kellog & Aristide Briand won it, the former for the 1928 eponymous pact that outlawed war as an instrument of national policy.  The Japanese signed that just two years before invading Manchuria.  Ex-Bush 43 speechwriter Michael Gerson notes polls showing that 71 percent of Europeans reject use of force to achieve justice, while 71 percent of Americans support the idea; the Nobel thus embodies Euro-pacifism, unbowed after history's bloodiest century.

While some notably deserving people--think Mother Teresa, Lech Walesa--have won, Stephens offers abundant evidence that 44 should mostly rue the company he now keeps.  My favorite awardee is the 1910 winner: an outfit called the Permanent International Peace Bureau--victorious just four years before Germany unleashed World War I!!!!  Read the Nobel Committee's narrative on the Bureau and savor: It notes that World War I "hindered" the Bureau's work and that "for technical & ideological reasons" World War Ii halted its work.  Wonder why....

But let us finish with an essay by Stratfor chief George Friedman, who argues that Europe's affection for Barack Obama is based upon the belief that unlike "cowboy" Presidents he will not take rash actions that threaten Europe's prosperity, and that Europe has awarded the prize to the Obama of their dreams, ignoring the twin wars Obama is entangled in and the risks he must inevitably take.

The essay below is reprinted with permission from Stratfor:

Nobel Geopolitics

Oct. 12, 2009

by George Friedman

U.S. President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize last week. Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prize, which was to be awarded to the person who has accomplished “the most or the best work for fraternity among nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the promotion of peace congresses.” The mechanism for awarding the peace prize is very different from the other Nobel categories. Academic bodies, such as the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, decide who wins the other prizes. Alfred Nobel’s will stated, however, that a committee of five selected by the Norwegian legislature, or Storting, should award the peace prize.

Related Series

• Special Series: Obama’s Foreign Policy Landscape

The committee that awarded the peace price to Obama consists of chairman Thorbjorn Jagland, president of the Storting and former Labor Party prime minister and foreign minister of Norway; Kaci Kullmann Five, a former member of the Storting and president of the Conservative Party; Sissel Marie Ronbeck, a former Social Democratic member of the Storting; Inger-Marie Ytterhorn, a former member of the Storting and current senior adviser to the Progress Party; and Agot Valle, a current member of the Storting and spokeswoman on foreign affairs for the Socialist Left Party.

The peace prize committee is therefore a committee of politicians, some present members of parliament, some former members of parliament. Three come from the left (Jagland, Ronbeck and Valle). Two come from the right (Kullman and Ytterhorn). It is reasonable to say that the peace prize committee faithfully reproduces the full spectrum of Norwegian politics.

A Frequently Startling Prize

Prize recipients frequently have proved startling. For example, the first U.S. president to receive the prize was Theodore Roosevelt, who received it in 1906 for helping negotiate peace between Japan and Russia. Roosevelt genuinely sought peace, but ultimately because of American fears that an unbridled Japan would threaten U.S. interests in the Pacific. He sought peace to ensure that Japan would not eliminate Russian power in the Pacific and not hold Port Arthur or any of the other prizes of the Russo-Japanese War. To achieve this peace, he implied that the United States might intervene against Japan.

In brokering negotiations to try to block Japan from exploiting its victory over the Russians, Roosevelt was engaged in pure power politics. The Japanese were in fact quite bitter at the American intervention. (For their part, the Russians were preoccupied with domestic unrest.) But a treaty emerged from the talks, and peace prevailed. Though preserving a balance of power in the Pacific motivated Roosevelt, the Nobel committee didn’t seem to care. And given that Alfred Nobel didn’t provide much guidance about his intentions for the prize, choosing Roosevelt was as reasonable as the choices for most Nobel Peace Prizes.

In recent years, the awards have gone to political dissidents the committee approved of, such as the Dalai Lama and Lech Walesa, or people supporting causes it agreed with, such as Al Gore. Others were peacemakers in the Theodore Roosevelt mode, such as Le Duc Tho and Henry Kissinger for working toward peace in Vietnam and Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin for moving toward peace between the Israelis and Palestinians.

Two things must be remembered about the Nobel Peace Prize. The first is that Nobel was never clear about his intentions for it. The second is his decision to have it awarded by politicians from — and we hope the Norwegians will accept our advance apologies — a marginal country relative to the international system. This is not meant as a criticism of Norway, a country we have enjoyed in the past, but the Norwegians sometimes have an idiosyncratic way of viewing the world.

Therefore, the award to Obama was neither more or less odd than some of the previous awards made by five Norwegian politicians no one outside of Norway had ever heard of. But his win does give us an opportunity to consider an important question, namely, why Europeans generally think so highly of Obama.

Obama and the Europeans

Let’s begin by being careful with the term European. Eastern Europeans and Russians — all Europeans — do not think very highly of him. The British are reserved on the subject. But on the whole, other Europeans west of the former Soviet satellites and south and east of the English Channel think extremely well of him, and the Norwegians are reflecting this admiration. It is important to understand why they do.

The Europeans experienced catastrophes during the 20th century. Two world wars slaughtered generations of Europeans and shattered Europe’s economy. Just after the war, much of Europe maintained standards of living not far above that of the Third World. In a sense, Europe lost everything — millions of lives, empires, even sovereignty as the United States and the Soviet Union occupied and competed in Europe. The catastrophe of the 20th century defines Europe, and what the Europeans want to get away from.

The Cold War gave Europe the opportunity to recover economically, but only in the context of occupation and the threat of war between the Soviets and Americans. A half century of Soviet occupation seared Eastern European souls. During that time, the rest of Europe lived in a paradox of growing prosperity and the apparent imminence of another war. The Europeans were not in control of whether the war would come, or where or how it would be fought. There are therefore two Europes. One, the Europe that was first occupied by Nazi Germany and then by the Soviet Union still lives in the shadow of the dual catastrophes. The other, larger Europe, lives in the shadow of the United States.

Between 1945 and 1991, Western Europe lived in a confrontation with the Soviets. The Europeans lived in dread of Soviet occupation, and though tempted, never capitulated to the Soviets. That meant that the Europeans were forced to depend on the United States for their defense and economic stability, and were therefore subject to America’s will. How the Americans and Russians viewed each other would determine whether war would break out, not what the Europeans thought.

Every aggressive action by the United States, however trivial, was magnified a hundredfold in European minds, as they considered fearfully how the Soviets would respond. In fact, the Americans were much more restrained during the Cold War than Europeans at the time thought. Looking back, the U.S. position in Europe itself was quite passive. But the European terror was that some action in the rest of the world — Cuba, the Middle East, Vietnam — would cause the Soviets to respond in Europe, costing them everything they had built up.

In the European mind, the Americans prior to 1945 were liberators. After 1945 they were protectors, but protectors who could not be trusted to avoid triggering another war through recklessness or carelessness. The theme dominating European thinking about the United States was that the Americans were too immature, too mercurial and too powerful to really be trusted. From an American point of view, these were the same Europeans who engaged in unparalleled savagery between 1914 and 1945 all on their own, and the period after 1945 — when the Americans dominated Europe — was far more peaceful and prosperous than the previous period. But the European conviction that the Europeans were the sophisticated statesmen and prudent calculators while the Americans were unsophisticated and imprudent did not require an empirical basis. It was built on another reality, which was that Europe had lost everything, including real control over its fate, and that trusting its protector to be cautious was difficult.

The Europeans loathed many presidents, e.g., Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan. Jimmy Carter was not respected. Two were liked: John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton. Kennedy relieved them of the burden of Dwight D. Eisenhower and his dour Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who was deeply distrusted. Clinton was liked for interesting reasons, and understanding this requires examining the post-Cold War era.

The United States and Europe After the Cold War

The year 1991 marked the end of the Cold War. For the first time since 1914, Europeans were prosperous, secure and recovering their sovereignty. The United States wanted little from the Europeans, something that delighted the Europeans. It was a rare historical moment in which the alliance existed in some institutional sense, but not in any major active form. The Balkans had to be dealt with, but those were the Balkans — not an area of major concern.

Europe could finally relax. Another world war would not erase its prosperity, and they were free from active American domination. They could shape their institutions, and they would. It was the perfect time for them, one they thought would last forever.

For the United States, 9/11 changed all that. The Europeans had deep sympathy for the United States post-Sept. 11, sympathy that was on the whole genuine. But the Europeans also believed that former U.S. President George W. Bush had overreacted to the attacks, threatening to unleash a reign of terror on them, engaging in unnecessary wars and above all not consulting them. The last claim was not altogether true: Bush frequently consulted the Europeans, but they frequently said no to his administration’s requests. The Europeans were appalled that Bush continued his policies in spite of their objections; they felt they were being dragged back into a Cold War-type situation for trivial reasons.

The Cold War revolved around Soviet domination of Europe. In the end, whatever the risks, the Cold War was worth the risk and the pain of U.S. domination. But to Europeans, the jihadist threat simply didn’t require the effort the United States was prepared to put into it. The United States seemed unsophisticated and reckless, like cowboys.

The older European view of the United States re-emerged, as did the old fear. Throughout the Cold War, the European fear was that a U.S. miscalculation would drag the Europeans into another catastrophic war. Bush’s approach to the jihadist war terrified them and deepened their resentment. Their hard-earned prosperity was in jeopardy again because of the Americans, this time for what the Europeans saw as an insufficient reason. The Americans were once again seen as overreacting, Europe’s greatest Cold War-era dread.

For Europe, prosperity had become an end in itself. It is ironic that the Europeans regard the Americans as obsessed with money when it is the Europeans who put economic considerations over all other things. But the Europeans mean something different when they talk about money. For the Europeans, money isn’t about piling it higher and higher. Instead, money is about security. Their economic goal is not to become wealthy but to be comfortable. Today’s Europeans value economic comfort above all other considerations. After Sept. 11, the United States seemed willing to take chances with the Europeans’ comfortable economic condition that the Europeans themselves didn’t want to take. They loathed George W. Bush for doing so.

Conversely, they love Obama because he took office promising to consult with them. They understood this promise in two ways. One was that in consulting the Europeans, Obama would give them veto power. Second, they understood him as being a president like Kennedy, namely, as one unwilling to take imprudent risks. How they remember Kennedy that way given the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the coup against Diem in Vietnam is hard to fathom, but of course, many Americans remember him the same way. The Europeans compare Obama to an imaginary Kennedy, but what they really think is that he is another Clinton.

Clinton was Clinton because of the times he lived in and not because of his nature: The collapse of the Soviet Union created a peaceful interregnum in which Clinton didn’t need to make demands on Europe’s comfortable prosperity. George W. Bush lived in a different world, and that caused him to resume taking risks and making demands.

Obama does not live in the 1990s. He is facing Afghanistan, Iran and a range of other crisis up to and including a rising Russia that looks uncannily similar to the old Soviet Union. It is difficult to imagine how he can face these risks without taking actions that will be counter to the European wish to be allowed to remain comfortable, and worse, without ignoring the European desire to avoid what they will see as unreasonable U.S. demands. In fact, U.S.-German relations already are not particularly good on Obama’s watch. Obama has asked for troops in Afghanistan and been turned down, and has continued to call for NATO expansion, which the Germans don’t want.

The Norwegian politicians gave their prize to Obama because they believed that he would leave Europeans in their comfortable prosperity without making unreasonable demands. That is their definition of peace, and Obama seemed to promise that. The Norwegians on the prize committee seem unaware of the course U.S.-German relations have taken, or of Afghanistan and Iran. Alternatively, perhaps they believe Obama can navigate those waters without resorting to war. In that case, it is difficult to imagine what they make of the recent talks with Iran or planning on Afghanistan.

The Norwegians awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the president of their dreams, not the president who is dealing with Iran and Afghanistan. Obama is not a free actor. He is trapped by the reality he has found himself in, and that reality will push him far away from the Norwegian fantasy. In the end, the United States is the United States — and that is Europe’s nightmare, because the United States is not obsessed with maintaining Europe’s comfortable prosperity. The United States cannot afford to be, and in the end, neither can President Obama, Nobel Peace Prize or not.

LFTC - Index 10/13/09

6 posts: (1) Health Care Numerology & Necrosis--The Home Front; (2) Fairness for Mass Murder Defendants--9/11, 3/11 & N/11; (3) Israel, Settlements & Rights--Wobble Watch; (4) Afghan Reckoning--Wobble Watch; (5) Dear Honduras: Making Friends With Uncle Sam--Wobble Watch; (6) Tony Blair on China at 60--"It's the Earth Stupid!"

LFTC - Health Care Numerology & Necrosis

Numerology.  Hudson scholar Tevi Troy offers a crisp 3-page assessment of the Congressional Budget Office's long-term HC budget numbers.  To his take I add a personal note.  In 1982 I interned on Capitol Hill, as an assistant to the chief staff economist with GOP (then the majority) staff on the Senate Budget Committee.  I learned two things about federal government budgeting.  First, projections made even a few years into the future are subject to huge margins of error--not billions, but tens, even hundreds of billions.  Second, politics rears its unlovely head in any budget process, and inevitably offers rosy assumptions.  Rarely do these prove on spot, and even rarer are they not rosy enough.  In particular, projected savings are almost never realized--especially if they purport to cut popular programs.  About all we can say with confidence about whatever version of ObamaCare passes it that it will cost gazillions, and swell the budget deficit immensely.

In cautioning against trusting any projections made by any government, I do not intend to impugn the honesty and integrity of those making the calls.  People are fallible, and politics rarely brings out their best.  It is the nature of the beast.

Necrosis.  On a related note, policy maven William Tucker dissects how government has made a mess out of private health insurance. The feds allow tax-subsidized HC coverage via private firms, while the states impose countless costly mandates on private insurance firms.  The result, writes WT:

The result is that only 6 percent of the non-elderly population actually buys insurance directly from insurance companies and these tend to be a perversely self-selected group who are too sick to work or can't get a good job. As a result, the insurance companies can't create large risk-pools and have to charge everybody a high rate.

Put simply, first government imposes destructive regulation on a private market, and then government argues that public coverage is needed because the private market does not work.  Economist Martin Feldstein suggests we substitute private insurance for the employer-paid model, with health vouchers + a health credit card for catastrophic care expenses:

Here's a better alternative. Let's scrap the $220 billion annual health insurance tax subsidy, which is often used to buy the wrong kind of insurance, and use those budget dollars to provide insurance that protects American families from health costs that exceed 15 percent of their income.

Specifically, the government would give each individual or family a voucher that would permit taxpayers to buy a policy from a private insurer that would pay all allowable health costs in excess of 15 percent of the family's income. A typical American family with income of $50,000 would be eligible for a voucher worth about $3,500, the actuarial cost of a policy that would pay all of that family's health bills in excess of $7,500 a year.

The family could give this $3,500 voucher to any insurance company or health maintenance organization, including the provider of the individual's current employer-based insurance plan. Some families would choose the simple option of paying out of pocket for the care up to that 15 percent threshold. Others would want to reduce the maximum potential out-of-pocket cost to less than 15 percent of income and would pay a premium to the insurance company to expand their coverage. Some families might want to use the voucher to pay for membership in a health maintenance organization. Each option would provide a discipline on demand that would help to limit the rise in health-care costs.

My calculations, based on the government's Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, indicate that the budget cost of providing these insurance vouchers could be more than fully financed by ending the exclusion of employer health insurance payments from income and payroll taxes. The net budget savings could be used to subsidize critical types of preventive care. And unlike the proposals before Congress, this approach could leave Medicare and Medicaid as they are today.

Lower-income families would receive the most valuable vouchers because a higher fraction of their health spending would be above 15 percent of their income. The substitution of the voucher for employer-paid insurance would be reflected in higher wages for all.

Two related problems remain. First, how would families find the cash to pay for large medical and hospital bills that fall under the 15 percent limit? While it would be reasonable for a family that earns $50,000 a year to save to be prepared to pay a health bill of, say, $5,000, what if a family without savings is suddenly hit with such a large hospital bill? Second, how would doctors and hospitals be confident that patients with the new high deductibles will pay their bills?

The simplest solution would be for the government to issue a health-care credit card to every family along with the insurance voucher. The credit card would allow the family to charge any medical expenses below the deductible limit, or 15 percent of adjusted gross income. (With its information on card holders, the government is in a good position to be repaid or garnish wages if necessary.) No one would be required to use such a credit card. Individuals could pay cash at the time of care, could use a personal credit card or could arrange credit directly from the provider. But the government-issued credit card would be a back-up to reassure patients and providers that they would always be able to pay.

Oh, and enjoy George Will at his puckish best, detailing why a "rights" view of health care & other matters spells trouble for social tranquility.

Bottom Line.  Distrust two things coming from advocates of a greater role for government in providing or directing the provision of health care: (1) budget numbers, because they inevitably incorporate rosy assumptions and promise savings rarely realized; (2) blame directed at markets whose operation has been badly distorted by existing government regulation.

LFTC - Fairness for Mass Murder Defendants

Eric Holder has a curious sense of fairness.  He declines to seek the death penalty for a terror defendant being prosecuted for the mass murder of 200 people in 1998, because he thinks it unfair.  His rationale--rather, what passes for one--is that other terrorists who were prosecuted here were spared the death penalty because the governments that extradited them insisted on same as a precondition to extradition.  But such unfairness is built in the law and applied every day.  No one gets away in a court of law arguing to the judge that someone else did it and the cop arrested me instead of someone else, or that someone else committed a worse crime and was not prosecuted.  There is nothing unfair about seeking to execute one mass murder defendant because we were blocked by squeamish allies from doing so with others.  What is truly unfair is that the American taxpayers will now support the defendant, if convicted--always a dicey proposition in our law courts--for decades to come.  Fairness would dictate that Holder be sent the annual tab for upkeep.

LFTC - Israel, Settlements & Rights

Former CIA Director R. James Woolsey addresses the Israeli settlements issue and finds illogic prevailing.  He notes that if 20 percent of Israel is Arab, why cannot 10 percent of Palestine be Jewish?  Also, the vast majority of Israeli settlers are concentrated in four settlements around Jerusalem's environs, totaling 1.5 percent of the land on the West Bank.  Why, then, Judenrein (German for "Jew-free") for Arabs but not Araberein for Israel?  Israel rejects the latter, accepting Arabs within its midst.  So why does not Team Obama press for the same dispensation on the West Bank  for Jews?

LFTC - Afghan Reckoning: Pakistan Positioning

Afghanistan.  Henry Kissinger presents his assessment of the situation in Afghanistan.  He sees the need to engage neighboring countries--Pakistan, China, Russia--in a coalition.  How we can manage this is hard to see--Russia is on our case everywhere, China in Asia & the Pakistanis resent our increasing involvement inside Pakistan.  HK makes one solid point re counter-insurgency: Because securing the safety of the population is paramount--thus denying the friendly sea of sympathizers or cowed neutrals that guerrillas seek to swim & hide in, per Mao Zedong's rules (McChrystal & Co. fully understand this)--it is better to have 100 percent control of 75 percent of the country than 75 percent control of 100 percent of the country.  VP Joe Biden's counter-terror targeting from remote bases, without local troop presence, fails this test.  We cannot win support from locals who know that if they help us during the day and we leave, the Taliban will return that evening.  They simply will not give us the necessary battlefield intelligence to operate effectively otherwise.  Even then, we must find a way to train enough Afghans to step in, despite a corrupt government in Kabul.

Robert Kaplan warns that Obama courts disaster by being indecisive:

Even if Obama does end up making the correct decision on Afghanistan strategy (by which I mean adding troops, since counterinsurgency is manpower-intensive), the public agony over his deliberations may already have done incalculable damage. The Afghan people have survived three decades of war by hedging their bets. Now, watching a young and inexperienced American president appear to waiver on his commitment to their country, they are deciding, at the level of both the individual and the mass, whether to make their peace with the Taliban—even as the Taliban itself can only take solace and encouragement from Obama's public agonizing. Meanwhile, fundamentalist elements of the Pakistani military, opposed to the recent crackdown against local Taliban, are also taking heart from developments in Washington. This is how coups and revolutions get started, by the middle ranks sensing weakness in foreign support for their superiors.

Obama's wobbliness also has a corrosive effect on the Indians and the Iranians. India desperately needs a relatively secular Afghan regime in place to bolster Hindu India's geopolitical position against radical Islamdom, and while the country enjoyed an excellent relationship with bush, Obama's dithering is making it nervous. And Iran, in observing Washington's indecision, can only feel more secure in its creeping economic annexation of western Afghanistan. So, too, other allies far and wide—from the Middle East to East Asia, and Israel to Japan—will start to make decisions based on their understanding that Washington under Obama may not have their backs in a crisis. Again, the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama only plays to such fears.

Policy debates are being influenced by two widely touted books on the Vietnam War: One stresses the mistake of getting in to a war without clear understanding of what lay ahead; the other stresses the need to meld strategy to political support.  Military historian Lewis Sorley explains how a shift to counterinsurgency strategy won the military phase of Vietnam, only to see Congress pull the plug on funding and let the North Vietnamese run over a weakened South; Sorley states that the South Vietnamese government was viable as well (quite possibly not true of the Karzai government today).  Peggy Noonan calls for a broader national debate on the war.

Jed Babbin sees 44 lacking not only the will to win but not seeing even the need to win, and believes ultimately he will choose an out; in this, JB writes, 44 is starkly at odds with his commander, General McChrystal.  The New York Times reports that America's civilian goals are unmet in Afghanistan, falling way short of cleaning up government, training police (the same problem that bedeviled us in Iraq).

Charles Krauthammer sees our President as "Young Hamlet" in a brilliant column.  CK details the administration's back-and-forth--and the Democrats' as well--and then frames the issue perfectly:

The White House began leaking an alternate strategy, apparently proposed (invented?) by Vice President Biden, for achieving immaculate victory with arm's-length use of cruise missiles, predator drones and special ops.

The irony is that no one knows more about this kind of warfare than Gen. McChrystal. He was in charge of exactly this kind of "counterterrorism" in Iraq for nearly five years, killing thousands of bad guys in hugely successful under-the-radar operations.

When the world's expert on this type of counterterrorism warfare recommends precisely the opposite strategy -- "counterinsurgency," meaning a heavy-footprint, population-protecting troop surge -- you have the most convincing of cases against counterterrorism by the man who most knows its potential and its limits. And McChrystal was emphatic in his recommendation: To go any other way than counterinsurgency would lose the war.

Yet his commander in chief, young Hamlet, frets, demurs, agonizes. His domestic advisers, led by Rahm Emanuel, tell him if he goes for victory, he'll become LBJ, the domestic visionary destroyed by a foreign war. His vice president holds out the chimera of painless counterterrorism success.

Against Emanuel and Biden stand David Petraeus, the world's foremost expert on counterinsurgency (he saved Iraq with it), and Stanley McChrystal, the world's foremost expert on counterterrorism. Whose recommendation on how to fight would you rely on?

Robert Kaplan, journalist-author extraordinaire, argues that America is trapped in Afghanistan into fighting a war it must win, but which will mostly benefit the regional powers, who are in essence free-riders on our efforts.  He adopts Ike's "Never fight a land war in Asia" motto:

In nuts-and-bolts terms, if we stay in Afghanistan and eventually succeed, other countries will benefit more than we will. China, India and Russia are all Asian powers, geographically proximate to Afghanistan and better able, therefore, to garner practical advantages from any stability our armed forces would make possible.

Everyone keeps saying that America is not an empire, but our military finds itself in the sort of situation that was mighty familiar to empires like that of ancient Rome and 19th-century Britain: struggling in a far-off corner of the world to exact revenge, to put down the fires of rebellion, and to restore civilized order. Meanwhile, other rising and resurgent powers wait patiently in the wings, free-riding on the public good we offer. This is exactly how an empire declines, by allowing others to take advantage of its own exertions.

Of course, one could make an excellent case that an ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan is precisely what would lead to our decline, by demoralizing our military, signaling to our friends worldwide that we cannot be counted on and demonstrating that our enemies have greater resolve than we do. That is why we have no choice in Afghanistan but to add troops and continue to fight.

But as much as we hone our counterinsurgency skills and develop assets for the “long war,” history would suggest that over time we can more easily preserve our standing in the world by using naval and air power from a distance when intervening abroad. Afghanistan should be the very last place where we are a land-based meddler, caught up in internal Islamic conflict, helping the strategic ambitions of the Chinese and others.

The New York Times reported that Team Obama is leaning towards focusing on al-Qaeda and not the Taliban.  Seems that the "nice Taliban" theory of the Afghan War has a new lease on life.  That the Taliban were in cahoots with al-Qaeda from 1996 onward is judged no longer significant by the administration.  The Taliban provided, in effect, the "sea" in which al-Qaeda operatives swam, per Mao Zedong's classic formulation noted above.  Read the full article, which includes comments from key critics.  Fareed Zakharia argues that we should woo Pashtun tribesmen, and that we are not losing in Afghanistan but should focus on achievable, if modest, goals.

Pakistan.  Meanwhile, Pakistanis are objecting to increased US involvement, citing alleged compromise of the country's sovereignty because the Kerry-Lugar aid bill would require enhancing civilian power inside Pakistan at the expense of the military.

A Washington Times front-pager recounts how Pakistan blames the CIA for not sharing enough intelligence to enable more targeted attacks on terrorist leaders; the CIA, for its part, notes that in 2006 & 2007 the Pakistani ISI leaked intel to the Taliban, which the Pakistanis say will not happen anymore.  A Wall Street Journal front-pager reports that the Pakistan government plans a strong military response to the weekend Taliban assault that killed 20 Pakistani soldiers.  This may, the WSJ reports, exacerbate the rift between America & Pakistan over how best to fight the Taliban and whom to fight:

The attack is likely to accelerate plans for a Waziristan ground offensive the government has long warned is coming, say Pakistani civilian and military officials. "We are going to come heavy on you," Interior Minister Rehman Malik warned the Taliban in televised remarks.

But any offensive is likely to highlight the gap between Pakistan and the U.S. on how to deal with the Pakistan-based Taliban, the loose confederation of ethnic Pashtun militant groups that operates in rugged tribal areas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and often serves as a de facto government.

The U.S. has long advocated a broad crackdown on all Pakistan-based Taliban. Washington argues that the most powerful Taliban factions here are providing support to those fighting in Afghanistan against U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces. The U.S. is currently considering a plan to deploy up to 60,000 additional troops to Afghanistan to counter the threat of the Taliban there.

Pakistan has taken a narrower approach. Even as an attack appears imminent against the Mehsud Taliban, Islamabad is seeking to renew peace deals with two other powerful Taliban factions in the country, say officials and tribal elders with ties to the militants.

Yesterday's suicide bombing that killed 41 more Pakistanis--the fourth terror attack in a single week--added fuel to the fire.

Bottom Line.  Great powers, especially those hemmed in by civilized values which limit use of lethal force, risk indefinite entanglement dealing with bloody-minded fanatics in far-flung corners.  Had they not attacked us we could--and should--ignore them.  But they did.  And we had to respond.  And we must find a way to get a tolerable outcome in Afghanistan, even if regional powers benefit far more than do we.

LFTC - Dear Honduras: Making Friends With Uncle Sam

Claudia Rosett has a classic column offering advice to Honduras on how to cultivate friends among Team Obama: (1) drop the constitutional democracy shtik; (2) start a nuclear program; (3) become a rogue proliferator; (4) incite Marxist or Islamist revolution.  Follow the examples set by Iran, North Korea, Russia, etc. and Hillary will push the reset button.  Read CR's spiffy, neat column in full.

Then read Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) in his Wall Street Journal op-ed on his Honduras visit.  The Senator states:

Indeed, the desire to move beyond the Zelaya era was almost universal in our meetings. Almost.

In a day packed with meetings, we met only one person in Honduras who opposed Mr. Zelaya's ouster, who wishes his return, and who mystifyingly rejects the legitimacy of the November elections: U.S. Ambassador Hugo Llorens.

When I asked Ambassador Llorens why the U.S. government insists on labeling what appears to the entire country to be the constitutional removal of Mr. Zelaya a "coup," he urged me to read the legal opinion drafted by the State Department's top lawyer, Harold Koh. As it happens, I have asked to see Mr. Koh's report before and since my trip, but all requests to publicly disclose it have been denied.

On the other hand, the only thorough examination of the facts to date—conducted by a senior analyst at the Law Library of Congress—confirms the legality and constitutionality of Mr. Zelaya's ouster.

(DeMint notes: It's on the Internet here.)  The study is 11 pages.  Noteworthy is DeMint's comment that the State Department's legal adviser, Harold Koh, issued the legal opinion that our Ambassador to Honduras stated was justification for America's punitive policy towards the country.  Koh is a hard-line leftist whose legal reasoning is a weapon in the hands of America's adversaries.  He can be counted on, again & again, to issue such opinions.

LFTC - Tony Blair on China at 60

Here is a solid Wall Street Journal op-ed by former British PM Tony Blair, on China at 60.  It merits a read.

LFTC - Islam, Free Speech & Us

Robert Spencer flags President Obama's endorsing a UN resolution adopted that bans "hate speech" directed against religious or racial groups.  RS details this disaster in the making:

Now no less distinguished a personage than the President of the United States has given his imprimatur to this tyranny; the implications are grave. The resolution also condemns “negative stereotyping of religions and racial groups,” which is of course an oblique reference to accurate reporting about the jihad doctrine and Islamic supremacism -- for that, not actual negative stereotyping or hateful language, is always the focus of whining by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and allied groups. They never say anything when people like Osama bin Laden and Khaled Sheikh Mohammed issue detailed Koranic expositions justifying violence and hatred; but when people like Geert Wilders and others report about such expositions, that’s “negative stereotyping.”

But we still have the First Amendment, right? Legal expert Eugene Volokh, in an excellent analysis of the resolution, explains why it isn’t that easy to dismiss this. “If the U.S. backs a resolution that urges the suppression of some speech,” he explains, “presumably we are taking the view that all countries -- including the U.S. -- should adhere to this resolution. If we are constitutionally barred from adhering to it by our domestic constitution, then we’re implicitly criticizing that constitution, and committing ourselves to do what we can to change it.” He adds that in order to be consistent, “the Administration would presumably have to take what steps it can to ensure that supposed ‘hate speech’ that incites hostility will indeed be punished. It would presumably be committed to filing amicus briefs supporting changes in First Amendment law to allow such punishment, and in principle perhaps the appointment of Justices who would endorse such changes (or even the proposal of express constitutional amendments that would work such changes).”

Last year the Secretary General of the OIC chief Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu issued a warning: “We sent a clear message to the West regarding the red lines that should not be crossed” regarding free speech about Islam and terrorism. And he reported success: “The official West and its public opinion are all now well-aware of the sensitivities of these issues. They have also started to look seriously into the question of freedom of expression from the perspective of its inherent responsibility, which should not be overlooked.”

For the first time, an American President has bowed to the OIC’s demands and taken cognizance of that “responsibility” -- after years in which George W. Bush resisted such initiatives at the UN. 

L. Gordon Crovitz writes in the Wall Street Journal how Yale, intimidated by fear of violent acts, kept the 12 Danish cartoons out of a book on the Danish cartoon affair of 2005-2006, that incited much Muslim violence.

Islamic communities are growing around the globe.  This article on a recent Pew report offers telling numbers.  of the world's nearly 1.6B Muslims, 60 percent dwell in Asia--2/3 live in just 10 countries--versus 20 percent in the Mideast and North Africa.  About 20 percent of Muslims live as minority populations, with 3/4 living in five countries.  Muslims are 5 percent of Europeans--yet Germany, with 4 million Muslims, has more living within its borders than does Lebanon.  Muslims in the US number some 2.5M--8/10 of one percent of the population.  (The 20 percent of African-Americans who are Muslim are clearly not counted by Pew; adding them--about 5M, assuming blacks are 13 percent of America's 306M--makes for about 7.5M Muslims, or 4 percent of America's total population.)

Bottom Line.  America must not retreat from defense of free speech values.  The use of "hate speech" and "incitement" as bases for censoring speech will be most eagerly embraced not by sincere idealists, but by our jihadist adversaries.  It is people like them, whose sensibilities are most infinitely expandable, who will happily determine, if we let them, the boundaries of what is acceptable speech.  They will deprive of of the ability to communicate forcefully essential ideas concerning militant Islam, in a struggle where such communication is an indispensable weapon, when we most need free speech.  Along with our technologies and media, our laws and values are being manipulated to fruitful effect by our adversaries.  We should try to the utmost to minimize their ability to use those weapons.  Put simply, we must not, in the realm of free speech that is the lifeblood of a free society, engage in unilateral disarmament when facing mortal adversaries who seek to destroy free speech and our entire civilization.

LFTC - Index 10/12/09

3 posts: (1) Islam, Free Speech & Us--9/11, 3/11 & N/11; (2) President Obama's Nobel Appeasement Prize--Wobble Watch; (3) IRAN Winning, Clock Running, Options Closing--Us v. Them.  Happy Columbus Day!

LFTC - President Obama's Nobel Appeasement Prize

Begin with a multi-cartoon horse-laugh (literally) from The Weekly Standard Obama Nobel Peace Prize Parody.  But to be fair, the President himself admitted that he does not deserve the award.  Let us hope he really means that.

President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for: "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."  Such efforts include his global apology tour, sucking up to America's enemies, stiffing allies and waffling in the face of provocations by nuclear North Korea & nuclearizing Iran.

The Washington Post excerpted comments from the Nobel committee that show the grantors embracing every empty leftist cliche about peacemaking: dialogue to solve even the most difficult problems, promoting a vision of total nuclear disarmament, etc.  The quotes are scattered throughout the WP story, but are well worth reading.  NRO adds more detail & pungent comment.  The Wall Street Journal editors add detail, too.  The WSJ editors suggest also that Iranian dissidents sentenced to death for protesting the fraudulent elections last June get the award, which would be a fitting sequel to the 2004 prize given Shirin Ebadi.

Claudia Rosett, who notes other dubious recipients, sees the prize intended to influence 44 towards pursuing internationalist policies at the expense of American national interest.  On ABC News Sunday George Will said the the Nobel award suggests that "there is a cult, in which the President is a communicant, that is entirely detached from accomplishment"; Will called the Obama era as "a presentational Presidency."  John Bolton sees the Nobel as an "albatross" on 44's neck.  Mark Steyn "predicts" 44 will win Miss World next.  MS places the award in the broader context of Team Obama's goals:

But that was then and this is now. As the historian Robert Dallek told Obama recently, “War kills off great reform movements.” As the Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne reminded the president, his supporters voted for him not to win a war but to win a victory on health care and other domestic issues. Obama’s priorities lie not in the Hindu Kush but in America: Why squander your presidency on trying to turn an economically moribund feudal backwater into a functioning nation state when you can turn a functioning nation state into an economically moribund feudal backwater?

MS concludes:

Barack Obama will have history’s most crowded trophy room, but his presidency is shaping up as a tragedy — for America, and the world.

James Taranto's Best of the Web Friday entry has a great selection of quotes from right & left & from ordinary Americans.  JT notes: (a) ordinary Americans think achievement and not effort should be the yardstick; (b) it is liberals who were embarrassed.  Conservatives know that in recent decades the prize has often been politicized.  Thus liberal Ruth Marcus asks in her Washington Post column if 44 has received "a Nobel for a Good Two Weeks?"

RM writes:

“Mom!” my 12-year-old yelled from the kitchen. “President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize!”

I told her she had to be mistaken.

This is ridiculous -- embarrassing, even. I admire President Obama. I like President Obama. I voted for President Obama. But the peace prize? This is supposed to be for doing, not being -- and it’s no disrespect to the president to suggest he hasn’t done much yet. Certainly not enough to justify the peace prize.

"Extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples?” “[C]aptured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future?” Please. This turns the award into something like pee-wee soccer: everybody wins for trying.

Peggy Noonan sees "a wicked and ignorant" award.  PN writes that it damages the award for a generation, and calls it an award by liberals for liberals.  She has thoughts for Obama's acceptance address:

For instance: The Peace Prize judges won't see it this way, but America has gone to Europe twice in the past century to fight for peace. This is an old concept, and has to do with killing killers so they can't kill anymore. It cost America a lot to do this, and we kept no territory, as they say, beyond the graves where our soldiers lie. America then taxed itself and gave its wealth not only to its allies but to its former adversaries, to help them rebuild. We didn't actually have to do this. We did it to make the world better. We did it to foster peace. (They should give us a prize.)

America hasn't just helped the world, it literally lit the world with its inventions, which are the product of its freedoms. The lights under which the Peace Prize judges read, and rejected, the worthy nominations? Why, those lights were invented by an American. The emails the committee members sent to each other, sharing their banal insights on leadership? They came through the Internet. Who invented the Internet? It was a Norwegian bureaucrat with a long face and hair on his nose and little plastic geometric eyeglasses? Oh wait, it was Americans. The members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee are healthy because they have been inoculated against diseases such as polio. Who invented the polio vaccine, an enfeebled old leftist academic in Oslo? Nah, it was a man named Jonas Salk. He was an American.

Europe's elites experience Mr. Obama as a historical accident that needs and deserves their encouragement. Actually he was elected with 69.5 million votes, and you know, they were cast by Americans. Go figure.

Mr. Obama should get the spotlight off himself and put it on the great thing that yielded him up and made him possible. America is misunderstood these days, and he could perform a public service by helping people understand it better.

Love, after all, never harms the world, and as an added practical bonus such a speech would obscurely embarrass the committee, which won't be able to criticize the thoughts of its hero. That would be pleasurable for Americans, and therefore helpful to Mr. Obama.

This might to some degree redeem this wicked and ignorant award, this mischievous honor.

Bottom Line.  What makes this award not only silly but dangerous is that it will inevitably feed the fantasies of our President that he is a world transformational, messianic figure who is uniquely gifted with the ability ot bring about world peace.  It will confirm that his current path of appeasement--which Obama sees as peacemaking--is the correct one.  It will inflate an ego that already is hyper-inflated, and deepen illusions of super-competence that the President fancies he possesses.  Iran's murderous mullahs could hardly have hoped for a better gift.

President Obama joins such hallowed peace recipients as Le Duc Tho (for signing a treaty--the 1973 Paris Accords-- his country, North Vietnam, never intended to keep & did not keep) & Yasser Arafat (for signing a treaty--the 1993 Oslo Accords--he never intended to honor & did not honor).  Add Kofi Annan, who won whilst embroiled in the Iraq oil-for-food scandal.  Would you like to be in such company?

LFTC - IRAN Winning, Clock Running, Options Closing

Another Disputed Presidential Birth Certificate.  Let us begin with a report that Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may have been born an Iranian Jew.  NOT a misprint--enjoy the Jerusalem Post account.  But do not expect him to show up at anyone's kid's bar mitzvah anytime soon.  Perhaps Lou Dobbs will get on this newest "birther" case, which appears to have some legs to it....

Uranium Enrichment.  The New York Times reported that the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency has concluded that Iran now has all the data needed to make a nuclear bomb.  TIME reports that US intelligence knew about the Qom facility for three years.  The Wall Street Journal editors argue that the Iran 2007 National Intelligence Estimate was politicized, to frustrate a push by some Team Bush officials (most notably, VP Cheney), for a harder line on Iran's nuclear program.  Ralph Peters sees bureaucratic CYA behind CIA product--partly understandable in light of legal and political risks of going out on a limb:

Our current disagreement with our allies over Iran isn't just about how data should be interpreted. It's about bureaucrats playing it safe and a system that relies on technology, while still neglecting the human side of intelligence.

But machines are clean, and humans are messy. No mid-level manager ever missed his promotion because of a satellite image.

We've gutted, neutered and sterilized our intelligence system for 3½ decades, and we're paying the price. Tactical and operational intelligence has improved dramatically under the demands of war, but our strategic intelligence effort remains pathetic. If the satellites don't show it, we don't know it.

Our allies are worried about Iranian nukes. Washington's worried about careers.

The inevitable result? You'll hear the words "intelligence failure" again.

Newt Gingrich contrasts JFK's resolute UN confrontation with Moscow to President Obama's vacuous moral preening at the world body, where he ignored pressure from Gordon Brown & Nicholas Sarkozy to confront Iran over its hitherto undisclosed uranium enrichment plant, lest it spoil the world messiah atmospherics 44 wished to (and did) revel in.  John Bolton gives his scorecard for the October 1 P 5+1 meeting with Iran: (1) an empty "agreement in principle"; (2) Iran's getting Russia & France to enrich to medical research grade (19.5 percent) 1,200 kg. of Iran's estimated 1,600 kg of low-enriched uranium (LEU) undercuts the Security Council's ban on Iranian uranium enrichment already adopted; (3) enriching LEU to medical grade puts Iran nearly all the way towards attaining full-weapons-grade (90+ percent) highly-enriched uranium (HEU), as the hardest work--some 2/3--is the first enriching state, of commercial-grade reactor fuel (3 - 5 percent LEU).  The New York Times also reports that Iran will allow IAEA inspectors access to its Qom uranium enrichment plant, on October 25.  This gives the Iranians more than three weeks to sanitize the site.

Consensus & Common Interests?  George Wittman sees Persian ego driving Iran's regional ambitions. GW concludes:

The nations with which Iran deals know full well the principles by which Iran is guided. Actually Tehran has been quite straightforward, contrary to the guidance of taqiyah. Iran's leadership openly has announced its belief that Israel is an evil state that must be removed from the map. Exactly how and when is the only thing still left in the shadows. Holding this threat over the head of the Jewish state and the United States satisfies quite well the ego of Persia. And that's what really counts for Tehran.

Iran's operational plans incorporate not only lying about the country's nuclear weapon development, but it is on this basic dissimulation that the defense system of the Islamic Republic of Iran is built. There is, therefore, no logical reason to accept anything that Tehran says, officially or unofficially. In consequence Western defense planning for dealing with Iran must accept the fact that Iran sooner or later will arm itself with nuclear weapons. The Persian ego demands it!

After listing Team Obama's recent unilateral concessions, slighting of allies and placating adversaries, Elliott Abrams eviscerates President Obama's presumption of shared interests that transcend differences that are, in fact, irreconcilable:

See a pattern here? The president's U.N. General Assembly speech tied all this together, perhaps unintentionally: Talk of allies and enemies and national interests was absent. Getting something for concessions we make is contrary to the new spirit of engagement. The president, transcending all such anachronisms, poses as the representative of .  .  . the world. So why would his country treat friends better than foes, and why would we bargain for reciprocal concessions? So old fashioned, so Cold War.

Instead, he told us, "I am well aware of the expectations that accompany my presidency around the world. These expectations are not about me. Rather, they are rooted--I believe--in a discontent with a status quo that has allowed us to be increasingly defined by our differences." (Did speechwriters substitute "discontent" for Carter's famous "malaise"?) So we will turn away from such thinking: "It is my deeply held belief that in the year 2009--more than at any point in human history--the interests of nations and peoples are shared." Acting in the narrow interests of the United States and its friends and allies is passé: "Because the time has come for the world to move in a new direction. We must embrace a new era of engagement based on mutual interests and mutual respect, and our work must begin now." This must sound to Ahmadinejad--or Putin or Assad or Chávez or Castro--rather the way Carter's call to end our "inordinate fear of communism" sounded to Brezhnev.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal helpfully dredged up what Lady Thatcher said in 1981 of the perils of "consensus":

For me, pragmatism is not enough. Nor is that fashionable word "consensus." . . .

To me consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects—the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner "I stand for consensus"?

Sanctions.  The New York Times reports that Iran has become skilled at circumventing sanctions already in place, using dummy companies, laundered money, etc in a thriving black market.  AEI's Iran Tracker site assesses (14 p. of text + 9 p. footnotes) how Iran will respond to gasoline sanctions.  Here is a list compiled by AEI of all company contracts with Iran.

Real & Fake Compliance.  The United Arab Emirates has passed a law prohibiting uranium enrichment in the UAE, and contracted with outside parties to have its commercial nuclear fuel produced.  Mike Ledeen explains that we are already at war--a fight to the finish--with Iran--but only they realize this.  For three decades the revolutionary regime has waged proxy war against us, via terror, and aiding insurgencies in Iraq & Afghanistan.  Our one hope is the one the West shrinks from: regime change:

The strategically and morally correct course of action for the United States and its allies is to support the opposition forces, and refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the Ahmadinejad government. We should call for the release of political prisoners, equal rights for women, an end to torture, and a national referendum on the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic.

Rarely has there been such a dramatic convergence of sound strategy and moral virtue. The West’s leaders — as Churchill said of Chamberlain — choose dishonor, hoping to avoid war. But the war is already on; the only issues are its cost and the eventual winner .

Israel: Another UN Gem, and One More in the Wings.  All of this news, and what did chief UN atomic inspector Muhammad el-Baradei say recently?  He named his candidate for the number one security threat in the Mideast: Israel.  The Jewish state has been invaded and/or attacked several times since it crossed the nuclear threshold some four decades ago, without using nuclear weapons--even when its survival was threatened in 1967 & 1973.  Wall Street Journal pundit Bret Stephens sketches a plausible scenario in which the Iran talks are transformed into a diplomatic assault on Israel's nuclear program.

US or Israeli Military Strike?  One Israeli official says Israel will strike if Iran does not come around by Christmas, a comment jumped upon by an Iranian official.  But ABC News reported that the US has ordered four 15-ton superbombs (so-called MOPS--Massive Ordnance Penetrators) under a UON--"Urgent Operational Need" procurement.  Wiki's MOP entry notes that a test was carried out in 2007, and offers a few photos of the not-so-little dears.  Mideast maven Yoram Ettinger compares the 1981 Israel-Iraq nuclear strike & US attitudes then with the Israel-Iran-US equation in 2009; he sees Israel as the only hope of stopping Iran.

Would a strike incite a popular backlash against America & galvanize support for the now-hated regime?  Blogger Michael Totten, who fought inside Iraq, explains why he doubts this--all bets are off if the air raid is botched and thousands of civilians are slaughtered.  In his NRO piece "Iran Outlook: Grim" John Bolton sees diplomacy hopeless, sanctions as too little too late, regime change as too far away to help in the meantime and a military strike as likely at best to delay Iran's march towards nuclear status by 2 to 5 years.  By temporizing for nearly a decade we have given away far better options than a military strike, and raised risks all around.  As Team Obama will almost certainly decline, it looks like Israel on deck, JB writes, quite possibly within the next 6 months.

Bottom Line. Watching the slow-motion train wreck of Team Obama's foreign policy is, well, excruciating.  As to Iran, while it marches towards nuclear weapons status, the UN temporizes, our allies awake too late and our President dwells in a dream world.  He builds sand castles on the beach, denying or unaware that the ocean waters have receded a mile or so, and on the horizon, minutes away, is a massive foreign policy tsunami approaching full tilt.