The Razor

Before visiting Israel President Obama said in an interview with Israeli TV Iran was about a year away from having the Bomb, and “all options were on the table” for preventing it from acquiring it. Visiting Jordan later in his trip Obama took a more conciliatory tone, saying the issue is best resolved through diplomacy and the United States will continue to apply pressure on Iran “in a non-military way.” But if what Obama says is true, that Iran is a year away from having a bomb, it would represent a failure of diplomacy and would contradict the CIA position held as recently as 2012 that Iran had “halted its nuclear weapons program” in 2003. So what would it mean for Iran to have the Bomb? What would happen after a successful bomb test?

The first awareness of a successful Iranian underground nuclear test would come from seismic sensors detecting an earthquake  having a magnitude of 4.0-5.0 centered in a sparsely populated region of Iran. Such man-made earthquakes have a distinctive seismic signature compared to naturally occurring quakes and can be detected within minutes of a test. Occasionally an underground test, such as one conducted by North Korea in 2006, releases cesium 137 into the air which can be picked up by detectors downwind in China, India and Pakistan, but it is likely the seismic signature of a blast would be enough to announce to the world that Iran had joined the nuclear club.

Press reports would appear suggesting a nuclear detonation in Iran, but in the initial hours after the blast most nations would be quiet about it, preferring to review their own intelligence before making statements, and the media in the USA and Europe will double and triple-check their sources before setting the headlines. Not so the Iranian press. A nuclear Iran has been perhaps the only thing opposition groups and the theocratic regime agree on, and Iranian media outlets will be trumpeting the news throughout the nation and the regime will be passing out sweets in the streets of Teheran in celebration. Therefore it is likely we would learn about a successful nuclear blast from the Iranian press via American and European media reports before official confirmation came from western governments.

When those official confirmations arrive expect them to be funereal in tone, of the type “The (your nationality here) people condemn the Iranian regime for its unlawful nuclear weapons test that threatens the stability of the region as well as the regime itself.” There would likely be near panic in some quarters, jubilation in others with commentators and reporters expecting the imminent obliteration of Israel. But Israel will not be in immediate danger.  Building a bomb for a test and a bomb that can be put onto a missile or airplane are two separate engineering challenges, and because of that they are most likely occurring concurrently and with assistance from North Korea and some assistance from Russia.

There will be a sense in the West that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was worthless, and the sanctions Iran has put up with for over 15 years have completely failed. Promises made by the Obama administration to Israel and other states in the Middle East that containment of a nuclear armed is not an option as Vice-President Joe Biden said to a meeting with the Jewish group AIPAC, “Let me make clear what that commitment is: It is to prevent Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon, period. End of discussion. Not contain. Prevent,” would be repeated by some right wing or conservative media outlets while others more supportive of the administration would spike such “we told you so” stories.

There would likely be a window of at least a year or two beyond the bomb test before Iran could target a weapon on Israel, and during that time nothing  on the surface will seem to have changed much. In fact because of that calm, voices preaching containment and appeasement would begin to appear, saying “How are the Iranians different from the Soviets?” “The Iranians got the bomb, but they won’t use it.” “If containment worked for the Soviets why can’t it work for the Iranians?” Ron Paul said as much in the 2012 Presidential debates. Leaks would come out of the Israeli and US intelligence agencies of possible military action being launched against Iran to keep it from “weaponizing the bomb,” with the intent of undermining the rationale for the attacks in favor of non-intervention. Iranians would return to the negotiating table, promising to halt their nuclear program in exchange for this that or the other thing. North Korea plowed, graded, paved and painted lines on this road so expect the Iranian regime to ride it in comfort. As the sting from the surprise of the test wears off, liberals, anti-war type and other useful idiots of the Islamic regime will play a more active role and attempt to protect the regime. “The USA is the only state ever to use the Bomb,” expect them to say, “So why should we trust it more than Iran?”

And they’ll have a point, but for the wrong reasons. US credibility will be at a low not seen since the Iranian Hostage Crisis at this point. States such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia have already begun dusting off their own test programs, and a successful test by Iran would accelerate this research. Of  the two nations Saudi Arabia being the wealthier would probably simply buy a nuclear weapons program from Pakistan with assistance from France and other European nations, and perhaps share it with Turkey. But it would still take the better part of a decade for the Saudis to join the Nuclear Club. It would also push these nations closer to Russia who would be seen as an honest broker in the region, even when it is honestly supplying the Iranians whom the Sunni regimes in the Middle East detest. At least the Russians could be trusted while the Americans make threats and do nothing.

The time between a nuclear test and the successful weaponization of the Bomb will be the last window of opportunity for the Israelis and Americans to gather what remains of their spines and attack Iran. Failure at this point would lead to the fulfillment of promises made consistently over the history of the current Iranian regime: Israel will be destroyed. And while Israel will not go down without a fight, taking hundreds of thousands of Persians with them, it will not be said that the Iranians didn’t warn us; but it will be said that we were foolish not to believe them.

In the final weeks before the election I’ve been thinking long and hard about what the outcome could mean for the future of my country. Regardless of who wins, he will face a China that is bullying its neighbors into American arms, a Middle East that has become more radicalized not less, an Iranian nuke or a war started by Israel or the United States but blamed on the Great Satan regardless of which flag is painted on the bunker busters. The November winner will face a crumbling Europe, a soaring American debt that has become so big no one knows how to tame it, and a catatonic domestic economy. American education spends more than any nation in the world on its students yet they learn less. The weight of the pensions of Baby Boomers threatens to crush public spending, turning cities and states into mob enforcers who shake down the working, relatively poor young and pass the cash to the retiring relatively wealthy elderly.

I will leave the economic issues aside for the moment to focus on foreign policy. In my view with the exception of China, Obama has made all of these problems worse. But looking at these issues over the long-term, say through the remainder of this decade, would an Obama loss be really a victory for those of us who have opposed him every step of his way to the office he now holds?

China stands as perhaps the only issue I agree with the administration on. I’ve studied China and East Asia for decades, and recognize that handling a rising superpower is never easy, especially one with a 4,500 year history and cursed by a long, often twisted, memory. The Obama administration has attempted to encourage the rise of a peaceful, prosperous China that would take its place as an equal partner in the Pacific, but at the same time has worked to support our allies such as Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. It is an art more than a science, and while mistakes have been made by the Obama administration, they are to be expected in such a long-term important endeavor. The Chinese cannot understand why the United States would welcome a peaceful, prosperous and powerful China that is integrated with the rest of the world, and instead sees every American move through paranoid eyes and zero-sum calculations. We can’t do much to change this view of American policy in the Pacific, except by doing what this administration has done, setting policies that reassure our allies while encouraging the Chinese to play nice with others in the Pacific’s playground.

Unfortunately the tact, intelligence and real-politic shown by the Obama administration towards China has not been manifested anywhere else in the world. In the same way the reality of Iraq showed the folly of the neocon dream, the murder of our diplomat in Libya and the virulent anti-American nature of the “Arab Spring” has put paid to the dreams of Obama and his liberal eggheads. Obama believed that he alone could solve the Middle East problem with a grand speech in Cairo and apologies and bows to Arab leaders. He thought he could strong-arm Israel to make peace with the Palestinians, and that the Muslim world would see the wisdom of the Nobel committee’s awarding him his Peace Prize. He believed that once free from Iraq, he would be able to exit Afghanistan gracefully without fear of the Taliban taking it over and turning back the clock to 2000.

Nearly four years later America is even more hated than it was under the Bush administration. Iraq is becoming a satellite of Iran, allowing its Shiite neighbor unrestricted flights over its territory to resupply the Assad regime. Pakistan has degenerated into a pit of vipers that protected a man personally responsible for more American deaths than anyone since Ho Chi Minh and allowed Chinese to test a piece of top secret American gear left behind after its forces aired out his skull. Vast swathes of North Africa have been lost to al-Qaeda affiliated radicals including half of its most populous nation, Nigeria. Women are being secreted behind closed doors in Cairo and Tunis, as Egyptians copts are raped and terrorized out of their homes, putting an end to communities that date almost to the time of Christ. Liberals laughed when a man threw shoes at George W. Bush; they are oddly silent as they see Obama burned in effigy by crowds throughout the Middle East. Americans once were able to visit the Pyramids and Valley of the Kings; today members of the Egyptian government call for the destruction of the Pyramids and the State Dept warns Americans to avoid Egypt.

Hope and change.

The murder of the Libyan ambassador proves the Obama administration has failed to learn the lessons of 9-11. The average rapper has better security in Los Angeles than the Libyan ambassador. Threats against American interests there were ignored just as Bin Laden’s declaration of war against the US was in 1998. Many on the right including myself have given a pass to the Clinton administration for failing to imagine the attacks of 9-11 and stop them; today the Obama administration has no such excuses.

And speaking of silence, where is Code Pink, Cindy Sheehan and the other anti-war Left? Where are the anti-war drums that sounded for every dead Muslim civilian or American soldier arriving at Dover Air Force base in Delaware in the middle of the night? Where is the anger, the spiteful commentary of lost wars, the Vietnam comparisons that flowed thick through every mainstream news outlet during the Bush administration? As Walter Russell Mead notes, “If George W. Bush were president now, and had ordered the surge and was responsible for the strategic decisions taken and not taken in Afghanistan over the last four years, the mainstream press would be rubbing our noses in his miserable failures and inexcusable blunders 24/7. The New York Times and the Washington Post would be treating us to pictures of every fallen soldier. The PBS Newshour would feature nightly post-mortems on “America’s failed strategies in the Afghan War” and every arm-chair strategist in America would be filling the op-ed pages with the brilliant 20/20 hindsight ideas that our pathetic, clueless, failed president was too dumb and too cocky to have had.”

After his election I feared that Obama would weaken the position of the United States in the world. I envisioned Obama to be a pacifist who would gut our military, anger our friends and embolden our enemies. I was wrong about Obama’s pacifism; he may be a pacifist at heart but he has shown a willingness to kill America’s enemies that would make Dick Cheney offer him a high-five. Unfortunately he has succeeded in doing what I feared. Our alliances with our closest friends Australia, Canada and Great Britain are ignored. Our long-standing friendship with Israel rebuffed. A deep relationship with Egypt lost. Meanwhile Iran, North Korea and the socialist states in South America continue on as before, confident that the US lacks the resources to challenge them. As Machiavelli wrote “if one cannot be both, it is better to be feared than loved.” Obama should play less golf and read more because he has failed to do either.

The only solace I can take is that the Obama administration has shown a willingness to kill our enemies. Bin Laden is crab food, and drone strikes and special operations continue worldwide. The administration avoids calling it by its name, but the Global War on Terrorism continues using the same methods and tactics that the Bush administration developed and supported. What Obama has not done is use his speech giving abilities to provide an explanation to the American people why the war continues, and show that he and his administration understand the existential threat posed by radical Islam. It is a shame because it is possible that a liberal like Obama could do more to protect and advance freedom in the world for the same reason that a cold warrior like President Nixon could open up to China: his base trusts him.

And this is what concerns me about a Romney victory. If Romney wins I would expect that the Democrats would stoke the flames of their anti-war brothers at a critical time in our history. War is Not the Answer bumperstickers would sprout on foreign cars. Colleges would be wracked by anti-war protests. We need a coherent strategy explained to the American people while continuing the fight against terrorists around the world. There is the potential for Obama to do that, and for his allies to keep their anti-war instincts at bay. Likewise I suppose it’s possible that Obama, having achieved his goal of reelection would simply allow his own pacifist instincts to rule the day, putting American in even more danger. But I would hope that four years of at least occasional Angry Birds free Intelligence Briefings would have convinced Obama the threat to our nation is real.

So it is possible that the best outcome is an Obama victory for those of us who believe in the primacy of the war against radical Islam. The continued media silence at dead terrorists may be worth the price of four more years of Obama. This of course will not change my vote in November, but it has given me something to think about.

If you don’t read Walter Russell Mead, then by all means do so immediately because you are missing some of the best writing and analysis around. There are very few pundits I will sit through bad commercials to see, and even fewer writers that I will drop everything to read. Brit Hume and Charles Krauthammer are two pundits that stop me in my tracks at dinner time, and PJ O’Rourke and Walter Russell Mead are two writers that instantly overcome my ADD and allow me to focus on their essays. Unlike the others, Mead is actually a registered Democrat and centerist, so if you are expecting Conservative fire and brimstone, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Still, or perhaps because of his level-headeness his writing is persuasive and compelling. In short he’s just fun to read.

Two recent pieces worth reading: Top Saudi Cleric Issues Fatwa: Destroy Churches and Palestinian PM: Don’t Use Us to Justify Your Anti-Semitism. In the former, Mead imagines a dialog between a Christian and an Islamist that captures the zero sum nature of Islamism. The latter uses a dissenting voice on the Palestinian side to show that some Palestinians aren’t anti-Semites while many Europeans and Americans are.

My love for Israel knows no bounds except for it’s tolerance of ultra-orthodox parasites like this guy:

An orthodox Jew was charged with sexual harassment on Thursday after a young Israeli woman soldier was verbally abused for refusing to sit at the back of a bus, a judicial source said.

Shlomo Fuchs, a 44-year-old father, was charged for allegedly insulting the soldier several times, including calling her a “whore,” for refusing demands to sit on the rear benches of the vehicle.

The sheer audacity, or perhaps a better word is chutzpah of this man to insult a woman young enough to be his daughter, as she protects his Orthodox ass and those of his family from being swept into the sea by the likes of men in every way like him except for the name of the god they pray to, is an insult to everyone who supports the state of Israel. I understand why the Israelis tolerate the orthodox community: they are Jews although I wouldn’t go so far to claim they are Zionists, and Israel was set up for ALL Jews no matter how idiotic the ideas or parasitic their natures. And ultra-orthodox Jews like Fuchs are parasites. They don’t serve in the military (though G-d knows no officer would want them under their command), nor do they vote or pay taxes. Israel may be surrounded by enemies dedicated to wiping everyone there out, orthodox, reformist or secular and atheist alike, but the ultra-orthodox do nothing except complain and try to impose their Taliban-like demands on everyone else.

As a man older than Fuchs, I also particularly bristle at the use of the word “whore” against a woman. Call me old-fashioned but I deeply hate that word and all its connotations almost as much as Americans hate the “n” word. I’ve known women who worked in the sex industry and I wouldn’t even use that word to describe them. It is a degrading word, completely baseless, meant to disparage in a way that the victim cannot fight back. Having studied Middle Eastern cultures, I’m aware of its power in Arabic, Farsi and Hebrew and other languages, which is why it is commonly used in insults and invectives hurled by Iranian leaders and Taliban clerics alike. It may sound funny to hear one Arab leader call another the son of a thousand whores, but rest assured that in Arabic it’s the equivalent of “mother f***er.”

And for this man, a father like myself, to use it against a woman most likely his own daughter’s age, is beyond the Pale. That woman has a father; how would Fuchs feel if that father called his daughter a whore? It’s a simple juxtaposition, and one that Fuchs in his mindless fury forgets, but it’s a rule that binds society and keeps relations between strangers tolerable.

I’m not sure what Fuchs’s punishment should be. Deporting him to Pakistan would be interesting but I’m sure the lesson would be lost on him. Shaving off his beard would only make him a victim in the eyes of other parasites.

No, the best punishment for men like Fuchs is to prevent Israel from turning into Saudi Arabia. Secularists must stand up, fighting each and every attempt at imposing orthodox laws on the non-orthodox in a state that the ultra-orthodox don’t even believe in. That means allowing women to ride in the front of the bus in a land they are willing to die for. Let the ultra-orthodox parasites infest the back.

UPDATE: It gets worse. Now these “men” are bullying 2nd graders:

On Tuesday night, thousands of Israelis in the city of Beit Shemesh, just west of Jerusalem, gathered to protest the harassment of Naama Margolese, a cherub-faced second grader filmed weeping as she described walking to school while a few ultra-Orthodox Haredi Jewish men spat and screamed at her. The Haredi hecklers took issue with eight-year-old Naama’s exposed arms. More generally, they resented having to watch a procession of what they called “Nazis” and “whores” traipsing down their streets to get to a single-sex school nearby.

Notice how these cowards bully 8 year olds, not their parents. I guess they’re too afraid that they would get the crap kicked out of them – and nothing is worse for an haredi “man” than to be beaten up by a “whore.” I know plenty of Jewish women that would have no problem with the likes of them.

I’ve always believed that the Jews got a raw deal from their god. Things would have been a lot easier for the Jews had they found the promised land in present day Florida or maybe in an isolated spot in the Japanese archipelago. Instead He found them and they Him in the world’s crossroads. Every king, general or determined clan leader with a pointed stick had to pass through the Sinai, Canaan, Judea and Sumeria on their way to subjugate someone else. It strikes me as the equivalent of trying to survive in the middle of a busy intersection.

Nevertheless the Jews managed to do it. For close to 5,000 years they have struggled, triumphed, been slaughtered, overcome and suffered through it all, yet managed to remain faithful to their faith. While I don’t share it, it would be impossible for me not to appreciate their accomplishment and support it in any way I can.

It is difficult for Americans to appreciate the situation in Israel. The nation is tiny as this graphic below shows.

Americans have benefited from our isolation. Bounded on two sides by wide oceans and relatively weak nation states on the other sides, we have been able to prosper and grow without the threat of invasion for most of our history. Israel has never been so lucky. It’s borders are much less defensible. There are no natural barriers to protect it. It has never known peace with the neighbors, and has spent the bulk of its history as a story told from one generation to the next, its land owned by others and its people scattered to the corners of the earth.

In their diaspora, the Jewish people were subjected to the most heinous acts imaginable, and that was before the Holocaust when our ability to imagine horror and depravity reached its limit and was surpassed by the brutality of the Nazis and their sympathizers in the Middle East and Europe. Israel wasn’t founded on a whim in 1948. The Jews founded Israel because they needed a place which they controlled where they wouldn’t be kicked out, forced to convert, sold into slavery, or stripped naked and machine gunned. Throughout the diaspora Jews had been welcomed by one regime or another. But regimes rise and fall and leaders change. A safe haven one day could mount a pogrom or expel the Jews the next. The dream of Israel, and later its reality, gave the Jewish people what had been taken away by the Babylonians and later the Romans: a home.

Today this home is in a very bad neighborhood. The revolutions that are happening throughout the Middle East do not portend well for Israel, and Israelis aren’t as sanguine about events there as Americans or Europeans. While the mainstream media in the West applauds the downfall of Arab dictatorships in the region, the Israelis understand that the forces that are overthrowing these regimes aren’t democratic or tolerant as many commentators in the West assume. The use of the term “Israeli” is intentional: I believe that there is a divide between diaspora Jews and Israelis when it comes to recent events in the Middle East, and that the former are unaware of the danger that awaits the state of Israel.

Although it is tiny, the state of Israel maintains military superiority over its neighbors. But there are limits to technology, and it’s unclear whether the Israeli military wouldn’t be overwhelmed. A nuclear strike by Iran on Israel won’t destroy it, but it would mean the deaths of Jews on a scale that hasn’t been seen since the ovens at Auschwitz cooled. Such a strike would signal to its neighbors that the time had come to rid the region of Israel once and for all. Israel would immediately be subject to armies from Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Hezballah in Lebanon and possibly even Turkey. These forces may not be inclined to attack Israel, but they would be driven to do so by their own peoples, whom they have fed a daily diet of anti-Semitic propaganda for decades. I would expect waves of lightly armed Arabs to immediately set out to take Israel with their bare hands if necessary. When God is on your side, you don’t need body armor or an assault rifle. Pointed sticks and mindless fanaticism will do.

The Israeli government would have tens of thousands of casualties from the nuclear strikes. The dead wouldn’t be the immediate problem; as with any disaster it’s the living and particularly the injured that require the most resources. Israel would also face the question of retaliation. Would it use its nuclear weapons against Iran? Would it intentionally kill hundreds of thousands of Tehranis? Would it use the nukes against the masses of Arabs attacking it from all sides?

These are questions only an Israeli or a diaspora Jew can decide. I honestly don’t know if the Jewish people are willing to kill on such a grand scale even after being attacked. Contrary to Arab propaganda, the Jewish people are not monsters. They are a deeply moral people who abhor killing even in their own defense. Golda Meir most famously exposed this morality when she said to Anwar Sadat, “We can forgive you for killing our sons. But we can never forgive you for making us kill yours.”

Imagine this scenario: Tel Aviv and Jerusalem are on fire. Reports are sporadic and contradictory that both have been hit with devastating nuclear blasts. Casualty reports begin in the thousands and are expected to climb. We will have incomplete information about these attacks, but the immediate assumption will be that Iran has launched nuclear strikes, either using missiles or warheads in shipping containers. The Western press will be more skeptical, expecting the Iranian regime to claim responsibility for the attack. But just as al Qaeda remained silent for almost a year after the 9-11 attacks, so Iran will be silent. al Qaeda’s silence was intentional. Zawahiri and Bin Laden knew that the media expected responsibility calls to follow, and failure to receive them would cause some to question who perpetrated the attacks. In the months after 9-11 even no less an august figure as Nelson Mandela said, “The labeling of Osama bin Laden as the terrorist responsible for those acts before he had been tried and convicted could also be seen as undermining some of the basic tenets of the rule of law.” Iran will lay low, and the “Arab Street” will develop the propaganda line that Israel nuked itself in order to justify the attack on Iran. News outlets antagonistic to the Jewish State such as La Monde, the Guardian, al Jazeera and the New York Times will question the motives of the Israeli response and immediately demand that Israel wait for an international investigation before retaliating.

How will the Israeli government respond? Will it retaliate against civilian populations just because it can? It could target military facilities in Iran or Syria, but its enemies aren’t stupid; they will have surrounded their key military assets and personnel with layers of civilian human shields. Just to kill a single soldier the Israelis will have to kill dozens if not scores of innocent men, women and children. Israel will have to swallow its morality and tear through the flesh of innocents in order to strike at the heart of the regime that has attacked it. Does it have the will to do this?

For all of its power, its vaunted military, Israel is a fragile nation. The coming months and years will determine once and for all how fragile it is.

Courtesy: Monkey in the Middle

I have issues with Turkey. In the late 1990’s I used to write for a website and penned commentaries on the Turkish mistreatment of the Kurds. I remember getting into some pretty heated discussions with Turkish nationals over my support of a Kurdish homeland, and received a few threats thrown my way although nothing serious. I support the Kurdish cause which would could take a big bite of about a third from Turkey. The Kurdish state predates the modern Turkish state built by Kamal Ataturk in the 1920’s by a decade. The Kurds had been promised a state from the rubble of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, but for various reasons (like the European powers colonizing the region) it wasn’t to be, and for nearly a century the Kurds have been ignored. Ignored everywhere except in Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran – states that have actively fought to stamp out Kurdish culture and history that can trace its roots back to Pharaonic Egypt. The Kurds are a distinct people with their own language and culture, unlike the “Palestinians” who have neither although they already have a state – 3 of them actually: Gaza, the West Bank and Jordan itself.

Over the past eight years or so the Turks have been getting their Islam on, becoming more pious and anti-Western in the process. A decade or so Turkey seemed likely to integrate with the EU and become a full-fledged western state, but the AKP took power in 2002 and has been undermining the secularist state built by Ataturk and the generals that followed him. This process has included reversing the growing economic and military relationship with Israel under the previous regimes, leading recently to the threat by the Turkish prime minister that Israel’s refusal to apologize for the deaths of 7 Turks at the hands of Israeli commandos aboard a Turkish ship challenging the blockade of Gaza was cause for war. Never mind that as soon as the Israelis left Gaza, Jewish holy sites were destroyed as were greenhouses that had provided jobs to Palestinians, and the state became a launching pad for rockets and mortars into Israeli. So much for trading land for peace...

If the Turkish Prime Minister wants to get his war on, why not clear out the festering cesspool that is Syria on his doorstep? The Syrians would welcome the relief, and the Turks might even be lauded by the West for its humanitarian mission – and by Sunni states for checking Iranian power. The AKP has lightened the iron fist on the Turkish Kurds, and the Kurds can wait because they are a patient people. Their time will come and they know it.

But challenging Israel risks unleashing forces that I doubt Prime Minister Erdogan comprehends. American policymakers haven’t forgotten Turkey’s refusal to allow coalition forces through Turkey to Iraq. Provoking Israel would pretty much end Turkey’s flirtation with the EU and result in its expulsion from NATO. American politicians including a US president seen as weak on Israel would leap at the chance to appear supportive of the Jewish state. The Armenian Genocide Resolution which has been dead in Congress for 4 years would likely be signed into law. It would be a purely symbolic act, but symbolic acts are what Turkey is all for – at least when it comes to the Gaza blockade. 70% of US aid to Iraq flows through Turkey, but the Americans are drawing down and the strategic importance of that route lessens by the day. Pakistan has learned the limits of using supply lines for political leverage; the US has contracted with Moscow to move material through Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union; shipping through the Suez Canal and Persian Gulf might add a few weeks to the delivery time, but the material would go through. The biggest card Turkey holds is the Incirlik airbase. Closing that would dent US logistical support in Iraq and Afghanistan – but would also end the hundreds of millions of dollars Turkey receives from Washington DC each year for leasing the base, as well as the loss of thousands of jobs in support personnel. Other nations have played similar games with the US over its bases; ask the Philippines how things are doing at Clark and Subic Bay these days compared to 30 years ago.

A report leaked that Israeli foreign minister Avi Lieberman was considering opening talks with the PKK which the PKK and Lieberman both denied – although Israel is very well versed in playing the Arab “enemy of my enemy is my friend” game. Expect them to announce a “new relationship” with Greece, and for pressure on the US administration to side with the Greeks on the Cyprus Issue. For Turkey Israel is a religious affront, but to Israel Turkey simply joins the long line of intolerant Muslims who want to follow Mohammed’s orders and kill the Jews wherever they are found. For Israel such matters are of life and death, and they will fight accordingly.

Turkey is playing a dangerous game but doesn’t appear to have fully thought through the outcome of its actions. The Turks may find that the game has become all too real and that they don’t want to play anymore – but by then it will be too late.

UPDATE: Joshuapundit weighs in and agrees that war with Israel is unlikely.

I’ve been a big fan of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since Desert Storm in 1991. The man is extremely media savvy and seems completely comfortable in front of a camera or as today, making a speech in front of Congress. He’s relaxed, witty and unflappable – as proven when he used the squawking of a protestor to emphasize the point that only in free nations such as Israel and the United States can such a person be heard without being silenced forever. His speech was relatively short – about half an hour – and hit all the main points. The speech was very well received by both sides in Congress, and it is clear that Netanyahu’s visit to Washington is much warmer this year than last.

Full text of speech here. One of my favorite lines: “This startling fact reveals a basic truth: Israel is not what is wrong about the Middle East. Israel is what is right about the Middle East.”

Indeed.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center suggests how Richard Goldstone should repent for his blood libel against Israel.

I’ve always been fascinated by the Jews who collaborated with the Nazis during the Holocaust. I’m also interested in the Irish who sat out World War 2 as neutral, but that is another essay. Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about Jewish collaborators since learning billionaire George Soros was one of them, a teenaged judenrat who helped the Nazis expropriate Jewish property, and it’s difficult for me to think of the wealthy, powerful man today without considering the assistance he gave the Nazis who annihilated his own kind. I throw the word judenrat around a lot when I write about him, and it’s good for me to consider exactly what the word means. This article serves as a reminder of the potency of the term.

The more I learn about these collaborators, the more I cannot understand leftist Jewish groups like J-Street and people like new DNC head Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. While the original judenrat could be excused for not being aware of the scale of the Holocaust or its corporate nature, no such excuses can be used by Jews today when faced by the attitudes of Islamists towards the Jewish people and their state of Israel. While the judenrat under the Nazi occupation had the likes of Adam Czerniakow, judenrat leader of the Warsaw ghetto and Chaim Rumkowski of the Lodz ghetto, today’s judenrat are led by the likes of New York Times writer Thomas Friedman, Noam Chomsky and Human Rights Watch’s Ken Roth. Czerniakow made notes in his diary about having to provide the Nazis with 7,000 names to send to “work camps in the East.” He could at least console himself with thinking that the people he named had a chance of surviving at these camps. He wouldn’t have known that most would be gassed or shot immediately upon their arrival. He also didn’t have much choice. Those judenrat who refused German orders were shot, and their families either joined them against the wall or met their end in a concentration camp.

Not so the likes of Friedman, Chomsky and their followers. They live and speak freely in the West. No government is forcing them to create 21st century blood libels like that promulgated by Richard Goldstone in the Goldstone Report. No one is threatening to gas their families if they refuse to spread lies about Israel and Jews. Ken Roth of HRW spends George Soros’s money propagandizing relentlessly against Israel while remaining silent on the atrocities committed by its neighbors. No, the modern judenrat choose to collaborate with their people’s enemies by choice. The original judenrat couldn’t believe that their gentile friends in Poland, the villages their families had lived in for centuries, the nations that they called home would turn on them and “process” them the way cows are “processed” at the slaughterhouse. Today’s judenrat are well aware of the threats Jews face because Islamist groups like Hezballah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza make their intentions all too plain. Today Hamas shot an anti-tank missile at an Israeli school bus, and looks forward to rearming once a new Egyptian government is seated and removes its blockade on the Gaza Strip. Iran has made clear it plans to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, as a new secret nuclear site is revealed by an Iranian opposition group. Hezballah rearms under the noses of UN “peacekeepers” in South Lebanon waiting for orders from the regime in Tehran.

Meanwhile efforts to delegitimize Israel continue apace in Europe and the United States. This effort capitalizes on the complexity, history and general ignorance of the Arab-Israeli conflict (e.g. the demand that Israel should allow the “right to return” for displaced Palestinians but failing to recognize that such a demand effectively ends the state of Israel), to blur the line between criticism of Israeli government policies and actions, and the right of the state of Israel to exist. This hasn’t been helped by the overreaction of Israeli supporters to label all criticism as “anti-Semitic” (I personally was called a “nazi” and “skinhead” at a town hall meeting for speaking out against a proposed expansion of a Chabad Lubavitch community center in my neighborhood), and the tendency for Jews in the West to be more liberal and open-minded than non-Jews. While some of these liberal Jews may hope that the growing ideological alliance between the Left and Islamists would fall apart if Israel gave up settlements in the West Bank and neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, such sentiment ignores the rising background “noise” of anti-Semitic incidents in Europe and the United States.

As a gentile and long-time supporter of Israel I am often amazed at how some Jews can ignore 5,000 years of oppression – massacres, pogroms, expulsions – and support the people and ideas that strive to carry these practices into the 21st century. While Hamas lacks the opportunity and manpower the Nazis had at their disposal, only the most delusional Jew could think that the Islamists would not slaughter the Jews in their beds given the opportunity – as proven by the attack on the Fogel family. One in three Palestinians think it’s a good thing to stab a month old infant, a three year old and an eleven year old in their beds – yet the modern judenrat selectively ignore such behavior and attitudes and continue to provide moral cover for their killers. These Jews may not realize it themselves, but their actions prove they hold the belief that the destruction of Israel would solve all these problems, ignoring the oppression that is behind Israel’s founding in the first place. It’s as if the Holocaust or any other of the countless atrocities perpetrated against the Jewish people ever happened, or worse, that the Jewish people deserved its fate.

Today’s judenrat believe that the Jewish people can survive without the state of Israel, and accept that Zionism or Zionist are pejorative terms. I would have hoped that the Holocaust would have put that belief to rest, but the systematic slaughter of 6 million capping the deaths of hundreds of thousands in expulsions, massacres and pogroms evidently wasn’t enough.

So here we are in the midst of what the Chinese might call “interesting times” in the Middle East and it seems that I can write about nearly everything BUT what is happening there. There’s a reason for that: I really don’t know what is going on. Having lived through 1989, I can sense strong similarities between events that year in Europe and what is happening today in the Middle East but there’s a key difference between 1989 and now: 1989 happened. The Berlin Wall fell, the dust settled, and the world changed for the better (for the most part – Tiananmen Square also happened in 1989 and I don’t think the Chinese are better off because of the slaughter). What is happening today… is happening. It’s the present for me (at least at the time of writing) so I don’t know what is going to happen.

I have some ideas, like we are seeing the beginning of the next stage of development in the Mideast and the end of post-colonialism. In recent history the region has gone from the Ottoman Empire, to colonialism, and finally to post-colonialism. That era has been characterized by secular dictators like Saddam Hussein, Mohamar Khadafi, Gamal Abdal Nasser, Haffaz al-Assad and their regime successors. I believe one could even squeeze Iran into that category, with the secular dictator of the Shah being replaced by a religious dictator in the form of the Ayatollah Khomeini and his successor the Ayatollah Khamenei.

So what comes post post-colonialism? That’s the question and at this point it is impossible to answer it. It would be nice to think that secular democracies would sprout and take root throughout the region, but there is no democratic tradition which could provide the fertile soil necessary. I suppose it is a possibility – perhaps a democracy with Islamic characteristics that would reflect the will of the people more but show little in common with western democracies like Israel, Europe and the United States.

Naturalist Stephen Jay Gould’s hypothesis of “punctuated equilibrium” proposed that the evolution of organisms is characterized by long periods of stability punctuated by brief periods of chaos. In a sense the Middle East has been static for decades and now we are entering a chaotic period that will change the region forever. What comes out of that is impossible to know, no matter how important the results are to us.

So Remember the next time some talking head appears on TV predicting the future of the region that the future is impossible to predict. The next time some political wag waxes poetic in the New York Times about the future of the Middle East, remember that the future is impossible to predict. When some blowhard appears on NPR and offers his vision about what changes lay ahead in the Middle East, shout at the radio “The future is impossible to predict!” (and feel free to add “you liberal moron” as I used to do when I listened to NPR -which I don’t do anymore).

That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be supportive of the people over there, or that we should drop our guard and be suspicious of their motives. The outcome is unknown, and as long as it is we should try to influence it as best we can. But truth be told there is little we can do – especially when even helicopter gunships, jets and snipers aren’t enough to stop people from rioting in Libya.

Things are changing, but how are they changing? Who knows! Because the future of the Middle East is impossible to predict. It’s a basic idea but one that gets lost in the 24 hour news cycle and in RSS feeds and Facebook comments.

I ran across one today that I just can’t shake. Even after decades of reading about the Holocaust I still find pictures that simply horrify me in ways that defy explanation. The suffering displayed by the victims. The inhuman cruelty shown by the Nazis. Even the evil of the photographer who felt that the event should be preserved like a trophy by snapping the photograph. It’s as if the whole picture is a portal into Hell.

But here I am seven decades and an ocean away from the act, stunned with impotent rage. Even though I want to crawl through the picture and rip the Nazi apart with my own hands and stop the horror, there’s nothing I can do. The suffering is over. The Nazis in front of the camera and behind it most likely long dead like their victims. Yet the moment has been captured and lives on in the photograph.

The photograph reminds me that while the term is thrown about loosely today, and is often used against those who suffered it themselves, there is only one Holocaust – one true Sho’ah.

In the 1950’s William F. Buckley lifted conservativism out of the muck by driving out the John Birchers and racists, forming a modern political movement that changed America a generation later. Today liberalism continues its swift descent into the same sewer conservativism left, supporting religious extremism and spouting neo-nazi rubbish. There is no better example of this than the following cartoon.

This cartoon did not appear in a Middle Eastern paper, one that regularly demonizes the Jews for all the world’s problems. No it appeared in an American paper that refused to display the Mohammed cartoons for fear of getting a suicide bomber in the editorial office: the Washington Post.

As Roger Simon notes, “Oliphant – whose work I usually find humdrum in the extreme – has done us a favor. Deliberately or not, he has dropped the oldest of phony Leftist pretenses – that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are not the same.” That’s something I’ve noticed recently; increasingly the Left is dropping the pretence no doubt due to the fact that the pretence is a sham. Hating Israel is simply the politically correct and modern way to hate Jews. After all anti-semitism is probably the oldest existing prejudice and hatred, and being called an anti-semite just makes one seem old-fashioned.

It fascinates me how the Left, which claims to champion feminism, supports a doctrine where women are second class citizens. The Left claims to uphold gay rights, but supports regimes and groups in the Middle East where homosexuals are stoned to death. Yet I – who support these very rights – am dismissed as a “conservative” and called thug.

The Left is sliding into irrelevance the same way conservativism did in the 1930’s. Until it’s own version of Buckley comes along and cleans it up, the Left is looking mighty pathetic.

In the meantime liberal outlets like the Washington Post will slowly resemble the Arab media. How far is the cartoon below from the one above?

UPDATE: Does anyone else find it odd that the Arab media enjoys showing Jews as modern day Nazis considering that the Arabs were Nazi allies during World War 2? This group appreciates the irony.

UPDATE: Barry Rubin weighs in.

Michael Yon proves once again why he is one of the greatest journalists around in this letter to Glenn Reynolds.

In Sderot, Allison and I had the pleasure of having lunch with Noam Bedein, the Director of the Sderot Information Center, a privately funded organization. According to the “Kassam counter” on http://www.sderotmedia.com/, as of February 1, 10,046 Kassam rockets have hit Sderot and the Western Negev since 2001. During a single two-week period, 293 rockets rained in on Sderot. According to a pamphlet from the Sderot Information Center, a kindergarten teacher asked her pupils, “Why does the snail have a shell?” The Children answered in chorus, “So it can be protected from the Kassam rockets.”

As I write Israel is bombing Hamas targets in the Gaza strip, leaving 360 Palestinians dead, most of whom are women and children judging by the sympathetic (and stage managed) European press.

A Palestinian boy watches the funeral of three
children in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip
December 29, 2008. (Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters)

The Western Press has paid little attention to the rocket and mortar attacks on Israelis occurring on a daily basis for the past 8 years. Here is a photograph of a mother of 4 who was killed by a Hamas rocket in Ashdod.

Murdered: Irit Sheetrit, mother of 4 (Avi Rokach, Ynet News)

While the newspapers and airwaves are filled with pictures of Palestinian killed or wounded by Israel thanks to careful manipulation by Hamas, the European and American press ignore the Israeli victims that are behind the Israeli attacks. This fits “the narrative” that Israel is an apartheid, terrorist state while the Arabs are the oppressed, allowing the terrorists to use the consciences of Jews, Europeans and Americans as cover for their killing spree.

Since 2000 Islamic terror groups have launched 10,046 rockets and mortars at Israel, most falling within a 20 km band from Gaza. Of these, terror groups launched 7,000 after Israel quit the Gaza Strip in 2005. The attacks killed or wounded nearly 300 Israelis (est), a ratio of roughly 35 missiles for each Israeli casualty.

Kassam 2 Rockets, Enough to Kill an Israeli Mother of Four 
courtesy WeaselZippers.net

Kassams compromise the majority of rockets used in the attacks against Israel. The Kassam I was first used in 2001 against Israelis settlements in Gaza. The Kassam I weighs 12 lbs is 60mm in diameter, 31 inches long and carries a pound of explosive. The Kassam I has a 3km range. The Kassam 2 (shown above) weighs 70 lbs, is 150mm in diameter, 72 inches long and carries 11-15 lbs of high explosive. It has a range of 8 kms. The Kassam 3 and 4 are even larger, with the latter having a range of 20 kms. Israeli intelligence suspects that longer range rockets are on the drawing board, especially if sanctions are lifted on the Hamas regime. While these relatively small rockets can be manufactured in Gaza or be smuggled in from Egypt through tunnels, the larger and more sophisticated rockets would have to come from Iran, Syria or Russia by land and sea. These rockets have ranges of 40 km, effectively doubling the area currently under siege.

Recently as I was viewing satellite imagery of Israel, I was struck by how small the country is. At 20,770 km square if Israel were an American state it would be the sixth smallest – bigger than New Jersey, Hawaii, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island. Gaza itself is roughly the size of Detroit at 360 km square. At its narrowest point between the Mediterranean Sea and Judea and Sumaria (aka the West Bank) Israel is only 15 km – 9 miles – wide.

I don’t think Americans appreciate how physically small Israel is. When we hear that Hamas is firing missiles with ranges of 20 km (12 miles) into Israel, it’s difficult to relate it to anything we know. After all 12 miles from the border of Mexico is less than 1% of the distance between the Mexican border in the south and the Canadian border in the north. With the exception of border cities like El Paso and San Diego, Kassams launched by Mexico would fall into scrubland and desert.

America is a large country and our geography determines much of how we think and relate to the world. Americans perceive of space differently – speaking as one taking 2 years to navigate the narrow aisles of a Japanese grocery store without knocking food off the shelves. Our country is big, our homes are big, our roads are long and wide. Two oceans protect our eastern and western shores, and we have neutralized our only military threat in the entire hemisphere – Cuba an island 90 miles away.

But things are different in Israel. Israel is a small, fragmented country surrounded by enemies. When people urge Israel to trade land for peace they fail to consider that Israel doesn’t have very much land to trade. Worse, while Israel gives its precious land away – as it has in Gaza and in south Lebanon – it receives nothing in return. Instead of peace its enemies quickly use the land as a staging area for more attacks in a quest to get even more land from Israel. In essence “Land for Peace” becomes ”Land for More Land”, a method of conquest of Israel by its enemies.

Here is a map showing the actual ranges of rockets fired from Gaza superimposed on a map of Israel. Note that prior to 2005 settler outposts in Gaza had buffered Israel from many of the rocket attacks. Once Israel withdrew, Hamas and the other terror groups were free to hit Israel-proper with missiles and mortars. The area shaded red is expected future capabilities and will be ignored for now. Everything blue, yellow and green has been under bombardment for the past 8 years.

Bombardment ranges from Gaza, source: Anti-Israeli Terrorism in 2007
and Its Trends in 2008, IICC (pdf) (hattip). 

The 20 km distance ranges between 2/3 and 1/7 the width of Israel. For argument’s sake I will use an average of 1/4. For perspective imagine that a quarter of the width of the USA from Mexico – 500 km (300 miles) – was under bombardment from our southern neighbor.  What would a similar map look like?

Comparative Range of Rocket/Mortar Bombardment at 500 km (300 miles)

Virtually the entire southwest including all of Southern California, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Albuquerque and most of Texas and approximately 40 million Americans would be exposed to daily attack. It’s difficult to imagine any American administration no matter how Leftist that could tolerate the attacks that Israel has been putting up with for the past 8 years. Interestingly this region corresponds to Aztlan, an area which Chicano supremacist groups like MEChA and “La Raza” hope to one day liberate.

We can go further. Israel’s population of 7.2 million is roughly 1/40 that of the United States. Multiplying the number of rocket and mortar casualties by 40 and the American equivalent is 12,000 dead and wounded. How much “restraint” could an American government be expected to exercise in such a scenario?

The old adage that one should wait to judge a man until after walking a mile in his shoes can help us appreciate the conditions of “peace” that Israel has lived under for most of the decade. We can only hope that the Israelis have the wisdom and fortitude necessary to do what it takes to protect itself. Given the performance of its current government, it has shown that until now it lacks both.

Watcher of Weasels has announced this week’s results. Kudos to Bookworm Room for the post Why Jews Are Right to Suspect Obama’s Advisors, and Kaboom! A Soldier’s Journal for my favorite non-council post Deep Thoughts with Biggie Smalls. Biggie is the soldiers’ Iraqi interpreter who shows humor betrays his deep humanity. Congratulations to both of this week’s winners.