Charles Krauthammer On Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech to the U.N. General Assembly:
So: After that speech, the U.S. delegation at the U.N. says that what the president of Iran had said was abhorrent and delusional. And then [the] State Department issues a statement, and it accuses him of being outrageous.
And yet an hour earlier, our president, on the same stage, same podium, reaches out his hand, opens the door to new negotiations with a man who apparently is abhorrent, delusional, and outrageous.
Now there’s a real disconnect here.
Obama operates under the assumption that all Iran has to do is to show its sincerity, that it’s meeting its obligations under the NPT. This is the way a law professor speaks about the duties and obligations of a citizen in a cozy civil society where all of us agree on the norms.
The international arena is a state of nature where there are no norms, especially for a regime like Iran’s, a rogue regime. And it acts in its own interest to acquire its own — and to augment its own — power. To pretend, as Obama does, that this is only a question of obligations and duties, and to again stretch out a hand that’s been spat on for 20 months is simply unbelievable. It betrays a misunderstanding of the nature of the international community that is not even a law professor’s — it’s an adolescent’s.
Turtle Bay, Where the Outrageous Is Normal
September 24, 2010
By Brett D. Schaefer
Leading up to the speeches by heads of state at the United Nations this week, there was quite a bit of speculation about which world leader would say the craziest thing. Foreign Policy magazine even published a piece titled “The Top 10 Craziest Things Ever Said During a U.N. Speech,” and MSNBC ran one on “What to watch for at the U.N.: World leaders who dislike U.S.”
Each year yields a bounty of bizarre rhetoric ranging from the silly to the dangerous. On the silly side this year was Bhutan’s call for world leaders to adopt “Happiness” as the ninth U.N. Millennium Development Goal:
Let us grow forth from this summit to not only rededicate to the eight goals to banish disease and extreme poverty, but also to the new ninth voluntary goal, to build a world that can sustain happiness for all its people, today and for generations to come.
If only all U.N. discussions were focused on harmless efforts like figuring out how to measure Gross National Happiness. Unfortunately, more often the bizarre is far less benign.
Granted, this year was calmer than recent years, because many of the world’s worst leaders are absent. Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, the perennial contender for “Most Outrageous Statement” who famously called Pres. George W. Bush the devil, is out of the running, since he’s skipping this year’s U.N. meetings. (But just to make sure no one forgets him, he sent his proxy to denounce “market totalitarianism [which] prevents the exercise of human rights and the right to development.”) Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, who holds the record for the longest address to the U.N. General Assembly at a crushing four hours, is also absent. Nor will we be treated to a repeat of last year’s 90-plus-minute screed from Muammar Gaddafi, also not attending.
But don’t worry, there are other contenders.
President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, after destroying his country’s economy and violently repressing his political opponents, chastised the assembled world leaders at the MDG summit for “the debilitating sanctions” hindering his country’s progress toward the Millennium Development Goals. Never mind that the sanctions focus not on the general population of Zimbabwe but on him, his family, and other Zimbabwean officials linked to corruption and violence. He kept to this tone in his General Assembly speech (available here), condemning the use of “illegal” sanctions by the U.S. against Zimbabwe as a violation of the U.N. Charter; demanding that the U.S. lift the embargo on Cuba; accusing veto-wielding nations of hypocrisy for failing to welcome a dramatic expansion in the size of the U.N. Security Council; calling for inclusion of two veto-wielding seats for African nations; and demanding a host of concessions and increased assistance from Western nations.
Bolivian president Evo Morales took the stage and defended his actions to nationalize private industries, urged states to allow the free movement of people without immigration restrictions, and “criticized the building of walls in Mexico and Palestine” and “policies that expelled migrants.” He concluded by calling for “democratization” of the U.N., observing:
. . .the authoritarian regime led by the United States was only emboldened by the right to veto extended to it and other permanent members of the Security Council. The international community must ensure that the United Nations was [sic] an anti-capitalist Organization. He proposed a “war cry” for saving humanity, with the slogan: “The Planet or death”.
The favorite, however, was the reigning champion for “Most Outrageous Statement” — Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who rises to the occasion every year to condemn the “American empire” and the “Zionist regime,” or to declare capitalism dead.
This year was no different. At the conclusion of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) summit, Ahmadinejad called for reform of “undemocratic and unjust” international institutions dominated by the United States and the West, “now that the discriminatory order of capitalism and the hegemonic approaches are facing defeat.” Earlier in the week, he threatened the U.S. with terrorist retaliation if it launched a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, and dismissed the “Zionist” regime in Israel. To cap off the week, Ahmadinejad rolled out 9/11 conspiracy theories, stating that the U.S. government was behind the attack on the World Trade Center.
The administration called the remarks “totally outrageous” and “vile conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic slurs that are as abhorrent and delusional as they are predictable,” but apparently was not outraged to the point where it would end its unrequited efforts to negotiate with Iran.
Sadly, this is all par for the course in Turtle Bay, so much so that the outrageous no longer elicits shock, merely curiosity and rote response by public-relations spokesmen. According to State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley, “We didn’t offer engagement with Iran because we agree with what Ahmadinejad says. We have offered engagement with Iran because we think it’s in our national security interest.”
Really? The president of Iran is a crazy, dangerous conspiracy theorist, and that has no bearing on your diplomatic strategy?
The bulk of the speeches are unobjectionable for the most part. But, in the end, it’s hard to take the U.N. seriously when it gives such unserious and irresponsible people free rein to espouse craziness while the assembled dignitaries clap politely.
No wonder that only “thirty-one percent of Americans say the United Nations is doing a good job of solving the problems it has had to face.” The U.N. has earned its low esteem.
— Brett D. Schaefer is the Jay Kingham Fellow in International Regulatory Affairs in the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, a division of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies, at the Heritage Foundation and editor of ConUNdrum: The Limits of the United Nations and the Search for Alternatives.
Saturday, September 25, 2010
CNN Poll: Obama's Approval Rating at All-Time Low - 42%
CNN: Obama at All-Time Low
September 24, 2010
By Daniel Foster
The latest CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll has President Obama shedding eight points in three weeks, and congressional Democrats down nine on the generic ballot:
The president’s approval rating now stands at 42 percent – an all time low in CNN polling and 8 points lower than where Obama was only three weeks ago. Moreover, 56 percent of all Americans think the president has fallen short of their expectations
.
The president’s sagging poll numbers couldn’t come at a worse time for congressional Democrats, themselves facing a nine-point deficit in the so-called “generic ballot” question heading into the midterm elections. In fact, the president’s approval rating is the same as that of President Clinton’s in 1994 – the midterm election year that saw Republicans wrest control of both the House and Senate.
Also, broad support for tea-party backed candidates:
In even worse news for congressional Democrats, likely voters say they are considerably more likely to vote for a candidate the president opposes than one he supports. On the other hand, 50 percent of voters said they would be more likely to vote for a Tea Party-backed candidate while a third of Americans said Tea Party support would dissuade their vote for a candidate.
September 24, 2010
By Daniel Foster
The latest CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll has President Obama shedding eight points in three weeks, and congressional Democrats down nine on the generic ballot:
The president’s approval rating now stands at 42 percent – an all time low in CNN polling and 8 points lower than where Obama was only three weeks ago. Moreover, 56 percent of all Americans think the president has fallen short of their expectations
.
The president’s sagging poll numbers couldn’t come at a worse time for congressional Democrats, themselves facing a nine-point deficit in the so-called “generic ballot” question heading into the midterm elections. In fact, the president’s approval rating is the same as that of President Clinton’s in 1994 – the midterm election year that saw Republicans wrest control of both the House and Senate.
Also, broad support for tea-party backed candidates:
In even worse news for congressional Democrats, likely voters say they are considerably more likely to vote for a candidate the president opposes than one he supports. On the other hand, 50 percent of voters said they would be more likely to vote for a Tea Party-backed candidate while a third of Americans said Tea Party support would dissuade their vote for a candidate.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Not Inspiring ... At All
This is the Commander in Chief ? Ugh.
The Scandal of Obama’s War
September 22, 2010 9:34 A.M.
By Kathryn Jean Lopez
About the new Woodward book, Peter Baker writes in the New York Times:
The book, “Obama’s Wars,” by the journalist Bob Woodward, depicts an administration deeply torn over the war in Afghanistan even as the president agreed to triple troop levels there amid suspicion that he was being boxed in by the military. Mr. Obama’s top White House adviser on Afghanistan and his special envoy for the region are described as believing the strategy will not work.
The president concluded from the start that “I have two years with the public on this” and pressed advisers for ways to avoid a big escalation, the book says. “I want an exit strategy,” he implored at one meeting. Privately, he told Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to push his alternative strategy opposing a big troop buildup in meetings, and while Mr. Obama ultimately rejected it, he set a withdrawal timetable because, “I can’t lose the whole Democratic Party.”
I’m reminded of what Charles Krauthammer recently wrote:
“Our Afghan policy was focused as much as anything on domestic politics,” an Obama adviser at the time told Peter Baker of the New York Times. “He would not risk losing the moderate to centrist Democrats in the middle of health insurance reform and he viewed that legislation as the make-or-break legislation for his administration.”
If this is true, then Obama’s military leadership can only be called scandalous. During the past week, 22 Americans were killed over a four-day period in Afghanistan. This is not a place about which decisions should be made in order to placate congressmen, pass health-care reform, and thereby maintain a president’s political standing. This is a place about which a president should make decisions to best succeed in the military mission he himself has set out.
The Scandal of Obama’s War
September 22, 2010 9:34 A.M.
By Kathryn Jean Lopez
About the new Woodward book, Peter Baker writes in the New York Times:
The book, “Obama’s Wars,” by the journalist Bob Woodward, depicts an administration deeply torn over the war in Afghanistan even as the president agreed to triple troop levels there amid suspicion that he was being boxed in by the military. Mr. Obama’s top White House adviser on Afghanistan and his special envoy for the region are described as believing the strategy will not work.
The president concluded from the start that “I have two years with the public on this” and pressed advisers for ways to avoid a big escalation, the book says. “I want an exit strategy,” he implored at one meeting. Privately, he told Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to push his alternative strategy opposing a big troop buildup in meetings, and while Mr. Obama ultimately rejected it, he set a withdrawal timetable because, “I can’t lose the whole Democratic Party.”
I’m reminded of what Charles Krauthammer recently wrote:
“Our Afghan policy was focused as much as anything on domestic politics,” an Obama adviser at the time told Peter Baker of the New York Times. “He would not risk losing the moderate to centrist Democrats in the middle of health insurance reform and he viewed that legislation as the make-or-break legislation for his administration.”
If this is true, then Obama’s military leadership can only be called scandalous. During the past week, 22 Americans were killed over a four-day period in Afghanistan. This is not a place about which decisions should be made in order to placate congressmen, pass health-care reform, and thereby maintain a president’s political standing. This is a place about which a president should make decisions to best succeed in the military mission he himself has set out.
Obama's Terrifying, Blase views on Terrorism
Bob Woodward has a new book.
Barrack Obama has some scary, downright idiotic comments attributed to him.
I guess we should not be surprised.
Read on ....
Obama’s Non-Wars
September 22, 2010
By Victor Davis Hanson
I have not read Obama’s Wars. I am not a fan of Bob Woodward’s methodology of using almost exclusively unnamed sources, which, on one hand, encourages concerned players to be preemptive and get their one-sided stories out as “background” or face slander from others who beat them to the punch, and on the other hand, reports thoughts and unspoken impressions in the manner of a novelist.
That said, the initial reports from the book reveal two very disturbing presidential admissions that, if true, Robert Gibbs should quickly address: Obama’s purported toss-off that the U.S. could absorb another 9/11-like terrorist attack (a very callous and cruel editorial about the 3,000 who were so savagely killed and are no longer with us), and his studied avoidance of any notion of “victory” (as in, How quaint) in Afghanistan.
If these are accurate admissions, then we all better pray for salvation, because we won’t find it from the White House. The entire post-9/11 national-security doctrine was to be offensively minded, and to fight terror abroad rather than merely react to it serially at home. Afghanistan may be messy, confused, and non-traditional, but “victory” is no construct; it is a timeless military reality of making an enemy concede through force and diplomacy to your political objectives — in this case, a stable consensual government in Kabul, and the Taliban and its terrorist allies denied the use of Afghan soil to launch further attacks on Western interests. If Obama does not believe such a victory is possible, then he should not ask American youth to die in the next year as he finds a politically expedient method to back out of the theater.
When all this is collated with the arbitrary withdrawal dates, the McChrystal mess, the confusions and flip-flopping on everything from Guantanamo to the KSM trial, the plethora of regional czars at the expense of the secretary of state’s traditional portfolio, the weird remarks like “allegedly” after the Mutallab attempt, the deliberate distortions of the issues involved in the Ground Zero mosque, the Cairo speech myth-making, the initial al-Arabiya review, the silence after the Iranian protests last years, and much more — then we, our allies, and our enemies all get the impression that Obama is uninterested in national-security issues, resents the position that he is put in by a war against terror and operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and seems to think that at some abstract level past American culpability has provoked radical Islamists to lash out, requiring us to absorb rather than preempt their blows.
This trumps even Carterism and is a prescription for national suicide.
Barrack Obama has some scary, downright idiotic comments attributed to him.
I guess we should not be surprised.
Read on ....
Obama’s Non-Wars
September 22, 2010
By Victor Davis Hanson
I have not read Obama’s Wars. I am not a fan of Bob Woodward’s methodology of using almost exclusively unnamed sources, which, on one hand, encourages concerned players to be preemptive and get their one-sided stories out as “background” or face slander from others who beat them to the punch, and on the other hand, reports thoughts and unspoken impressions in the manner of a novelist.
That said, the initial reports from the book reveal two very disturbing presidential admissions that, if true, Robert Gibbs should quickly address: Obama’s purported toss-off that the U.S. could absorb another 9/11-like terrorist attack (a very callous and cruel editorial about the 3,000 who were so savagely killed and are no longer with us), and his studied avoidance of any notion of “victory” (as in, How quaint) in Afghanistan.
If these are accurate admissions, then we all better pray for salvation, because we won’t find it from the White House. The entire post-9/11 national-security doctrine was to be offensively minded, and to fight terror abroad rather than merely react to it serially at home. Afghanistan may be messy, confused, and non-traditional, but “victory” is no construct; it is a timeless military reality of making an enemy concede through force and diplomacy to your political objectives — in this case, a stable consensual government in Kabul, and the Taliban and its terrorist allies denied the use of Afghan soil to launch further attacks on Western interests. If Obama does not believe such a victory is possible, then he should not ask American youth to die in the next year as he finds a politically expedient method to back out of the theater.
When all this is collated with the arbitrary withdrawal dates, the McChrystal mess, the confusions and flip-flopping on everything from Guantanamo to the KSM trial, the plethora of regional czars at the expense of the secretary of state’s traditional portfolio, the weird remarks like “allegedly” after the Mutallab attempt, the deliberate distortions of the issues involved in the Ground Zero mosque, the Cairo speech myth-making, the initial al-Arabiya review, the silence after the Iranian protests last years, and much more — then we, our allies, and our enemies all get the impression that Obama is uninterested in national-security issues, resents the position that he is put in by a war against terror and operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and seems to think that at some abstract level past American culpability has provoked radical Islamists to lash out, requiring us to absorb rather than preempt their blows.
This trumps even Carterism and is a prescription for national suicide.
The Friedman Files - It Must Have Been the Authoritarianism !
Interesting read about Thomas Friedman and his fascination w/ Chinese authoritarianism ...
Friedman Today
September 22, 2010
By Jonah Goldberg
I’ll probably revisit this later — I’ve got some deadlines right now. But a bunch of readers have sent me this column today in which Tom Friedman seems to be addressing the complaints made by me and others about his long record of China-envy. He tries very hard to clear the record in his own behalf.
He writes:
For the U.S. visitor, the comparisons start from the moment one departs Beijing’s South Station, a giant space-age building, and boards the bullet train to Tianjin. It takes just 25 minutes to make the 75-mile trip. In Tianjin, one arrives at another ultramodern train station — where, unlike New York City’s Pennsylvania Station, all the escalators actually work. From there, you drive to the Tianjin Meijiang Convention Center, a building so gigantic and well appointed that if it were in Washington, D.C., it would be a tourist site. Your hosts inform you: “It was built in nine months.”I know, I know. With enough cheap currency, labor and capital — and authoritarianism — you can build anything in nine months. Still, it gets your attention. Some of my Chinese friends chide me for overidealizing China. I tell them: “Guilty as charged.” But have no illusions. I am not praising China because I want to emulate their system. I am praising it because I am worried about my system. In deliberately spotlighting China’s impressive growth engine, I am hoping to light a spark under America.Studying China’s ability to invest for the future doesn’t make me feel we have the wrong system. It makes me feel that we are abusing our right system. There is absolutely no reason our democracy should not be able to generate the kind of focus, legitimacy, unity and stick-to-it-iveness to do big things — democratically — that China does autocratically. We’ve done it before. But we’re not doing it now because too many of our poll-driven, toxically partisan, cable-TV-addicted, money-corrupted political class are more interested in what keeps them in power than what would again make America powerful, more interested in defeating each other than saving the country.
And a bit later:
The Chinese system is autocratic, rife with corruption and at odds with a knowledge economy, which requires liberty. Yet China also has regular rotations of power at the top and a strong record of promoting on merit, so the average senior official is quite competent. Listening to Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China tick off growth statistics in his speech here had the feel of a soulless corporate earnings report. Yet he has detailed plans for his people’s betterment, from universities to high-speed rail, and he’s delivering on them.
For starters, I do wish he’d stop referring to his own highly specific views of China as those of a generic “U.S. visitor.” I know he’s not alone in his views, but he doesn’t speak for everyone who has been there either.
Second, I love how even Friedman’s Chinese friends think he’s over idealizing China.
More importantly, saying he doesn’t want to live in an autocratic country like China, he just wants America to be able to do autocratic-type stuff democratically, isn’t as huge a distinction as I think he thinks it is. It still boils down to wanting everyone who disagrees with him to bend to his grand top-down schemes.
Oh, and about this grand Chinese meritocracy Friedman finds whenever he meets with Chinese functionaries. I have no doubt that the technocrats rise on their merits often enough. They also often get shot when they screw up or demand democracy. No doubt this sometimes contributes to efficiency (and even justice, as when corrupt bureaucrats allow children to be poisoned), but it’s not exactly a better system than our “toxically partisan” system. It’s a funny irony, toxic means poisonous, deadly. Our system is partisan, in the sense that we have peaceful democratic political parties that settle their differences without resort to violence. The Chinese system has no parties and, when push comes to shove, they settle their differences by killing people. So the toxicity of our system is purely figurative while the toxicity of the Chinese system is all too literal.
Look, China’s dictatorial rulers embraced markets reluctantly. First they killed tens of millions of their own people trying to make Communism work. They failed. So, in the late 1970s, they introduced market forces and things took off. People got richer, healthier, better educated. Tom Friedman looks at this transformation and says “It must have been the authoritarianism.” That says more about him than about China.
Friedman Today
September 22, 2010
By Jonah Goldberg
I’ll probably revisit this later — I’ve got some deadlines right now. But a bunch of readers have sent me this column today in which Tom Friedman seems to be addressing the complaints made by me and others about his long record of China-envy. He tries very hard to clear the record in his own behalf.
He writes:
For the U.S. visitor, the comparisons start from the moment one departs Beijing’s South Station, a giant space-age building, and boards the bullet train to Tianjin. It takes just 25 minutes to make the 75-mile trip. In Tianjin, one arrives at another ultramodern train station — where, unlike New York City’s Pennsylvania Station, all the escalators actually work. From there, you drive to the Tianjin Meijiang Convention Center, a building so gigantic and well appointed that if it were in Washington, D.C., it would be a tourist site. Your hosts inform you: “It was built in nine months.”I know, I know. With enough cheap currency, labor and capital — and authoritarianism — you can build anything in nine months. Still, it gets your attention. Some of my Chinese friends chide me for overidealizing China. I tell them: “Guilty as charged.” But have no illusions. I am not praising China because I want to emulate their system. I am praising it because I am worried about my system. In deliberately spotlighting China’s impressive growth engine, I am hoping to light a spark under America.Studying China’s ability to invest for the future doesn’t make me feel we have the wrong system. It makes me feel that we are abusing our right system. There is absolutely no reason our democracy should not be able to generate the kind of focus, legitimacy, unity and stick-to-it-iveness to do big things — democratically — that China does autocratically. We’ve done it before. But we’re not doing it now because too many of our poll-driven, toxically partisan, cable-TV-addicted, money-corrupted political class are more interested in what keeps them in power than what would again make America powerful, more interested in defeating each other than saving the country.
And a bit later:
The Chinese system is autocratic, rife with corruption and at odds with a knowledge economy, which requires liberty. Yet China also has regular rotations of power at the top and a strong record of promoting on merit, so the average senior official is quite competent. Listening to Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China tick off growth statistics in his speech here had the feel of a soulless corporate earnings report. Yet he has detailed plans for his people’s betterment, from universities to high-speed rail, and he’s delivering on them.
For starters, I do wish he’d stop referring to his own highly specific views of China as those of a generic “U.S. visitor.” I know he’s not alone in his views, but he doesn’t speak for everyone who has been there either.
Second, I love how even Friedman’s Chinese friends think he’s over idealizing China.
More importantly, saying he doesn’t want to live in an autocratic country like China, he just wants America to be able to do autocratic-type stuff democratically, isn’t as huge a distinction as I think he thinks it is. It still boils down to wanting everyone who disagrees with him to bend to his grand top-down schemes.
Oh, and about this grand Chinese meritocracy Friedman finds whenever he meets with Chinese functionaries. I have no doubt that the technocrats rise on their merits often enough. They also often get shot when they screw up or demand democracy. No doubt this sometimes contributes to efficiency (and even justice, as when corrupt bureaucrats allow children to be poisoned), but it’s not exactly a better system than our “toxically partisan” system. It’s a funny irony, toxic means poisonous, deadly. Our system is partisan, in the sense that we have peaceful democratic political parties that settle their differences without resort to violence. The Chinese system has no parties and, when push comes to shove, they settle their differences by killing people. So the toxicity of our system is purely figurative while the toxicity of the Chinese system is all too literal.
Look, China’s dictatorial rulers embraced markets reluctantly. First they killed tens of millions of their own people trying to make Communism work. They failed. So, in the late 1970s, they introduced market forces and things took off. People got richer, healthier, better educated. Tom Friedman looks at this transformation and says “It must have been the authoritarianism.” That says more about him than about China.
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