Iraq: good news means no news

Iraq has now taken another huge step toward stable democratic rule and no one seems to have noticed. While headlines this week followed Obama's every utterance and his cabinet's growing tax evasion problems, a story of historic proportions was unfolding in a nation that has dominated American politics for the past five years. Some 140,000 U.S. troops are deployed in Iraq, and over 4500 Americans have paid the ultimate price to create the conditions in which national elections could be held and a democratic government could peacefully take power. Just such an election occurred in Iraq this past week.

And it hardly made the news.

What a difference a year or two makes. Throughout 2007 and 2008, the debate that raged in Washington and among the pundits in the press was to whether Iraq was a "lost cause". Though evidence of the success of the "surge" being implemented by David Patreaus was clear to those who chose to see it, the media was having none of it. During the early days of the 2008 primary season, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both gave endless stump speeches decrying the war and the need to "bring the troops home now". Obama was convinced that the surge would fail, and continued to tout his "wisdom" in being the only candidate in both parties to be "against the war from the beginning". Even in the face of evidence that the surge was working, with U.S. combat deaths declining precipitously and security (and commerce) returning to areas of Iraq that were once uninhabitable, Obama never budged: Iraq was a failure, a mistake in judgment and the surge "too little, too late".

I'm sure the Iraqis who voted this past week would beg to differ. As Frederick and Kimberly Kagan wrote today in the Wall Street Journal, the Iraqi election not only reaffirmed democracy itself, but showed that voters are increasingly choosing secular candidates over religious ideologues:

Iraqi voters chose nationalist, secularist parties over religious parties by a wide margin. In the mostly Shiite south, candidates associated with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Dawa Party appear to have gained significantly. This outcome is noteworthy because Dawa came to power in the 2005 elections with virtually no grass-roots support or organization. Few would have predicted Mr. Maliki's electoral success even a year ago.

In addition, the Kagans note that the influence of Moqtada al-Sadr has continued to wane. The former scourge of U.S. forces that lead the insurrection in 2006 following the bombing of the Samarra Mosque in Baghdad -- the spark that lit the sectarian tensions that threatened to subsume Iraq into Civil War. al-Sadr and his Mahdi militia ran roughshod over Iraq until the forces of the Bush/Patreaus surge prompted Sadr to disarm.

Moqtada al-Sadr, by contrast, relied on grass-roots support for his movement and seemed poised to dominate elections in the south a year ago. But he lost much of his popular support when Iraqi Security Forces defeated his militias in Basra, Baghdad and Maysan in June 2008. The door was open for the well-organized Iraqi Supreme Islamic Council (ISCI), the clerically dominated party that had controlled many important provincial governorships and councils in the south. Yet Iraqis voted instead for Mr. Maliki's coalition or for the secular Shiite coalition of former prime minister Iyad Allawi.

The Iraqi elections thus seem to have ushered in a new era of secular democracy, and provide the latest proof that the Iraq which George Bush has bequethed to the Obama Administration is well on its way to becoming a stable, functioning democracy in the heart of the Middle East. More importantly, these latest election results are a further blow to the efforts of Iran to destabilize that Maliki government in favor of an Islamic state:

The big loser in this election was Iran. Iranian agents spent a lot of money trying to influence the outcome of the elections in the south, and they largely failed. Iran's favored parties did poorly. The Iranians had hoped to persuade Iraqi voters to punish Mr. Maliki for signing the security agreement with the United States. Instead, these elections proved to be a powerful vote of confidence for the prime minister and his policies, including that agreement.

All of which puts Barack Obama in a great position to advance American interests in the region -- should he choose not to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.  The continued presence of American troops -- as honest brokers in the on-going negotiations between factions and as a bulwark against the return of Al Qaeda -- is essential to cementing this fragile democracy into a steady and reliable member of the international community.

The presence of a stable Iraq with a democratically elected government is a gift to the world from George W. Bush. Pray now that Barack Obama doesn't follow the self-loathing instincts of those in the media and within his party who wish to isolate us from the world, and abandon this important and noble effort before it is finished.

Israel's grim situation

Today the existence of Israel is in greater peril than at any time since its founding hour when the fledging state was invaded by every one of its Arab neighbors. Only an understanding of this mortal threat to the Jewish state allows comprehension of the high stakes involved in Israel’s determined assault on Hamas in Gaza. First, consider that Israel is the same size as Massachusetts; its population is little greater than Colorado. Israel’s enemies have fifty times the territory, and twenty-five times the population. While lately only the President of Iran has publicly endorsed the goal of wiping Israel off the map, anyone familiar with the underlying mindset of Israel’s Muslim neighbors knows they all would welcome such an event.

Israel has been sustained through sixty years, three invasions, and the unremitting hostility of its neighbors only by its decisive military superiority and the support of the Western democracies.

Today with the exception of the United States support for Israel in the Western democracies has collapsed. Elite (i.e. leftist) European opinion tends to be pro-Palestinian, and borderline anti-Semitic. Most assuredly no European country would aid Israel militarily in the event of war. This general antipathy to Israel was well illustrated by the French ambassador to Great Britain who in an unguarded moment referred to the Jewish state as a “sh---- little country”.

On November 29, 1947, the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into separate homelands for the Arabs and Jews thus setting the stage for the birth of Israel six months later. It is at once ironic and tragic that if the United Nations took such a vote today Israel would have no chance whatsoever.

Most ominous of all, however, is Israel’s steadily declining military edge over its enemies.

The Hamas rockets that have terrorized the population of southern Israel are harbingers of more horrific things to come. It is only a matter of time and political calculation before Iran provides its proxies in Gaza (Hamas) and Lebanon (Hezbollah) with the more sophisticated rockets that can reach all of Israel’s major population centers.

Israel is painfully aware of where events are leading, and in no doubt as to the implications of Iran’s not too distant acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Israel’s sense of looming apocalypse is confirmed by their recently revealed request to the U.S. to overfly Iraqi airspace for the purpose of conducting air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities. A politically weakened Bush administration predictably refused this request thereby denying Israel the chance to replicate their years ago success in pre-emptively destroying Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons project.

Israel’s own government is arguably the weakest in its history. Not since the untimely death of Ariel Sharon has Israel had either a strong leader or a truly effective majority in the multi-party Knesset. The current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert who leaves office in just a few weeks under a cloud of scandal and threatened prosecution authorized an earlier woefully mismanaged military incursion into Lebanon and the withdrawal from Gaza- now seen clearly as the strategic blunder which led to the present conflict.

For so long has America’s image of Israel been of outstanding leaders- David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir- and invincible soldiers- Moshe Dyan, Ariel Sharon- that today it is nearly impossible for us to grasp either the enfeebled condition of its democracy, or its vulnerability to military catastrophe.

President Bush steadfastly supported Israel and refused to buy into the pernicious doctrine of “moral equivalence” between Jews and Palestinians. Yet in Europe tens of thousands of demonstrators thronged the streets of London, Paris, and Berlin denouncing Israel as the equivalent of Nazi Germany. In New York similar rhetoric rings out in the United Nations.

To understand the desperate determination of Israel to stop rockets raining down on its citizenry we must see the plight of a small country denounced as a savage aggressor by most of “World Opinion”, its diplomatic isolation nearly complete, and its military advantages rapidly disappearing against an enemy whose goal is not peace but annihilation.

In 1945 as the victorious Allied armies drew back the curtain on the horrors of the Holocaust, the world’s revulsion and guilt- “If only we had known …… in time”- led to the creation of Israel.

Today we should recall the philosopher Santayana who warned that “those who do not heed the past are doomed to repeat it”.

William Moloney’s columns have appeared in the Wall St. Journal, USA today, Washington Post, Washington Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Baltimore Sun, Denver Post, Rocky Mountain News.

Obama's first 48: Do you feel safer yet?

Barack Obama has been president for all of 48 hours, and I already feel less safe. In one of his first official acts as president, Obama ordered the detention facility at Guantanamo closed "within a year", and officially outlawed any "enhanced interrogation" techniques that fall outside of the U.S. Army Field Manual. In a signing ceremony attended by all the usual liberal suspects, the new president said that we would confront global violence without sacrificing "our values or our ideals".  After years of criticizing the Bush Administration, Obama and the Democrats will now have a chance to do it "their way". Democrats, of course, have always put a premium on high minded ideals -- preferring things to look good, sound good and feel good -- even if they don't work well (or at all) in practice.   The notion of fighting a war against a brutal enemy -- that decapitates its prisoners and seeks to wipe us from the face of the earth -- with the high ideals of our democratic laws and rules is both naive and dangerous. It reflects the fact that most on the left have never seen the fight against Islamic extremism as a real war, but rather as a difficult issue that can be dealt with through diplomacy, so-called "soft power" and conventional law enforcement techniques. In this upside down view of the world, Miranda rights, Habeus corpus and all other protections for terrorist detainees makes perfect sense.

The immediate result of closing Guantanamo is that it will now fall on the U.S. justice system to figure out what to do with the 250 detainees that remain there. For many on the left, this presents something of an academic question; there is a common narrative among opponents of Guantanamo that those imprisoned there are mostly innocent sheep herders and others caught up in the net of American power, and thus unjustly held without trial. Nothing could be further than the truth: the majority of prisoners at Guantanamo are hardened killers who if released will take up terrorism against us again, and present a real and pressing threat to the United States.

Obama's move to close Guantanamo comes as no surprise, of course, having been a central theme of his campaign. In fact, Obama has been on record as favoring a conventional legal remedy for terrorists ever since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year in Boumediene v Bush that Guantanamo terrorists should be granted access to the U.S. courts:

“I mean, you remember during the Nuremberg trials, part of what made us different was even after these Nazis had performed atrocities that no one had ever seen before, we still gave them a day in court and that taught the entire world about who we are but also the basic principles of rule of law. Now the Supreme Court upheld that principle yesterday”.

Now, as president, Obama is acting to put his view of "terrorist rights" into effect.  In ruling that interrogation techniques be limited to the U.S. Army Field Manual, which limits questioning to "please" and "thank you" kind of questions, Obama has effectively tied the hands of CIA and other interrogators who seek vital intelligence about Al Qaeda and other terrorists in the field. Unlike the salons of Paris, London or now Washington, D.C., the CIA and U.S. military operate in the real world, where innocent lives may depend on extracting information from evil doers intent on destroying us.

But that apparently doesn't matter to Obama, who with a swipe of his pen, has decided that he and the other liberals now in charge of our national security apparatus know more about security than does the current head of the CIA, General Michael Hayden, who has testified repeatedly in front of Congress that enhanced interrogation techniques are critically important to our security. Rather than study the issue from the inside and take some time to make the right decision on this important issue, Obama has placed politics over public safety in unilaterally disarming our intelligence officials as a grand act of political theater.

The left believes that some quid pro quo will exist between us and our enemies; that somehow us living up to our ideals will make a difference with those who seek our destruction and are willing to go to any lengths to ensure it. It is hard to believe that smart people can be so naive as to the real nature of the threats arrayed against us.

I've said many times that the left lives in a fantasy world of their own making, and this is further proof that with the Democrats in charge we will be in greater danger because of it.

We are all Israelis now

For those now condemning Israel's decision to confront and destroy Hamas, I suggest reading Ron Rosenbaum.  Rosenbaum, who wrote the book "Explaining Hitler", has written a compelling piece entitled Some differences between Hamas and the Nazi Party.   Rosenbaum doesn't mince words -- arguing in effect that Hamas represents a bigger threat to Jews than even the Nazis did: The Hamas founding covenant explicitly calls for the extermination of all Jews. Hitler never made total extermination an official plank of the the Nazi party platform. (see Holocaust scholar Omar Bartov’s article in the February 2, 2004 issue of The New Republic. 7th article of the founding Hamas covenanat which cites the Hadith (saying of the prophet). Here is a translation of the Hadith ina deeply disturbing summary of Hamas’ exterminationist anti-semitismby the Brown University scholar Andrew Bostom:

“The Prophet, Allah’s prayer and peace be upon him, says: “The hour of judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, so that the Jews hide behind trees and stones, and each tree and stone will say: ‘Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him,’ except for the Gharqad tree, for it is the tree of the Jews.” (Sahih Muslim, Book 41, Number 6985). 

In other words, Hamas is not committed merely to the political goal of expelling Jews from the land of Israel but to what they believe is a sacred religious goal of exterminating all Jews everywhere behind every tree in creation. (I’m not pinning any hopes on “the Gharqad tree”). I’d suggest those who deceive themselves into believing Hamas is just another Palestinian rights group, maybe a little on the extreme side, read the whole Bostom article. The exterminationist anti-semitism of Hamas is more excessive than Hitler’s.

Many might take issue with Rosenbaum's position by noting that Hitler actually killed millions of Jews at the head of a mighty industrial Nazi machine, and that Hamas has done comparatively little to carry out its genocidal ambitions.  But in this day of WMD and nuclear technology, it is important to give a disproportionate weight to intent: one suicide bomber with sarin gas or a nuclear bomb, and Article 7 of the Hamas covenant could be realized in an instant.

Nonetheless, Israel has (again) come under terrible fire from the left for it's "disproportionate response" to Hamas and the "poor people of Gaza" -- citing the fact that many Palestinian civilians have been killed and wounded. Of course, it is Hamas' strategy to put women and children in the path of the Israeli attack, so that civilians will be killed. Hamas knows that on the left, nothing Israel ever does in right, and that media pictures of civilian destruction is certain to bring condemnation from the UN, the EU and the other Palestinian apologists. Its so predictable -- and to Israel's credit, they have not been intimidated by it.

Nor should they be. Let's put this into perspective: suppose Al Qaeda -- a group with a sworn objective to destroy the United States and kill every last infidel in the West -- had developed a settlement over the U.S.-Mexico border and was lobbing missiles into San Diego on a daily basis, terrorizing the civilian population and killing and wounding American citizens.

Is there any chance in a million years that the United States would not wipe those settlements off the face of the earth to protect American lives?

Of course not. But because the much of the world wallows in anti-semitism and has fallen in love with the "Palestinian cause" there is a double standard at work. When Israel acts to defend itself, the world protests. No other nation would live under such a threat. But that doesn't matter -- because Israel never gets the benefit of the doubt.

In the end, we should be grateful that Israel has the courage to do what needs to be done. If they are successful here, they will destroy Hamas and free the Palestinian people to pursue statehood under a peaceful two-state system. That's the only future for the Palestinian people that makes sense. Israel is doing them a favor.

Let's hope that Israel is successful, and that this is but a precursor to them taking on (and taking out) the real 800 pound gorilla in the region: a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. This is a threat that Europe and a post-Iraq America have failed to face up to. Israel can't afford to be so cavalier.

We are all Israelis now.

Glass way more than half full

This Thanksgiving season, no one has more reason to be grateful than us. Though the media, politicians, Hollywood and a growing number of cap-in-hand special interest groups would like you to believe otherwise, Americans enjoy an unrivaled degree of prosperity. Even the 12.5 percent of Americans identified by the census bureau as poor are well off by world standards. Forty-three percent of all poor families own their own homes. The average poor American enjoys more living space than the average Londoner or Parisian. Three quarters of poor families own a car. Ninety-seven percent have a color television (more than half of the families have two or more televisions). A majority have cable TV, a VCR or DVD player, a microwave oven, and air conditioning.

These government statistics, compiled by the Heritage Foundation, paint a different picture of the downtrodden than does the nightly news, but the facts do not tell the whole story. Without a comparison of how other people live around the world, Americans have no real sense of just how grateful they should be.

Unfortunately, Americans don’t get out much. Roughly a quarter of US citizens hold passports. I’m probably safe in assuming that more of my countrymen watch American Idol than BBC World News. American myopia creates a skewed perception of reality. America’s poor families have homes, cars and televisions. The poor in most of the world have little or nothing. Completely destitute in America means finding a shelter where you can have a warm bed, a meal and the help you need to get back on your feet. In Haiti, the poor are baking dirt into cookies to fill their stomachs.

In America, if you lose your job there are “help wanted” signs up and down the street. The jobs may not be optimal but they’ll do until something better comes along. I’ve certainly done my time behind a register and sweeping a broom and I’ll do it again if I have to.

No such option exists for people in Zimbabwe where the unemployment level is 80 percent. There are no jobs. Government corruption and control of the market have reduced this once prosperous nation to abject ruin. Zimbabwe is far from the only country to strangle its economy with government regulation. The world average for unemployment is 30 percent. In the U.S. it is less than 5 percent.

America’s clean air and water may look dirty if you don’t know better. In Cairo, every breath I took was like sucking off a tail pipe. I found myself smoking Egyptian cigarettes just to get the taste of the air out of my mouth. Cairo took 2nd place in the Progressive Policy Institute’s Smokiest Cities contest with 159 micrograms of particulate matter per cubic meter of air. By comparison, Los Angeles, America’s most polluted city has 36 micrograms of particulate matter.

Breathing in the Egyptian capital was tough but drinking the tap water was out of the question. I drank bottled water and ate oranges, a fruit hermitically sealed by its own peal. Cairo was a great place to visit and I’ll go again, once my lungs have healed.

Should I need any medical help along the way, I’ll get it here, thank you. Americans have access to the best health care in the world. In developing countries, people die for want of penicillin or routine vaccinations. In socialized European nations and our neighbor to the north, citizens can get decent care if they have the time to wait for it.

According to the Frasier Institute, a Canadian think tank, Canadians wait on average nine weeks between getting a referral from a general practitioner and actually seeing the specialist. They then wait another nine weeks to get treatment. A cancer radiation referral takes five weeks, orthopedic surgery nine months.

My point here isn’t to browbeat readers into gratitude but to give a needed perspective. Ignorance is not bliss. An ungrateful heart is an unhappy one. It leaves people vulnerable to being misled by honey-tongued politicians promising to make them richer, healthier, and happier. In the places where the government tries to give people these things, it inevitably makes them poorer, sicker and less free to seek their own happiness.

This Thursday I gave thanks to God for the many blessings in my life including my beloved country. I joined with those who, in the words of George Washington’s Thanksgiving Proclamation, “unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection...for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty which we have since enjoyed; for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enable to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed...”

Krista Kafer is a Denver-based education consultant, frequent cohost on Backbone Radio, and regular columnist for Face the State.com, from which this is reprinted by permission.