Thatcher-Reagan, Blair-Clinton, Brexit-Trump: Richard Cockett, Foreign Policy, July 5, 2016— Maybe it was just a coincidence, or maybe Donald Trump really does have a political sixth sense.
The Benghazi Debacle Should Have Ended Hillary Clinton’s Career: David French, National Review, June 28, 2016— Do failures and lies matter any longer?
The Latest Attempt to Rewrite the History of the Iraq War: Benny Avni, New York Post, July 6, 2016 If hindsight indeed is 20/20, how come no one ever examines foreign-policy actions not taken, while those like George W. Bush’s 2003 decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein are forever second-guessed?
Obama’s Money and Israel’s Sovereignty: Caroline Glick, Breaking Israel News, June 28, 2016— This week, MK Michael Oren stood up to his boss in the Kulanu party, Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon, to the political Left, including hundreds of retired security brass, and to the IDF General Staff.
FBI Rewrites Federal Law to Let Hillary Off the Hook: Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review, July 5, 2016
How Hillary and Obama Caused the Orlando ISIS Attack: Daniel Greenfield, Front Page Magazine, June 26, 2016
Obama Will be Neck-and Neck With G.W. Bush as the Most Incompetent U.S. President of our Time: Conrad Black, National Post, June 3, 2016
Obama’s Death Sentence for Young Refugees: Nicholas Kristof, New York Times, June 25, 2016
THATCHER-REAGAN, BLAIR-CLINTON, BREXIT-TRUMP
Richard Cockett
Foreign Policy, July 5, 2016
Maybe it was just a coincidence, or maybe Donald Trump really does have a political sixth sense. Either way, it was with exquisite timing that The Donald descended out of the skies onto the soil of his mother’s birthland just a couple of hours after the European Union referendum result, to claim the Brexit vote as his own. Standing in front of the clubhouse of his Turnberry golf course, the rotor blades of his helicopter still whirring, he declared the British people’s decision to leave the EU to be a “great thing.”
Fair enough. Trump is entitled to his opinion on the matter of British sovereignty. But he also made a more empirical claim about the Brexit result, namely that it represents a “great” victory for his politics — and here one is forced to concede that he is correct. British and American politics have tended to move in tandem since World War II, sometimes one country a bit ahead, sometimes the other. On this occasion, it is Britain that is a couple of steps in front.
Even a cursory glance at the polling data suggests that the people who voted to leave are indeed Trump’s kind of people. By considerable margins, leavers were usually poorer, less educated, less urban, and older than those who voted to remain. Moreover, according to polling by the Tory politician Lord Michael Ashcroft immediately after the vote, those who voted to leave were indeed trying, in Trump’s words, to “take their country back” — or, one might say, to make their country great again.
Nearly three-quarters of “Remainers” thought that life in Britain was better today than 30 years ago; but 58 percent of those who voted to leave said it was worse. How so? Well, the overwhelming majority of “Leavers” in the poll (80 percent) thought that social liberalism had been a “force for ill” in Britain, 74 percent thought the same of feminism, and 70 percent of globalization itself. In other words, they were flatly rejecting the whole liberal worldview of a globalized, open, multicultural trading nation that successive governments — both Labour and Tory — have cultivated over the past 40 years or so.
Europe had become a proxy for these discontents. But the lightning rod for all this resentment was immigration. Very specifically, it was the net migration figures that killed the Remain campaign. Last year over 300,000 more people came to Britain than left the country, yet Prime Minister David Cameron had foolishly promised that his government would bring this figure down to the “tens of thousands.” To the Leavers, there was no clearer example of the country’s inability to “take [its] borders back.”
Moreover, there was plenty of evidence from the campaign to suggest that arguing against more immigration did not necessarily lose the votes of immigrants and ethnic minorities. This is another axiom of Trump politics, advanced in America by Republicans such as Tom Cotton, the freshman congressman from Arkansas. In the referendum in Britain, about a quarter of blacks and ethnic minorities said they would vote to leave before the poll. Often — and I know this firsthand from campaigning on the streets for the Remain campaign — immigrants seemed keener to pull up the drawbridge behind them, to reduce the competition for jobs and public services, than to extend a hand of friendship to others fleeing poverty, or worse. Translated to America, this suggests that Trump Republicans might yet appeal to millions of Hispanics while demanding that Mexico build its wall and all illegals be deported.
The biggest reason why all this should matter to American observers is that historically, postwar America and Britain have moved in political lockstep, often with plenty of cross-fertilization between the two. The postwar Keynesian consensus of full employment and managed economies prevailed on both sides of the Atlantic until the late 1960s, when a reaction set in at exactly the same time, producing the victories for Richard Nixon in America in 1968 and the Tory Prime Minister Edward Heath in 1970. After brief left-of-center respites in the mid-1970s (Jimmy Carter in the United States and Jim Callaghan in Britain) both countries ratcheted to the right with the ideological soulmates Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. They were followed in the mid-1990s by “Third Way” social democratic reactions (Clinton and Blair).
Now the conventional wisdom that both Britain and America inherited from these eras of dramatic political change — a conventional wisdom in support of globalization, free trade, open markets, and multiculturalism — has been challenged again on both sides of the Atlantic, most dramatically by Trump in his campaign for the presidency, and more persuasively by Britain’s Brexit voters. Given the history of British and American politics moving in tandem, Trump is right to draw encouragement from the Brexit vote. For the same reason, Americans opposed to his politics should heed Brexit as a warning…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
THE BENGHAZI DEBACLE SHOULD HAVE ENDED
David French
National Review, June 28, 2016
Do failures and lies matter any longer? If you are a prominent Democratic politician, what exactly is the level of wrongdoing that will end your career? Reading the long-awaited report from the House Select Committee on Benghazi and the associated media coverage, I was struck by the sheer scale of the failures and the deceptions surrounding the terror attack on the Benghazi compound, and by the mainstream media’s dismissiveness.
Here’s the opening paragraph of the New York Times’s story on the report: Ending one of the longest, costliest and most bitterly partisan congressional investigations in history, the House Select Committee on Benghazi issued its final report on Tuesday, finding no new evidence of culpability or wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton in the 2012 attacks in Libya that left four Americans dead. And here’s the Washington Post on the report: A final report issued by the Republican majority that investigated the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, found fault with virtually every element of the executive branch response to the attacks but provided no new evidence of specific wrongdoing by then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
This is an extraordinary response to a report that comprehensively details one of the most shameful episodes in recent American diplomatic and military history. Clinton’s State Department failed to adequately protect its diplomats in Libya, with the Obama administration so intent on avoiding “boots on the ground” in the aftermath of its Libyan air war that it left Americans dangerously exposed even as the jihadist threat was plainly and clearly ramping up. The report details at least ten previous terror attacks in Benghazi, including two IED attacks on the American compound, yet the State Department had decreased its security there in the months before Ambassador Chris Stevens and four others were killed.
Obama’s Pentagon failed to mobilize assets to protect those same Americans even as they endured an hours-long assault on September 11, 2012. One of the most painful elements of the report is its description of exactly how difficult it was for the Pentagon to ramp up even the quick-strike elements of the most powerful military in the history of the world. Fighters were in one location, tankers in another. Ground assets were in one place, air transport in another. It took hours for clear commands from the White House and Pentagon to filter sufficiently far down the ranks to spur actual military activity.
Then, confronted with the damage afterward, the administration lied, repeatedly. Of that there can no longer be any reasonable doubt. The report lays out in excruciating detail the contrast between the administration’s private and public statements about the attack: The private statements consistently attributed the Benghazi attack to terrorists while the public statements either directly blamed an anti-Islamic YouTube video for causing the violence or conflated the Benghazi attack with a protest at the Egyptian embassy that did appear to be connected to the video.
While Clinton can’t be held responsible for the Pentagon’s failures, her own failures and deceptions can’t and shouldn’t be addressed by a mere apology. The Benghazi attack and the subsequent collapse of Libya into a jihadist playground should have ended her career. Instead, because of the well-worn (and media-assisted) process of progressive scandal management, she looks primed for a promotion to the highest office in the land.
The pattern is familiar: When news first breaks, say what needs to be said to escape the news cycle unscathed. Next, when the truth starts to emerge, deny wrongdoing and state that any comprehensive judgment should be withheld pending a full investigation. When the investigation commences, stonewall the investigators and accuse conservatives of being “obsessed” or on a “witch hunt.” By the time wrongdoing is finally confirmed beyond any reasonable doubt, the average voter will have forgotten why the scandal was a scandal to begin with, or, if he hasn’t forgotten — and actually did withhold judgment — the waters will have become so muddied he won’t know whom to believe.
To some in the media, the very act of stonewalling is heroic. Confronting congressional investigators makes you a “fighter.” Enduring inquiries and consolidating your base makes you a “survivor.” Bill Clinton used this playbook to escape political accountability for infidelity, perjury, and obstruction of justice. The Obama administration has used it to flush the IRS’s targeting of tea-party groups down the memory hole, transforming one of the most outrageous abuses of power in the modern history of the executive branch into old news in record time.
It should be acknowledged that in their efforts to outrun their misdeeds, Obama and the Clintons always get an inadvertent assist from the conspiracy-mongering right. Obsessed with finding smoking guns personally connecting their targets to wrongdoing, they help the media define scandal down. They swing for the fences, and journalists are all too happy to treat doubles and triples as signs of failure. Can’t find any records proving Obama and Clinton specifically ordered administration officials to lie about Benghazi? Well then, they must not have done anything wrong. Can’t uncover e-mails directly tying Obama to IRS abuses? The story moves to the back page, and then out of the media entirely.
So here we are. The presumptive Democratic nominee for president is largely responsible for one of the great foreign-policy disasters of the last eight years and unquestionably responsible for helping mislead the public, yet in the media calculus of our time the Benghazi report is a “win,” because it merely confirms failures we already knew about. And everyone knows that old failures are no failures at all.
THE LATEST ATTEMPT TO REWRITE THE
Benny Avni
New York Post, July 6, 2016
If hindsight indeed is 20/20, how come no one ever examines foreign-policy actions not taken, while those like George W. Bush’s 2003 decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein are forever second-guessed? Thanks to a British public commission, we’re once again relitigating Iraq. According to John Chilcot, the principal author of a new British inquiry into the war, it was waged on the basis of unchallenged, yet deeply flawed intelligence. There was no post-war planning, and diplomacy wasn’t exhausted in the lead up to military action that should have only been used as “a last resort.”
As he released the 6,000-page, 12-volume, 2.6 million-word report Wednesday, Chilcot said his inquiry didn’t attempt to assign legal culpability. Nevertheless, he said, legal justifications for the war were “far from satisfactory.” That will no doubt be used as ammunition by those who’ve long called for trying the British prime minister at the time, Tony Blair, on war-crimes charges. And can Bush be far behind?
Politically, the Chilcot report will embolden those, like Bernie Sanders, who say Iraq was “the worst foreign-policy blunder in the history of the country.” Or Donald Trump, who just added Saddam to the list of his favorite foreign dictators. “Saddam Hussein was a bad guy, right?” Trump told a crowd in North Carolina Tuesday. “But you know what he did well? He killed terrorists. He did that so good.” OK, leave it to Trump to ignore Saddam’s well-documented support of terrorists in the Mideast. Yet he’s reiterating a received wisdom: Saddam’s Iraq had “nothing to do with 9/11” and by overthrowing him America and our allies have opened Pandora’s box, which bred the current Mideast mess and gave birth to ISIS.
True: Dismantling state organs after the overthrow of Saddam — known as de-Baathification — was a terrible mistake that deepened sectarian hatreds. It was based on a faulty, idealistic notion that once Saddam was gone, freedom would replace his despotic rule. But remember when the decision to invade Iraq took place: two years after 9/11, the deadliest terrorist attack in American history, which didn’t at the time look like a one-off. Anthrax envelopes, a shooting spree and the fear of a follow-up attack put America on war footing.
Afghanistan was first, but it wasn’t enough. While al Qaeda was headquartered in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, its principals were Arabs and they were a product of the Arab world’s ills. As in Saddam’s Iraq — where chemical weapons were used to put down resurrections; where sectarian enmities that bubbled under the surface were only capped by a ruthless, corrupt and megalomaniacal tyrant; where destructive weapons, including nukes, were in development in the past, were widely believed to still exist, and could easily fall into the hands of terrorists.
But Chilcot’s also wrong about a very big part of the report’s conclusion. Diplomacy with Iraq did, in fact, reach a dead end. At the United Nations, Russia and France were about to dismantle the sanctions regime that kept Saddam from resurrecting his chemical, biological and nuclear programs. And while Bush made terrible mistakes after toppling Saddam, he eventually managed to turn the tide. Between 2007 and 2009, al Qaeda in Iraq was defeated, the Sunnis cooperated with Baghdad and Iraq was mostly peaceful.
President Obama’s decision, in 2010, to back Nouri al-Maliki — even though he’d lost an election — and, more generally, America’s vow to withdraw forces from Iraq threw Iraq back into chaos. On Wednesday, Blair insisted that “Iraq in 2003 had no chance; Iraq today has a chance.” Well, maybe — though it’s hard to see it now. But clearly his and Bush’s decision to overthrow Saddam wasn’t the only reason for the current bloody state of the Middle East or for Sunni-Shiite enmity or the rise of Islamist terrorism. History is much trickier than that.
George H.W. Bush’s decision not to overthrow Saddam after the first Iraq war in 1991 was just as momentous. Bill Clinton’s decision to largely ignore the 1996 attack on Americans housed in Saudi Arabia’s Khobar Towers signaled to Islamist terrorists that they could strike Western powers and get away with it. Obama’s avoidance of any serious military intervention in Mideast disputes prolongs war, mayhem and terrorism. There’s a lot to criticize about how Bush and Blair led their respective governments — and the world — in the last decade. Their actions are endlessly dissected and investigated. But lack of leadership and inaction, while much harder to write lengthy reports about, can be just as bad, if not worse. Because, errors and all, an America-led world is a better place than one led by Russia, China and ISIS.
OBAMA’S MONEY AND ISRAEL’S SOVEREIGNTY
Caroline Glick
Breaking Israel News, June 28, 2016
This week, MK Michael Oren stood up to his boss in the Kulanu party, Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon, to the political Left, including hundreds of retired security brass, and to the IDF General Staff. The former ambassador to Washington urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to sign the multi-year security assistance deal that US President Barack Obama demands Israel accept. The problem isn’t the money. By all accounts, Obama’s multi-year military assistance package is generous. The problem is that in exchange for the expanded military aid, Obama is demanding that Israel surrender its diplomatic and military independence to the White House.
For more than 40 years, every US administration – including the Obama administration – that has sought to harm Israel in any way has hit up against an unmovable obstacle. Whether the White House wanted to enable the UN Security Council to pass an anti-Israel resolution, place an embargo on military exports or bureaucratically slow them down to force Israel to stand down during wartime; whether the White House wanted block expanded trade deals, crowd out Israel’s military industries, or sell game changing weapons systems to Israel’s enemies, the US Congress has always stopped it in its tracks.
Israel-haters in the US speak endlessly about the supposedly all powerful and malign “Israel lobby,” which controls US foreign affairs. But the simple truth is that it wouldn’t matter all that much if AIPAC were to shut down tomorrow. Even without AIPAC, Israel would enjoy the support of Congress. It would continue to enjoy that support because the vast majority of Americans support Israel and expect their representatives in Congress to support Israel. In other words, the “Israel lobby” is none other than the American people.
As Oren warned, Obama’s military assistance package would disenfranchise the American public when it comes to US policy toward Israel. The agreement bars Israel from asking that Congress augment the assistance that Obama has offered and bars Congress from acting. So if a future administration chooses to breach the agreement, or to suspend it, or if conditions change and Israel requires other assistance, Congress would be barred from stepping into the breach.
Then there is the assistance agreement’s assault on Israel’s military independence. Israel’s military industries are the primary guarantor of its independent capacity to fight and win wars. Successive administrations have sought to restrict the activities of Israel’s military industries and have used the military assistance to achieve their goal.
Israeli critics of US assistance note that Israel’s military industries are the primary casualties of the aid. Currently, the US allows Israel to use a mere 25 percent of its assistance at home. As a consequence, the main beneficiary of US military assistance to Israel are US defense contractors. Critics of the US aid argue that if Israel stops receiving military assistance, far from harming the economy, the move would strengthen Israeli industry and expand economic growth. The thousands of jobs at US defense contractors that are created through US military assistance to Israel, will move to Israel, and go to Israelis.
Moreover, whereas Israel gives the US its technology for free as part of the security assistance package, if it stops accepting the assistance, it will be free to sell its technology to other partners such as India, which will eagerly partner with Israel in weapons development and production projects. Strategically, canceling the US military aid package would massively expand Israel’s military independence of action.
On the other hand, the deal that Obama is now trying to coerce Netanyahu to sign will require Jerusalem to give up the 25 percent of the military assistance it is now allowed to spend at home. Oren noted that such a concession will cost thousands of Israelis their jobs.
But even worse, an Israeli agreement to spend all future US military assistance in the US would be tantamount to an Israeli agreement to concede its military independence to the White House for a fistful of dollars. Without the independent capacity to develop and produce defense systems, spare parts and munitions, Israel will be unable to take military action without White House approval…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
FBI Rewrites Federal Law to Let Hillary Off the Hook: Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review, July 5, 2016—There is no way of getting around this: According to Director James Comey (disclosure: a former colleague and longtime friend of mine), Hillary Clinton checked every box required for a felony violation of Section 793(f) of the federal penal code (Title 18): With lawful access to highly classified information she acted with gross negligence in removing and causing it to be removed it from its proper place of custody, and she transmitted it and caused it to be transmitted to others not authorized to have it, in patent violation of her trust.
How Hillary and Obama Caused the Orlando ISIS Attack: Daniel Greenfield, Front Page Magazine, June 26, 2016—The media has desperately tried to blame anything and everything for the Orlando Muslim massacre. The bloodshed by a Muslim terrorist has been attributed to guns, homophobia, family problems and mental illness. By next week, the media may be blaming global warming and UFOs.
Obama Will be Neck-and Neck With G.W. Bush as the Most Incompetent U.S. President of our Time: Conrad Black, National Post, June 3, 2016 —Gary Mason wrote in the Globe and Mail on May 27 a column presumably entitled by his editors “Obama’s Imperfections Already Fading.” The contents of his piece justify the title, and my subject here is that column, not Mason himself.
Obama’s Death Sentence for Young Refugees: Nicholas Kristof, New York Times, June 25, 2016—Cristóbal, a 16-year-old Honduran refugee fleeing a drug gang that wants to kill him, has never heard of anyone named Barack Obama. Neither can he name the Mexican president, Enrique Peña Nieto.
