A gloomy dispatch from Michael Yon, in Afghanistan.
Category Archives: War Commentary
A Crack In The Regime?
There seems to be a civil war brewing among the Iranian clerics:
“This crack in the clerical establishment, and the fact they are siding with the people and Moussavi, in my view is the most historic crack in the 30 years of the Islamic republic,” said Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University. “Remember, they are going against an election verified and sanctified by Khamenei.”
The president will be very disappointed. He was so looking forward to discussing nuclear weapons with Ahmadinejad and demonstrating the power of his silver tongue. What will he do if he doesn’t have a comfortable, familiar dictator to prostrate himself before? These damned people, wanting their freedom. They’re so inconvenient.
Lionesses
An interesting story on American women soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Iran And Honduras
Is President Obama objectively pro-fascist?
Sure looks like it.
Also, thoughts from Ron Bailey on energy Leninism.
It’s a tragedy (though perhaps it’s a plan, going back to Thomas Dewey) that the voters understand neither history or economics.
[Mid-morning update]
Everything inside the state, nothing outside the state.
Selective Meddling
Some questions:
Now that the president has decided it’s okay to meddle in Honduras (where they are fighting to keep preserve their democracy against the Chávez-style thug who Obama wants to re-install) but not Iran (where thousands of Iranians who seek democracy are being killed, maimed and jailed by a regime which has been at war with the United States for 30 years), the president’s tack is to say that Honduras’s action in removing Zelaya is “not legal.”
What on earth makes Obama think he knows better about what is legal under the law of Honduras than the Supreme Court of Honduras and the law-writing legislature of Honduras? The Honduran military acted after Zelaya defied an order by that nation’s highest court which pronounced his coup attempt illegal; he has been replaced under a Honduran legal process by that nation’s Congress, which essentially impeached him and democratically voted in a successor. That sounds pretty legal to me. I am the first to admit I am not an expert in Honduran law, but I’d bet the Honduran Supreme Court has a better grasp on it than President Obama. On the issue of what is legal in Honduras, as between Hugo Chávez and the Honduran Supreme Court, our president has decided to go with Chávez.
Secondly, as IBD notes, the Obama administration is now “threatening to halt its $200 million in U.S. aid, immigration accords and a free-trade treaty if it doesn’t put the criminal Zelaya back into office.” Can someone explain to me how it is that Obama is willingly giving $900M to Hamastan (i.e., the jihadist-controlled Gaza strip) but would pull back a comparative pittance of aid in order to penalize a poor country in our own hemisphere for trying to preserve its democracy against a would-be left-wing dictator?
Also, as Charles Krauthammer said last night on Special Report:
…our decision ought to be: Yes, a coup isn’t a nice thing, but it’s preferable to having Zelaya dismantle the democracy. And we should insist on the elections of a president as scheduled in November, so it is a temporary situation.
Look, a rule of thumb here is whenever you find yourself on the side of Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega, and the Castro twins, you ought to reexamine your assumptions.
Hey, left-wing dictators have to stick together.
[Update early evening]
Zelaya’s operatives did their dirt all the way through. First they got signatures to launch the “citizen’s power” survey through threats — warning those who didn’t sign that they’d be denied medical care and worse. Zelaya then had the ballots flown to Tegucigalpa on Venezuelan planes. After his move was declared illegal by the Supreme Court, he tried to do it anyway.
As a result of his brazen disregard for the law, Zelaya found himself escorted from office by the military Sunday morning, and into exile. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro rushed to blame the U.S., calling it a “yanqui coup.”
President Obama on Monday called the action “not legal,” and claimed that Zelaya is still the legitimate president.
There was a coup all right, but it wasn’t committed by the U.S. or the Honduran court. It was committed by Zelaya himself. He brazenly defied the law, and Hondurans overwhelmingly supported his removal (a pro-Zelaya rally Monday drew a mere 200 acolytes).
Yet the U.S. administration stood with Chavez and Castro, calling Zelaya’s lawful removal “a coup.” Obama called the action a “terrible precedent,” and said Zelaya remains president.
In doing this, the U.S. condemned democrats who stood up to save their democracy, a move that should have been hailed as a historic turning of the tide against the false democracies of the region.
They only like democracy when it gives them the right (in this case “left”) result.
Optimism On Iran
From Amir Tehari.
All that Iranians want the U.S. to do is to be true to its own principles, not to kowtow to the Khomeinist regime, and not to help it restore its shattered legitimacy. We want Obama to condemn the shooting of demonstrators in Iranian streets and the rigging of the election, and to make it clear that he would not shake Ahmadinejad’s bloodstained hand. We want Obama not to organize a strategic retreat from the Middle East, which would create a vacuum that the Khomeinists would fill. We want him not to leave the region’s new and fragile democracies alone and defenseless against the Islamofascists.
We also want him not to flatter the Islamists by pretending that the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were bred in an Islamic theological college. Don’t claim that Islam invented the pen and the printing press along with poetry and architecture — as if the Hellenic, Byzantine, Persian, Indian, and Chinese civilizations could be scripted out of history. Today, the U.S. has a choice: It can side with the Iranian people and invest in a future democratic Iran, or it can beg for a dialogue with the Islamofacists gathered around Ali Khamenei.
And from here:
…one thing is now certain: The oxymoron “Islamic Republic” has been exposed as a sham.
The regime in Iran has become an Islamic emirate, or imamate if you prefer, like the one that existed in Yemen until 1961 and in Afghanistan under the Taliban until 2002.
In Iran we have reached a moment of clarity. And, believe me, that is priceless.
In my humble way I have fought for three decades to help bring about that clarity, to show my people, and the world at large, the true nature of the regime created by Khomeini, and I am happy.
To be sure, I hope to be even happier a year from now.
I hope so, too.
Israelis Have Figured It Out
Of course, they have a lot more on the line. The question is, when will the American Jews get the memo?
…the poll results from Israel have got to be worrying to the Obama team. Liberal Jews are a critically important fundraising group and voter bloc for Democrats. With the economy remaining very weak and Obama’s national approval ratings sagging, the 2010 midterm elections and the presidential race in 2012 could be more competitive than were the Democratic sweeps in 2006 and 2008.
Will some liberal Jews step back, uncomfortable with the perception that Obama is hostile to Israel? Has Obama crossed a threshold among Jewish voters, much as Jimmy Carter did in 1979-1980, leading to a greatly diminished level of Jewish support in his run for re-election (Carter won but 45% of the Jewish vote in 1980).
To counter this perception, the lapdogs of the Jewish left — in particular, J-Street (a group whose real mission seems to be to reduce the power and influence of AIPAC) and the NJDC — are furiously spinning how Obama is still fond of Israel and the right choice for peace (which presumably is just around the corner if only Israel caved on the settlements issue).
I’ve got spinners like that right here in my comments section, even though the notion is certifiably insane.
Barack Obama…
Whew! What happened? Well, that, no doubt, is what the Obama team must be wondering. It is not merely the president’s poll numbers which are crumbling; it is the premises which formed his world view and domestic agenda which are disintegrating. The world is a dangerous place with despots immune to even “smart diplomacy.” Governments really can’t spend their way to prosperity. And even in an economic recession America remains a right-of-center country.
Obama, it seems, never confronted a critical media or a viable political opponent who could effectively quiz him on his assumptions and policy prescriptions. He waltzed through an election on essentially a “not Bush” campaign and a cloud of feel-good messages ungrounded in the real world. But once in office he finds the world — filled with rogue states, recalcitrant laws of economics, squirrely citizens, and cold, hard budget numbers — is not so easily charmed. Facts are stubborn things, after all.
I always find hilarious the lack of irony with which these people presume to call themselves the “reality based community.”
The Bullet Fee
And the president thinks he should personally negotiate with this regime with no preconditions?
I wonder if the president thinks that Ronald Reagan shouldn’t have “meddled” in the Soviet Union?
Support Trader Joe’s
I haven’t been able to shop at Trader Joe’s since we left California, because for some reason they have never opened up any in Florida (I’m guessing it has something to do with state laws — perhaps the restriction on hard liquor sales in groceries?). Anyway, here’s one more reason that I wish I could:
Very sadly, the tactic employed against Israeli products in Europe has now made its way to our own country, taking root in our own backyard and focusing its attention upon a grocery retailer that many of us patronize, Trader Joe’s. Only the difference is that in the United States there is a significantly larger Jewish population than there is in Europe and we now find ourselves in a position to make an immediate and very positive impact on Israel’s behalf.
I hope that this anti-semitic (and yes, sorry, that’s what it is) boycott helps them more than hurts.