Iran Attacks Israel Using Palestinian Proxies

By Alan Caruba

If you think that the attack by Palestinians on Israelis along Egypt’s Sinai border is just another in the long history of attacks from Gaza, you’re not paying attention.

The new round of rocket attacks were planned and orchestrated out of Tehran, Iran using missiles smuggled into Gaza through a Sinai that is barely under the control of the Egyptians.

The Arab Spring is being manipulated by the Iranian ayatollahs whose goal of destroying Israel has been central to their actions since 1979. They have created proxy armies, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, but there are reports that even Hamas was taken by surprise when the Iranian controlled group, Jihad Islami, perpetrated the attacks.

Palestinians have been famous for seizing defeat whenever even the possibility of peace could be achieved or statehood gained. Middle East analysts now believe that statehood is irrelevant to the Iranians for whom the Palestinians have always been their pawns. This has been true as well of the region’s Arab nations.

The Palestinians have a history of greeting Israeli efforts for peace with renewed violence. A perfect example is Gaza, a strip of land from which Israel withdrew in 2005, forcing out Jewish residents, along with those in four settlements in the northern West Bank. In return, Gaza became a launching area for 12,000 rockets directed at Israel and, after three years of extraordinary restraint, Israel responded in late December 2008 with Operation Cast Lead, a military action, to discourage further attacks. They began again last week.

As always, Israel is denounced as the aggressor, the perpetrator of violence against the Palestinians who initiated the attack. Moreover, the Palestinians are divided among themselves. In order to seize control of Gaza, Hamas forced representatives of the Palestinian Authority to retreat to Rahmallah in the West Bank.

The victims of the latest attack included an Israeli commuter bus, civilian cars, and soldiers on patrol; eight Israelis died. The Israelis retaliated, dealing out punishment against the terrorists who planned the attack and were engaged in rocketing. Caught in the fog of battle, several Egyptian soldiers were killed.

There are reports from inside Gaza that the Palestinian Authority has been talking about the need to escalate “popular protests” against Israel and, while Mahmoud Abbas, the PA leader, has said he is opposed to armed struggle, he has also “repeatedly voiced his full support for a ‘popular intifada’ in the West Bank.”

For Americans and other westerners, it is necessary to understand that when the PA and other Palestinian spokespersons say one thing, it usually means the opposite. Palestinians and those who must deal with them do not trust one another and it is pure folly for others to do so. The role of Iran only adds a new layer of deceit.

The UN has never objected to China’s occupation of Tibet, but tiny Israel has been under constant attack by the UN as the “occupier” of lands secured in the wake of the 1967 war that was initiated as Egypt made plans to attack. Joined by Jordan and Syria, both nations lost territory that included, for Jordan, the so-called West Bank. It is composed of ancient Israel's provinces of Judea and Samaria.

To achieve peace with Egypt, Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula. Until the recent overthrow of the Mubarack regime there was peace. Now the Egyptian military has aligned itself with the Muslim Brotherhood and, thus, the prospect for war has escalated.

The bid for Palestinian statehood, as one longtime observer puts it, “is being sold as a test of legitimacy.” What legitimacy can it have when Palestinians have ceaselessly attacked Israel before and since Yasser Arafat formed the Palestinian Liberation Authority? What legitimacy can it have when Hamas and Lebanon's Hezbollah are sworn to the destruction of Israel?

Put simply, there never was a nation of Palestine. The areas claimed and fought over by the PA and Hamas barely function as a nation. They were Israel's. They are Israel's.

The so-called Palestinians are the oldest “refugee” group in modern history. They have been sustained by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for over six decades. It is the same UN that has organized and held several hate fests against Jews, dubbed Durban conferences. Among the speakers at the next one to be held September 22 will be Holocaust denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran.

The Middle East has been in turmoil since the Tunisians overthrew their longtime dictator, followed by the Egyptian removal of Mubarack, the current effort to remove Libya’s Gadhafi, and the Syrian people’s efforts to drive out Basher Assad. The Iranians have sought to turn all these events to their own advantage and agenda.

In sum, an entire region in transition and its people seek real freedom and real justice. They won’t have it if the Iranians continue to manipulate events, the latest of which has been to provoke a war with Israel.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Ignoring Iran to Our Peril

By Alan Caruba

On Saturday, July 23, Daryush Rezaee-Nejad, an Iranian scientist involved with its nuclear program was assassinated in front of his home in Tehran. Two motorcyclists shot him in the head and throat. Being a nuclear scientist has become a very bad career choice in Iran.

According to Debka, an Israeli news agency that appears to have lines of communication into its intelligence community, “This was another in the series in the past year of mysterious attacks of top-flight scientists attached to the Iranian nuclear program.” What better way to slow down that program than (a) infect it with a computer virus called Stuxnet and (b) systematically kill the scientists involved with the development of a nuclear weapon?

It is not hard to say who may be involved in such an effort. The obvious parties would be the U.S. and Israel. Ali Larijani, Iran’s parliamentary speaker, was infuriated by the latest killing, calling it an “American-Zionist terrorist act” the demonstrated “the degree of American animosity.”

Earlier assassination attempts included Dr. Majid Shariani who was killed, but the attempt on Prof. Fereydoon Abbassi failed. He was appointed Vice President for Nuclear Affairs and Chairman of the Atomic Energy Organization. In a possible related effort, three Russian scientists known to be assisting Iran’s nuclear program died in an airplane crash.

For the record, American administrations going back to Jimmy Carter’s have no reason to feel anything other than animosity toward Iran, beginning with its breaking every diplomatic rule in the book by taking U.S. diplomats hostage in 1979 and holding them for 444 days.

The Iranians have been attacking U.S. military forces, starting with Marines stationed in Beirut as peacekeepers in 1983 right up through the conflict in Iraq, providing arms and aid to insurgents. By any standards you might apply, Iran has been at war with America for just over three decades.

In their push to acquire nuclear weapons parity, the Iranians have been relentless. In his book, “The Rise of Nuclear Iran: How Tehran Defies the West”, Dore Gold related the history of Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons. Gold is the president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and has held positions in Israel’s diplomatic corps.

Noting that Iran is an Islamic theocracy that so idealizes the cult of martyrdom it was the first to “systematically employ suicide bombing attacks in the present era”, Gold warned that it “could very well be immune to deterrence and the threat of full scale retaliation should it employ nuclear weapons.”

The notion that it is American intelligence operatives behind the assassinations and the Stuxnet virus ignores the greater likelihood that these have been Israeli efforts to slow Iran’s efforts, given that Iran has made no secret of its desire to destroy Israel.

There is another reason to question whether the U.S. is involved insofar as policies of the Obama administration going back to 2009 have led some observers to conclude that “President Barack Obama has decided to let Iran acquire nuclear arms.” That was the opinion of Anne Bayefsky in August 2009, writing in the National Review Online.

More recently, Fred Fleitz, a retired intelligence expert with a twenty-five year career at the CIA, DIA, State Department, and House Intelligence Committee staff, wrote a warning that was published in The Wall Street Journal, “America’s Intelligence Denial on Iran.”

“Mounting evidence over the last few years has convinced most experts that Iran has an active program to develop and construct nuclear weapons,” wrote Fleitz. “Amazingly, however, these experts do not include the leaders of the U.S. intelligence community.” Incredibly, U.S. intelligence officials are standing by their 2007 assessment that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and has not restarted it since.

This constitutes criminal negligence.

“One cannot underestimate the dangers posed to our country by a U.S. Intelligence community that is unable to provide timely and objective analysis of such major threats to U.S. national security—or to make appropriate adjustments when it is proven wrong,” wrote Fleitz.

It’s hardly a secret that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. One can easily access maps showing the sites where the program is known to be underway.

There’s a reason for the Stuxnet virus and for the assassinations. It is the fact that Iran, once armed with nuclear weapons, will use them against either Israel or America or both.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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The Syrian Horror Show

By Alan Caruba

Name me a country where funeral processions get fired upon and more people die on the way to burying the latest martyrs for peace and freedom? It’s just about any country in the Middle East and on July 19 it was Syria where ten people died in Homs, a place where some fifty have died in the past week protesting the second generation of the Assad dictatorship.

A week earlier an alleged "pro-Assad mob" attacked the U.S. embassy in Damascus after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said of Basher Assad that he as “not indispensable” and that the U.S. has “absolutely nothing invested in him remaining in power.” So far this has been the position of the U.S. on Egypt’s Hosni Mubarack, Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, and just about everyone else in the Middle East short of Abdullah, the King of Saudi Arabia.

It was not the first time the Damascus embassy had been attacked. In December 2006, al Qaeda was credited with blowing up a car bomb outside as a gang of armed men tried to break in. The attack, though, has all the earmarks of an Iranian operation.

Let’s see, when was the last time a U.S. embassy was attacked? It was 1979 in Tehran when the Iranians took its staff hostage and held them for 444 days. The Iranians were behind the 1983 suicide attack on the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241. These days they all but own Syria as they patiently work their way toward possessing nuclear-tipped missiles with which to threaten the Middle East and everywhere else.

After World War I, Syria was carved out of the former Ottoman Empire and ceded to French colonial control. In 1946, the French granted it independence. It then passed through a series of military coups until Basher’s father, Hafez Assad, took control of Syria.

Upon his death, it passed to his son, Bashar in 2000. In May 2007, Bashar was “elected” to his second term.This is not exactly a definition of a democracy, but neither is any nation in the Middle East and never was.

In the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Hafez joined with Egypt and, in the process, lost the Golan Heights, a strategic victory for the Israelis who have shown no intention of returning it or the ancient Israeli provinces of Samaria and Judea, won from Jordan, and now commonly but mistakenly called the West Bank. The Israelis do not “occupy” it. They lived there three thousand years ago.

The Egyptians lost the Gaza at that time, but the Israelis have since ceded it to the Palestinians in the hope they might establish a state, but they have never shown the slightest inclination of establishing one except as a base from which to attack the Israelis.

From 1976 until April 2005, the Syrians had occupied Lebanon which is now a base for Hezbollah, a Palestinian terrorist group that has successfully taken control. They take their orders from Iran.

Syria has been a classic police state. Reportedly, Iran has deployed 10,000 troops to Syria to protect the Assad regime and are in effective control of the nation. Iranian troops have been in Syria since 2008 and, not surprisingly, their northern headquarters have been in Homs, the site of the latest killings.

In February 2009, it was reported that President Obama had decided to send a new U.S. ambassador to Syria and lift sanctions against a nation believed to have aided al Qaeda in Iraq and of secretly building a nuclear reactor. The Israelis, as they had done earlier with a reactor Saddam Hussein was building, bombed it to rubble in 2009.

So far, President Obama’s philosophy of talking nicely to our enemies in the Middle East has not worked and anyone with the slightest knowledge of the history of the region could have told him that.

President Bush’s decision to eliminate Saddam Hussein was based on the fact that Saddam was a constant destabilizing factor, having waged war against Iran for eight years in the 1980s, used poison gas to kill thousands of Kurds, and in 1990 attacked Kuwait to seize its oil fields.

The current U.S. policy is to withdraw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. Expecting the Middle East to act in any civilized fashion or thinking it can be taken over and reformed by sheer military force is clearly a fool’s dream.

Afghanistan has resisted control since the days of Alexander the Great. The Ottoman Empire, run by the Turks from the 1300s until the early 1920s did a fairly good job of maintaining the peace until it collapsed of its own dead weight

As nations such as Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan did little other than accept various dictators, the prospect of expecting anything but turmoil is utterly futile. What the West wants is access to and through the Suez Canal, along with the oil of the Middle East. The template of Western influence disappeared with both World War One and Two.

Just because those in the Middle East have the outward appearance of modernity, it is an illusion. This is a region of the world dominated by a warrior cult called Islam. As such it will remain an enemy of the West and of each other. It is a huge horror show.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Jimmy Carter Redux

By Alan Caruba

It is inevitable that the current first and, hopefully, last term of Barack Obama will be compared to that of Jimmy Carter’s, 1977-1981. Until then, no sitting President had ever failed to have been reelected since Herbert Hoover in 1932. The stock market had crashed in 1929 and the U.S. was sliding into what would be a decade-long depression.

Carter, a holier-than-thou former Governor of Georgia captured the public’s attention after the sordid ordeal of Watergate, followed by a genial Jerry Ford whom the press relentlessly portrayed as a bumbling fool. Four years later, it was Carter’s turn because his policies were relentlessly liberal with the worst possible outcomes.

The comparisons between Carter and Obama are instructive. When Carter arrived in office in 1977, the nation was recovering from a severe recession from 1973 to 1975. Unemployment stood at 9% and economic growth had slowed. Sound familiar? Only today economic recovery rates are actually less than Carter’s 3.4%.

The second half of Carter’s term was a slight improvement, but was plagued by events that included the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and the taking of U.S. diplomats as hostages of the Iranian revolution in 1979. Presidents are elected to deal with such events, but Jimmy Carter had a pure genius for coming to the wrong conclusion or electing to take the wrong course of action.

Much of what we now see as President Obama’s agenda is a reflection of Carter’s. In the same way the Congress continues to refuse American’s access to their own oil and their own coal to fuel economic growth, Carter inflicted a “windfall profit tax” on the nation’s oil industry, thus drying up domestic exploration in favor of seeking it elsewhere. It put oil industry personnel out of work and did nothing to encourage “energy efficiency” initiatives. The tax was repealed in 1988 when prices collapsed as more oil became available worldwide.

Liberals are constantly dazzled by the promise of “conserving energy” when the only real way of doing so is to not use it. This, of course, is never an option. Try getting through breakfast without using energy. Need it be said that Carter put solar panels on the roof of the White House? Or that Ronald Reagan ordered them removed? Wind, solar, and biofuels have been sucking billions out of the pockets of Americans in the form of subsidies and hidden taxes on gasoline for decades.

Carter also came up with the Department of Energy which, of course, he thought would save energy. Created in 1977 to lesson dependence on foreign oil, it now has some 16,000 employees and a budget around $24 billion. And we are importing more oil than ever before. Compare that with the fact that the top three U.S. oil companies paid $42.8 billion in 2010 income taxes.

Barack Obama received a Nobel Peace Prize just for showing up. Carter received it for the Camp David accords in 1978 between Israel and Egypt that greatly eased the tensions between the two nations. The Palestinians hated it. Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, was assassinated by the Muslim Brotherhood for agreeing to it. Carter came away from the experience with an animus toward Israel exceeded only by Obama’s.

When events outside his control seemed to conspire against Carter, those within it sabotaged him repeatedly. In 1977, he returned control of the Panama Canal to the nation of Panama even though most Americans opposed it. The Canal, for all intents and purposes, is controlled by China after they purchased important military facilities at both end of it.

In December 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. This is what happens when America’s enemies conclude that it is weak. The invasion, ironically, would hasten the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, although that is generally attributed to the reduction in oil prices, its single, major export.

The final coup de gras for Carter was the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979 after the overthrow of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. A military operation to rescue the hostages failed and Carter spent most of the rest of his time in the Oval Office, unseen and unlamented until his defeat in 1980.

Carter has not distinguished himself much since leaving office and the debris of mindlessly liberal “answers” to problems they created. He has criticized Israel for practicing “apartheid” even though the Palestinians continue to refuse to seek peace. Meanwhile, Obama’s big move in the Middle East was to throw a longtime ally, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarack, under the bus and seeking an approach to the Muslim Brotherhood. Obama also managed to involve the U.S. in an undeclared war on Libya.

Americans are still suffering from Carter’s incompetence and weakness, and thirty years from now, today’s younger generations of Americans will be paying the price for Obama’s efforts to destroy the nation’s economy.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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The Epicenter of Anti-Semitism

By Alan Caruba

Anti-Semitism has a very long history.

In June, Dr. Rivka Shpak Lissak, a Jewish historian, posted a section of her forthcoming book, noting that “The Roman Empire committed a genocide of the Jewish people under its occupation (63 BCE – 324 CE) of the land of Israel. From about 3,000,000 Jews in the first century CE (Common Era), about 200,000 survived until the 7th century, most of them killed or enslaved.”

How does this differ from the Arab agenda that has existed since the day that the modern state of Israel was resurrected and was immediately attacked by five Arab nations in 1948?

Islam’s exponents in Hamas and Hezbollah have always made it clear that the purpose of their existence is the destruction of Israel and both are instruments of Iran’s expressed intention to “wipe Israel from the map.”

The United Nations, despite its role in the recognition of Israel, is the epicenter of modern anti-Semitism and a facilitator of Jew-hatred.

It has provided a shameless platform for every virulent call for the destruction of Israel and the Jews. If for no other reason, the UN has no right to exist. The United States should not be a participant or party to this obscenity.

The UN’s role in the furtherance of global anti-Semitism is so manifest it is impossible to ignore. Its sponsorship of the Durban conferences, allegedly to oppose racism, has fostered the most egregious anti-Semitism. In September 2009, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addressed the conference and repeated every tired lie about Judaism and Jews. Out of 192 UN members, only eleven got up and left. The United States and Israel had chosen not to attend.

In September 2010 Ahmadinejad used his UN invitation to New York to claim that that “segments within the U.S. government orchestrated the (9/11) attack” on behalf of “the Zionist regime”; only seven nations including the U.S. departed the General Assembly.

Simply not attending these events without a strong, vocal denunciation is a weak response.

The “tilt” of the Obama administration against Israel has only encouraged Arab states. In the two and a half years Obama has been in office, he has expressed support for a mosque within sight of Ground Zero, has openly insulted the Israeli Prime Minister on his first trip to Washington, and backed a UN investigation into the Turkish flotilla to Gaza, among other overt acts.

Most recently, the UN leadership endorsed the Iranian-sponsored “World Without Terrorism” conference on June 25-26. It was a confab attended by some of the leading actors when it comes to terrorism including Sudan and Pakistan, both of which were hosts to the late Osama bin Laden. By far the leading facilitator for terrorism is, of course, Iran. This Alice-in-Wonderland approach to the truth is typical of Arab and Persian Islamic deception and incitement.

In June, the UN General Assembly elected Iran as one of its vice presidents and Qatar as its president. Each will begin a year-long term in September. Durban III is scheduled for September 22, 2011.

The Palestinians will push for recognition as a nation-state in the General Assembly where the U.S. has no veto. Former US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, noted that “General Assembly resolutions are not legally binding, and that body has no authority to recognize states, although its actions can be politically powerful, as the 1975 ‘Zionism is racism’ resolution demonstrated.”

Bolton is urging Congress to make it clear that any resolution to recognize Palestinian statehood will result in a cutoff of funds to the UN, but not to separate agencies such as the World Health Organization, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and others.

From the days of ancient Rome, to the last century’s Holocaust, to the present existence of the United Nations, anti-Semitism remains an evil component in the affairs of the world

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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The Middle East Mess

By Alan Caruba

Anyone such as myself who lived through the long years of the Vietnam quagmire knows that the United States is repeating the same errors in the Middle East that we did with that nation. We seem incapable of recognizing a civil war when we see one and incapable of not inserting ourselves in the midst of it.

I speak specifically of Libya and the inchoate decisions and measures taken by the Obama administration. To suggest that the present White House and State Department have a Middle East “policy” is to vastly overstate and misunderstand their ignorance of that region of the world and the forces at work within it.

The United States has been militarily involved in Afghanistan since 2001, shortly after 9/11. What should have been a short sortie to inflict punishment on the al Qaeda and the Taliban has turned into a classic “quagmire”. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 reflects this as well.

Like many, I thought that the application of U.S. military intervention would somehow drag the Middle East into the 21st century, but clearly the region remains subject to the seventh century religion of Islam and its schism between the majority Sunnis and the minority Shiites. Islam, plus a tribalism that reaches back millennia, renders the Middle East intractable to the West’s efforts.

Billions have been squandered in Afghanistan and Iraq, while the real enemy, Iran, has been allowed to go unscathed in its pursuit of regional hegemony and its pursuit of nuclear parity with its “neighbors”, Pakistan, India, and Russia.

As this is written, Saudi Arabia has concluded that the United States will take no action to stop the Iranian nuclear program and is seeking to pull together a Gulf State coalition to end the expansionist ambitions of the Iranian ayatollahs. The Saudis have also consulted with Israel.

Forty years seems to be the limit that Middle Eastern populations will tolerate the various despots that have controlled Islamic nations. In Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Egypt and Syria those in charge have found themselves under siege and, in some cases, removed.

In two cases, Libya and Egypt, the Obama administration has openly sided with the rebels. At the same time, it has incomprehensibly offered a weak defense of Syria’s dictator, Bashar el-Assad, Iran’s strongest ally in the region. Sensing a shift in power, even Egypt’s new ruling body has reached out to Iran to thaw decades of antipathy.

The only consistent Middle Eastern policy of the Obama administration has been its hostility to Israel, the region’s only democracy and America’s traditional ally since its founding just over sixty years ago. For all the caterwauling about the Palestinians, they have long since been abandoned by the Arab nations and are now well within the Iranian orbit of influence and support.

The Palestinians could have had a separate state decades ago but have always pursued an all-or-nothing policy aimed at the destruction of Israel. It is widely believed that they will initiate a new war as Iran’s proxies, from Lebanon in the north and Gaza in the south.

The Palestinians, in fact, have a sovereign nation. It is called Jordan which lost the West Bank, part of ancient Israel, to modern Israel after attacking it in 1947-48 and 1967.

Iraq has made it clear to the United States that it wants to see American troops withdrawn as agreed by the end of the year. Its Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki recently ordered an attack on Camp Ashraf, home to 3,500 Iranian dissidents for the past twenty-six years. That should tell even the casual observer that Iraq is now in the Iranian orbit. This is true as well of Lebanon, first occupied by Syria for decades and now in the grip of the Palestinian Hezbollah.

As to the Iranian people, the Obama administration made it clear they have been abandoned after protests against Mamoud Ahmadinejad’s stolen election last year received no support whatever by a U.S.

America has severely weakened itself since 9/11 with ill-advised military excursions that, like the Vietnam debacle, have proven costly in treasure and lives sacrificed in an area that is resentful of our unwanted incursions, coupled with our addled “nation building” schemes.

There is a massive realignment occurring as the result of the popular uprisings against despots across the North African Maghreb and the heart of Middle Eastern nations, several of which were the artificial creations of Western interests. Resentments against the tyrannies of former despots will likely give way to new despots, not democratic reform.

There is no end to the resentment against America and the West.

Lacking any kind of cohesive policy toward Arab nations except for the oil they provide, the only sensible policy America should pursue would be to drill for our own extensive oil reserves to prevent a severe shock to our economy and security. So long as Obama is President, this will not happen.

There is no perceivable policy in place to stand against Iran and has not been since the Carter administration abandoned the Pahlavi regime in 1979. The fall of Tunisia’s Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, Egypt’s Mubarack, Syria’s Assad, and the resistance to Gadhafi, along with unrest in Yemen and Bahrain will be seen, in retrospect, as inevitable.

What remains is a Maghreb and Middle East in a volatile struggle to determine whether it returns to an Islamism reminiscent of the Ottoman Empire or an enlightened embrace of Western values.

There is little reason to hope for a good outcome.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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The Iranian Armageddon

By Alan Caruba

In the months and years leading up to the beginning of World War Two, all the parties knew full well Hitler’s intention to start a war. When he struck a deal with Stalin to divide Poland, the die was cast. The invasion came in September 1939. Previously, diplomats had met with the Nazis to offer them the former Czechoslovakia and turned a blind eye to other provocative events.

World War Two was preceded by Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” that spelled out his plans for Europe’s Jews and the torrent of lies that led to war and the genocide that became known as the Holocaust.

It is not surprising that history is repeating itself as in the case of an April 7 letter to The Wall Street Journal by Alireza Miryousefi of the Iranian Mission to the U.N. “There is no evidence of any military diversion” in Iran’s nuclear facilities claimed Mr. Miryousefi, who went on to assert that “the real threat of nuclear proliferation” was Israel which he described as “the Zionist regime.”

Despite Iran’s support for two terrorist organizations, Hezbollah and Hamas, it was Israel, said Mr. Miryousefi, that was “the biggest terrorist and apartheid regime.”

Today, everyone knows the Iran’s crazed ayatollahs intend to secure nuclear weapon capability and everyone knows that, when they do, they will attack Israel with them. They have never ceased to call for its destruction. It is not a question of if, but when.

How close is “when”? The Iranians just released a video titled “The Coming is Near” that describes the current events in the Middle East as the prelude to the coming of the Twelfth Imam, the Mahdi, a figure particular to the Shiite branch of Islam and one that Islamic scriptures say will lead the armies of Islam to victory over all non-Muslims in the last days.

In a nuclear age, as Nikita Krushchev, a former Premier of the Soviet Union, once said, “The living will envy the dead.” Those were the days of the Cold War and, with both the U.S. and Russia possessing nukes, the concept of mutually assured destruction, MAD, was understood. This, however, does not apply to the ayatollahs. They need massive destruction to bring about their Islamic End Times scenario.

In a recent Wall Street Journal interview with Bernard Lewis, the West’s leading scholar on the Middle East, he pointed out that the mullahs “are religious fanatics with an apocalyptic mindset. In Islam, as in Christianity and Judaism, there is an end-of-times scenario—and they think it’s beginning or has already begun.”

The result, said Lewis, is that “mutually assured destruction is not a deterrent—it’s an inducement.”

In the days leading up to World War Two, the diplomatic choice was appeasement. Today, hope is that the mullahs can be deterred long enough that Iranians will somehow bring about regime change from within. The computer virus, Stuxnet, had the affect of interfering with the enrichment process necessary to weaponize uranium, but may not now be a factor.

In the meantime, the Gulf Cooperation Council, composed of six GCC states are discussing a proposal to identify and deport an estimated 20,000 Shiites linked to Iran. In Kuwait the plan would focus on Lebanese Shiites with links to Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

It is believed that many Iranian agents have been activated this year and, as such, pose a security threat. Said one GCC insider, “For years, the GCC knew of these people, but looked the other way. We can’t look the other way anymore.”

The news, unfortunately, just keeps getting worse and worse. In the muddle that represents the effort to overthrow Libya’s Gadhafi, DebkaFile reports that the “rebels” have sold thousands of chemical shells found in Benghazi to Hezbollah and Hamas, two puppet organizations funded by Iran.

When you add to that the thousands of rockets cached in Lebanon by Hezbollah and the rocketing that has been reinstituted from Gaza by Hamas, you have a trigger for a wider war.

Specifically, you have the elements of the destruction of Israel by the Iranians and the so-called Palestinians, a stateless group that have been the pawns of Iran and Arab nations for more than six decades.

In late March, Senators Mark Kirk (R-Ill) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) were joined by twenty-five other Senators who sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asking her to identify specific steps the administration is taking to press the Palestinian Authority to end the “dangerous incitement against Jews and Israel.” The letter was sent in the wake of the terrorist murder of the Fogel family in Itamar and a bombing of a civilian bus in Jerusalem. A school bus has since been attacked.

You don’t have to be a CIA analyst to know that events in the Middle East will be exploited by the Iranians to bring about their apocalyptic End Times aspirations and that the destruction of Israel is, in their view, the trigger. After Israel, the United States and Europe will be next.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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The Education of Barack Obama

By Alan Caruba

Just over two years ago when Barack Obama was sworn into office, he might have needed help to find Libya on the map and Muammar Gadhafi was just another Middle Eastern despot.

Despite a whirlwind tour of the Middle East, I doubt he had any idea that the Maghreb of north African nations, from Tunisia to Egypt, or that Syria, Jordan, Yemen and Bahrain would be in varying states of turmoil, but neither did anyone else. He had little to say during the protests against Iran’s mullahs.

The last thing Obama wanted was to be a “war President.”

Even in his address to the nation regarding the U.S. intervention in Libya, he could not resist chiding his predecessor. “To be blunt, we went down that road in Iraq,” he said without naming George W. Bush, his favorite fall-back position for blame. Then he added that the war in Iraq has lasted eight years, cost thousands of lives, and a trillion dollars. The one in Vietnam lasted almost as long and was just as costly.

Unmentioned was his decision to not only remain in Afghanistan where the U.S. has been since 2001, but he increased our troop strength—just as former President Bush did with the “surge” that turned things around in Iraq. The result of Obama’s decision has been to keep al Qaeda on the run and a continuing effort to degrade the Taliban. Unsaid is the fact that guerrilla wars are generally long, drawn-out, and often inconclusive.

The conduct of war is the job the Constitution assigns to the President by also authorizing him to be the Commander-in-Chief. Obama, the community organizer, is uncomfortable with this responsibility, but he put those skills to use to pull together a coalition, get a U.N. resolution, and let loose the dogs of war, if only from the skies.

What he failed to do was consult with the Congress and either ask for or get a resolution of support. He’s supposed to do that, but the former university lecturer on the Constitution either forgot that or decided to ignore it. That, however, is a very bad precedent.

“I refused to wait for images of slaughter and mass graves,” he said and, frankly, I believe him. He drew on the lessons of former President Clinton’s difficulty to get the U.S. involved in stopping the ethnic cleansing in Serbia and Bosnia.

The reluctant war President, however, took pains to tell Americans that “The U.S. will play a supportive role” in Libya’s liberation and only the seriously uninformed could believe that tall tale. There is no military action in Libya without the U.S., now and into the unknown future.

In almost an aside, Obama spoke of Iran, “where change is fiercely oppressed.” He hasn’t had much to say of Iran and this suggests he wanted to send some kind of message to the ayatollahs that he was keeping an eye on them as he should. They are gearing up to make events infinitely worse in the Middle East.

What Obama has discovered—and should have known—is that America has been the world’s policeman since the end of World War II way back in 1945. It’s the reason that former President Truman ordered U.S. troops into the field when North Korea attacked South Korea. It’s the reason Americans happily elected a former five-star general, Ike Eisenhower, to guide the nation when he promised “I will go to Korea” to personally inspect the demilitarized zone.

“We should not be afraid to act,” said Obama regarding the various unpleasant choices we have before us and those that are sure to come and then he emphasized “collective action”, falling back into his favorite role as an organizer, rather than a warrior.

In truth, Obama is not a warrior. Unlike many prior presidents he never wore the uniform of his nation and he clearly finds war distasteful, a distraction from imposing domestic change on Americans who have proven resistant and who are likely to send him home to Chicago in 2012.

“We welcome the fact that history is on the move in the Middle East,” the President said. Somehow I doubt that. For decades this nation has been more than happy with the status quo in the Middle East so long as the oil flowed. Those days are over.

It was a decent enough speech that touched on all the key points. Gadhafi is a despot. He threatened his people. Our interests and values are at stake. All the things one would expect him to say, but none of the fire, the “bring’m on” swagger we have missed since 9/11. Like him or not, George W. Bush made us feel safe. Obama makes us feel tentative.

America has real enemies and, frankly, I want them to be very afraid of us. They were once, but when even a cockroach like Gadhafi thinks we won’t or can’t kill him, I want his head on a pike for all the rest of the world to see.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → The Education of Barack Obama

From Hiroshima to Iran

By Alan Caruba

These days it is fashionable to decry the use of not one, but the two atomic bombs that were used to convince the emperor of Japan and his warlords that the United States would destroy its cities if forced to invade. Within days World War Two was over.

America, since December 7, 1941, when it was the victim of a Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, had been fighting in the Pacific theatre as well as in the European one. There was no doubt that, just as Germany had been reduced to rubble to achieve victory, so too would Japan if needed. Expectations of American casualties if an invasion was required were huge.

Long before September 11, 2001, war had been declared on America by Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of al Qaeda. The destruction of the Twin Towers shocked Americans. A decade later, however, they were debating whether Muslims have “a right” to build a mosque within a short walk of Ground Zero. That’s blindingly stupid.

Short memories can lead to big defeats. It is worth reminding Americans that our troops did not lose in Iraq. We went there to depose a psychopathic despot who killed his own people with impunity. We went there to see whether democracy could take root in a region where it never had. (Only a secular Turkey was the exception; its military kept the Islamists at bay, but that too is changing.)

In the midst of the turmoil that has taken much of the Middle East and northern Africa, along with the rest of the world, by surprise, it is worth noting that the only thing keeping Israel from being attacked and utterly destroyed and that is its nuclear arsenal.

A people who lost six million of their families, their brethren, whose motto became “Never again”, will not to fail to use them to defeat what has been grandly called “an existential threat.” There’s nothing existential about it.

The U.S. has developed a sophisticated arsenal of weapons in the years since 1945 and has become the world’s policeman, fighting a Cold War with occasional hot outbreaks in Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere. We have tolerated a Communist Cuba just off the border of Florida. We have watched Venezuela go Communist.

We have not used our nuclear arsenal and we presently have a President who wants desperately to reduce it in order to appease the Russians who are not our friends.

I have no doubt that Israel will use its nuclear weapons and I can think of no reason why they should not.

It is the barbaric leadership of Iran that is the enemy, not its people. Israel understands that. Thus, attacks would likely target Iran's nuclear and military facilities, not its cities.

Throughout its sixty-two years, Israel been repeatedly attacked by Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Despite a cold peace with Egypt and Jordan, both nations find themselves challenged by a largely Islamist movement. Israel watches and waits.

As the first Iranian warships recently passed through the Suez Canal the Iranian puppets, Hamas, celebrated by firing two long-range Iranian-made Grad missiles rockets at Beersheba and Netivot from Gaza . It is a signal of what is to come

Israel, a democracy whose population includes over a million Arabs, has thrived. All around Israel the threat to its existence has continued. In this decade, it has required Israeli military operations against Lebanon’s  Hezbollah and, in Gaza, against Hamas. Absolutely nothing Israel has done to secure peace has been successful and yet it is constantly importuned to do more.

Only the fact that it has nuclear weapons and a trained, dedicated defense force has kept its enemies at bay. However, as the Iranians creep toward nuclear parity, it will demand a Hiroshima to thwart another Holocaust.

The Second World War was one of unimaginable carnage, but the allies were able to rebuild and even our former enemy, Germany, was converted to an integral power in Europe. The American occupation of Japan left it a truly democratic nation and an ally. A South Korea under the protection of America is an economic dynamo. We have embassies in Vietnam.

There are the lessons of history that entire new generations of Americans need to learn and need to understand.

The war to protect, restore, and project Western values was worth fighting. A war against an Iran that has declared itself an enemy is one that Israel will have to fight. Just as in 1945, nuclear weapons will restore clarity and peace.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → From Hiroshima to Iran

Iran's Gangster Government

By Alan Caruba

Two hapless Americans, Shane Bauer and Joseph Fattal, have been held hostage in Iran for eighteen months. Hikers, they and Sarah Shourd, were taken prisoner in what is generally described as “an unmarked border area between Iraq and Iran.”

As much as I sympathize with their problem, I keep asking myself how can three Americans, two aged 29 and one 32, have been so oblivious to the danger of hiking anywhere near Iran, let alone in northern Iraq? Their naiveté is appalling. The world is filled with other places to hike.

Ms. Shourd was released by the Iranians on a $500,000 bail in September and you can bet that it was provided by the U.S. via the Swiss ambassador, our go-to guy there.

On Sunday, Bauer and Fattal, charged with illegally entering Iran for the purpose of espionage, were subject to a judicial hearing before Judge Abolghasem Salavati, the Iranian version of Vlad the Impaler. Their lawyer was not given the opportunity to meet with them before the three-hour session to prepare a defense. This is what passes for justice in Iran.

Lawyer Masoud Shafii said that he had requested that “they are freed immediately. We reject all the charges, and I think the 18 months they’ve already served is more than enough.”

This is the equivalent of Iranian kabuki theatre because justice has nothing to do with the fate of the two hikers. They, like every other hostage the Iranians have taken since their 1979 revolution, are just bargaining chips, pawns to be used in their endless war with America and the West.

It began with 52 American diplomats and embassy staff that were held for 444 days until the day Ronald Reagan took the oath of office at his first inaugural.

Does Barack Obama today look any less weak than Jimmy Carter did? The answer is that America and other nations, Great Britain and France for example, have grown so accustomed to negotiating with the Iranians over their hostage nationals that it has become “normal” to do so.

It is a very bad “normal” and it ignores the criminal, fascist nature of a regime for whom hostage taking is routine. Indeed, Iran “is open to a deal, saying the country would be willing to negotiate an exchange for Iranian prisoners held in the U.S.—a notion the U.S. has rejected”, according to The Wall Street Journal.

For now the two hikers will remain in jail before an equally bogus trial is held. Reporting for The Wall Street Journal, Farnaz Fassihi wrote, “Analysts say that the hiker’s case has become caught up in Iran’s internal political rivalries and its standoff with the West over its nuclear program.” You think?

Bauer and Fattal will be set free only if the U.S. agrees to a secret deal with the Iranians and that will be a bad deal for the U.S. If there is no deal, they will rot in an Iranian prison, guilty of extreme stupidity.

No matter their fate, there are far greater future options at stake. The closer the Iranians get to weaponizing nuclear materials, the closer the world gets to running out of options to stop them.

The deal I would offer them is to put those hiking morons on the first plane out of Tehran or expect a couple of guided missiles to arrive at the several known nuclear facilities in Iran.

Even Bill Clinton let fly a few to try to kill Osama bin Laden and managed to blow up a Libyan aspirin factory thanks to bad intelligence. Still, it sent a message.

Think about it. The Iranians don’t have missiles that can hit the U.S. homeland. Their navy would be obliterated by ours in hours. We already have 50,000 troops in Iraq and others in Afghanistan. If you think they are there on “training missions”, you’re dreaming.

Not only do we have nukes, but the Israelis do as well and they need to send a signal to their “neighbors” in the Mideast, most of whom are praying they nuke Tehran anyway.

It’s not like we haven’t been patient and forbearing in the face of years of insults and threats. It’s time to send an “or else” message, but I doubt that day will arrive for at least two more years; say sometime after January 2013 when Barack the Uncertain is sent packing to Chicago.

Like the final days in office of Jimmy Carter, the Iranians have concluded that America has elected a sissy.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → Iran's Gangster Government

Football (and War) is about Winning

By Alan Caruba

The film, “Patton”, opens with George C. Scott giving an abbreviated version of General George Patton’s actual speech to the men of the Third Army on the eve of D-Day.

Today’s wars apparently require a different kind of general; one who gets combat ribbons for testifying before Congress and giving press conferences. They could win wars if the pukes in Washington would let them annihilate the enemy.

Patton’s actual speech was laced with profanity of the kind any man who has spent time in the Army or other branches of the service understood. Patton began by saying “Americans love to fight, traditionally. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle.”

“When you, here, every one of you, were kids, you all admired the champion marble player, the fastest runner, the toughest boxer, the big league ball players, and the All-American football players. Americans will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise cowards.”

The late comedian George Carlin had a routine in which he compared baseball to football. In baseball, he said, you play “in a park.” In football, you play in a stadium “on a grid.” Carlin knew that football is as much about war as it is about winning. The very image of a football player is a large, intimidating man clad in body armor.

The Superbowl is a clash of titans, men who have fought for every inch and every point until the whistle blows and the game is ended. We don’t go to the games or tune in on television to watch women play football.

We don’t want women analyzing the game afterward. We don’t even like seeing them interview the players on the sidelines. We do like the cheerleaders in their skimpy outfits. That’s the only place for a woman anywhere near the field.

Vietnam War veterans will tell you they were winning in the field and they were. The problem was that we had been in Vietnam for seven years by the time the politicians, yielding to a weary public, pulled the plug.

Fifty thousand-plus lives were lost, mostly due to a lack of resolve. Out of Vietnam came the doctrine enunciated by Colin Powell who had fought there and rose to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He said America must only go to war with overwhelming numbers and force.

That was applied in the first Iraqi war (1990-91) called Desert Storm and it worked. George H.W. Bush, probably because of pressure from Middle Eastern allies, stopped well short of going into Baghdad. It was left to George W. Bush to do, aided by our British and Canadian allies.

On March 20, 2003, Operation Iraqi Freedom commenced. U.S. forces arrived in Baghdad with too few troops to control the crowds and with no plan beyond finding Saddam Hussein. What followed was yet another long, meandering war without an end date though combat has ended.

This has been repeated in Afghanistan. How long have we been there? Can anyone remember? Have we “won”? Is it, by any definition winnable?

Throughout the 2008 campaign, Obama, carped about Iraq and called Afghanistan the real war. As president he increased the number of troops in Afghanistan and it is still a stalemate.

We have troops in Korea, in Japan, in Germany. Even when we “win” we never leave. When not killing the enemy, we build schools and clinics. For this we get little thanks and no respect.

“Americans play to win all of the time,” said Patton. Well, we used to. Our victories since the end of World War Two have ended in stalemates. It’s not that we lack the capacity to win decisively and impose our will on our enemies; it’s that we lack the will to do so.

Unlike the Superbowl where millions tuned in to watch, I doubt you have seen any coverage of the war in Afghanistan in a long time. After a year, the Iraqis have managed to cobble together something they call a government.

We have two carrier groups parked off the coast of Iran and the Iranians have recently announced they are going to put some warships through the Suez Canal and into the Mediterranean off the coast of Israel.

“Sure we want to go home,” Patton told his men. “We want this war over with. The quickest way to get it over with is to go get the bastards that started it.”

Good advice then. Good advice now.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → Football (and War) is about Winning

Waiting and Watching Egypt

By Alan Caruba

Today we watch events unfold in far off places often in real time. What we lack, however, is context. Most Americans and, I suspect, others in Western nations are frequently at a loss when it comes to knowing anything about the culture and history, past and recent, of nations in the Middle East, Africa, or Asia.

What we do know about the Middle East is that, since the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran along with the rise of al Qaeda and other jihadist organizations, things have not gone well for American and Western interests.

How different everything might have been if U.S. troops had occupied Tehran in 1979 and demanded the return of our diplomats after they had been taken hostage.

After World War One, what was once the Ottoman Empire that ruled the Middle East and areas of the Maghreb in northern Africa, the French and the British got out their maps at the Versailles conference to literally draw new lines on it and create new nations that were, in fact, colonies. They included Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, and a strip of territory called the Palestinian mandate. The chief prize at stake was oil.

After World War Two was concluded many of the former British and French colonies, including India, and much of Africa declared their independence. The Saudi Royal family had already thrown in its lot with America. In Egypt, the Suez Canal, opened in 1869, was jointly owned by the British and French. The British called the shots there through its royal family.

The Egyptian defeat in the 1948 war in response to the establishment of Israel stirred discontent among its military leadership. Gamal Abed Al Nasser ultimately emerged as Egypt’s leader after a July 1952 bloodless coup against King Farouk and the royal family. In 1956 Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal.

Here’s what it gets very instructive. In 1956 the British and French, with Israeli involvement, sent troops to seize the Suez Canal. That operation was quashed by President Dwight Eisenhower who made it known that the United States would not support it. The era of colonization was over.

What had been occurring, however, was an era of pent-up anger throughout the Middle East focused on the establishment of Israel and resentment of the former colonial powers. The British had earlier installed a royal family in Iraq. A new component was opposition to the dictators like Hussein who emerged to run Iraq. Another example is the fact that first the British and then the Americans had controlled Iran’s oil through its royal family. Other royal families continue to control mideast oil.

Ironically, it took George W. Bush to rid Iraq of three decades of despotic rule by Saddam Hussein. However, this has to be balanced against the fact that the U.S. has also supported the authoritarian regime of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. It was, however, Egypt, as well as Jordan, who made peace with Israel.

Arab military defeats gave way to support for the so-called Palestinians as pawns in the war against Israel. The main support of the Palestinian "refugees" is the United Nations, sixty-three years after 1948 and subsequent wars to destroy Israel. Iran has funded two Palestinian terrorist organizations, Hezbollah and Hamas.

At the heart of the turmoil in the Middle East is a movement to restore Islam to its former glory when it literally knocked on the doors of Europe. The jihadists such as Osama bin Laden dream of a worldwide Islamic caliphate. As in the early spread of Islam, it would be achieved through war, but the tactic employed would be terrorism and the fact of Islam’s expanding population worldwide.

An irony of the Islamist movement is its opposition to the monarchies ruling Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, all of whom have proven to be good allies to the United States at the same time they have funded the spread of Islam. In Egypt, under Mubarak, the jihadists known as the Muslim Brotherhood were ruthlessly suppressed. The Saudis actually exiled bin Laden.

What the world has witnessed has proven to be very bad news for the West. The 1979 Iranian revolution has given us Mamoud Ahmadinejad and a regime plotting through proxies to control Lebanon via Hezbollah and Gaza via Hamas, while it plots to control Iraq and eyes the Gulf States as well. Its closest ally these days is Syria. It has long sought to become a nuclear power. Its proclaimed goal is to destroy Israel.

Democracy has not turned out to be much help in the Middle East. Rigged elections in Egypt kept Mubarak in power for three decades. Saddam Hussein used terror and the Baath Party to achieve and hold on to power. Elections were rigged in Afghanistan. Pakistan has been mainly ruled by its military.

Lebanon was a democracy and now its prime minister comes from the ranks of Hezbollah. Turkey has had a long run of real democracy, but only because its military ensured that Islamists did not take over.

Americans have a lot at stake and, of growing concern to many, a President, Barack Hussein Obama, whose first television interview was with Al Arabia, who bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia, and whose first global lengthy outing was a tour of the Middle East to demonstrate how friendly he was to their cause.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → Waiting and Watching Egypt

Losing Egypt

By Alan Caruba

Those of us around at the time of the 1979 Iranian student revolution that deposed the shah are having strong feelings of déjà vu because that uprising was swiftly co-opted by Ayatollah Khomeini who hated the Great Satan, America, as much as he hated the Little Satan, Israel.

The U.S. lost a major ally in the Middle East. The Shah may have been a bastard, but he was our bastard. The CIA had put him on the Peacock Throne.

The uprising in Egypt, if taken over by the Muslim Brotherhood, will severely endanger American interests that have largely been coasting along in the belief that Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak would engineer a smooth transition of power to his son. This was the scenario in Syria when its dictator, Hafiz al-Assad, passed away.

That scenario just went out the window. Given the depth of opposition to Mubarak, it is unlikely power would pass to his son, Jamal who, with his wife and daughter have fled to Great Britain. Moreover, since Mubarak has no vice president, there is a major power vacuum.

The fate of the Suez Canal is the biggest geopolitical concern at this point. A lot of oil transits through it in much the same way it does through the Strait of Harmuz. Years of growing dependency on Middle East oil while our own vast reserves were locked up and neglected will demonstrate why the policies of several administrations have been not just short-sighted, but incredibly stupid.

As big a pain as Saddam Hussein was, I always believed that he was overthrown as much because of his control of Iraqi oil as for any other reason. The U.S. backed his war on Iran until it fizzled after eight years. When he invaded Kuwait, we pushed him back into Iraq. After 9/11 it is likely that the calculation was made that Iraq and the Middle East would be better off without him. His overthrow might also been seen as an object lesson to others in the region of what happens when Uncle Sam is unhappy.

Mubarak has been “our man” in Egypt since he took over after the assassination in 1981 of Anwar Sadat who had been killed because he made peace overtures to Israel. Up to then, Egypt had been repeatedly defeated, especially in the Six Day War. After thirty years of dictatorship Mubarak is hated by most Egyptians for all the usual reasons.

To understand the current unrest in Egypt and elsewhere, it is necessary to understand that most of the population of the Middle East and northern Africa’s Maghreb are young people. They are fed up with the oppression of their governments, with unemployment, with inflation, with the region’s endemic and historic corruption, and its lack of political freedom.

They rioted in Lebanon against Syrian oppression after the assassination of their prime minister. They rioted recently against Hezbollah control of Lebanon. Within the past weeks, there have been riots in Tunisia, in Yemen, and now Egypt. It is a contagion.

We are running out of friends in the Middle East. For all of the talk of supporting freedom in the Middle East, the U.S. has usually backed its despots. Given our dependency on Middle East oil, we have had very little choice. That’s what happens when you don’t allow drilling in Alaska’s ANWR, anywhere off our coastlines or domestically where billions of barrels are estimated to exist.

Now, however, we have a President who is VERY different from any that came before him going all the way back to Truman and Eisenhower.

A neophyte when it comes to foreign affairs, no matter what nation is involved, Obama has demonstrated extraordinarily bad instincts and judgment. He has regarded the United States as just one nation among others. He has apologized for the sixty years of relative peace the U.S. has provided as global sheriff. He has been eager to “reach out” to Middle Eastern nations. The result is that Obama has appeared weak to everyone.

He failed to speak out strongly in June 2009 when ordinary Iranians filled Tehran’s streets to protest the despicable and detested ayatollahs that rigged its election in favor of Mamoud Ahmadinejad. He lost a major opportunity while saying at the time that he did not want to “meddle” in Iran’s affairs.

Although he increased combat strength and supported Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai, the results there have been a predictable failure for a regime that lacks popular support.

Ironically, the only actual and natural ally the U.S. has in the Middle East, Israel, has been beaten about with Obama’s absurd demands that it not construct new housing in its own capitol, Jerusalem.

In the first two years of Obama’s presidency, it has become obvious to everyone, friend and foe alike, that he is anti-Israel. Perhaps he was trying to signal some kind of accommodation with Iran? Or maybe he just doesn’t like a Jewish presence in the Islamic Middle East?

That is why the rumor that the U.S. will not veto yet another anti-Israel resolution in the UN Security Council worries a lot of people. Failure to do so would make Obama the first U.S. President ever to abandon Israel in the UN.

Throughout the Middle East, people risking their lives for freedom know that if the U.S. abandons Israel, it will abandon them.

That is why, also, there can be no accommodation with Iran. Every other nation in the Middle East knows this. Hezbollah and Hamas are both terrorist organizations and both are funded and directed by Iran. It is the single greatest threat to peace in the Middle East. Syria is Iran’s closest ally and agent.

By contrast, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, all monarchies, all protected by the U.S., fear Iran.

No Middle Eastern nation is safe so long as radical Shia Islam is directed from Tehran and operates with impunity in Yemen and in Pakistan.

No nation in the world is safe if Iran acquires nuclear weapons.

If Egypt is lost to the Muslim Brotherhood as the result of the current insurrection and rebellion, the implications for the U.S. and the world would be a major game change.

A lot of nations who found it fashionable to oppose and criticize the U.S. as a big military bully are going to be looking to it to avoid an ugly, expensive, and dangerous future.

On Friday, the White House released a statement that was made in Platitude Heaven:

Politico.com reported that “President Obama called for Egypt's government to respect the rights of its people. ‘The people of Egypt have rights that are universal,’ he said.”

“Calling for Egyptian authorities to respect citizen’s right to speech and protest, he said, ‘suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away.’ The president also urged the people of Egypt to refrain from violent protest. Obama spoke with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak for 30 minutes earlier Friday.”

The problem, of course, is that we have a President who is intellectually, emotionally, philosophically, and in all other ways not up to this crisis.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → Losing Egypt

How Are the Jews Doing?

By Alan Caruba

Wondering how the world’s Jews are doing may seem a trivial question, but I have long thought of Jews as the proverbial canary in the coal mine. When events turn nasty in the world, it is the Jews who are most often its first victims.

If there is a rise in anti-Semitism worldwide it is, frankly, hard to detect from the constant, endless background noise from those who hate Jews full-time and would be utterly bereft of any purpose in life if there were no Jews.

Sadly, Christians in the Middle East are suffering attacks that have long been familiar to Jews throughout history and, these days, the Israelis. There is no room for live-and-let-live in that region of the world where the two Islamic sects, Sunni and Shia, do not hesitate to kill one another.

When one considers that the Iranian mullahs, desperately trying to construct their own nuclear weapons, have vowed to wipe Israel off the face of the map, inquiring as to the Jews’ welfare in general and Israelis in particular is not a trivial question. A nuclear attack could easily cascade into a general exchange of such weapons, a goal the mullahs actually want to trigger.

Thomas Cahill, an Irish author, said, "The Jew gave us the Outside and the Inside - our outlook and our inner life. We can hardly get up in the morning or cross the street without being Jewish. We dream Jewish dreams and hope Jewish hopes. Most of our best words, in fact - new, adventure, surprise, unique, individual, person, vocation, time, history, future, freedom, progress, spirit, faith, hope, justice - are the gifts of the Jews."

So, perhaps, in a way, we are all Jews.

In October 2010, my eye was caught by a speech by the press magnate, Rupert Murdoch, to the annual banquet of the Anti-Defamation League in New York. “We live in a world where there is an ongoing war against the Jews,” said Murdock.

This may be difficult for most Americans to comprehend because perhaps no where else in the world, other than Israel, have Jews not only prospered, but found a level of acceptance that is truly unique. In Israel, being a Jew is the ultimate definition of normality.

Murdoch, however, said that “conventional” anti-Semitism has largely failed, citing the wars against Israel since its founding in 1948. Now, said Murdock, Jews are the target of a “soft war that seeks to isolate Israel by delegitimizing it.”

This is going to be particularly evident when “Durban III”, a United Nations conference, takes place in September.

Originally called the “World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance” the UN conference name was shortened to the “World Conference Against Racism.” Suffice to say, as with most things involving the UN, the conferences have been the exact opposite of their announced purpose.

The previous Durban conference in Geneva caused European delegates to walk out when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, a keynote speaker, launched into a tirade against Israel and Jews. The Conference is recognized worldwide as a cesspool of anti-Semitism. In both conferences the hatred was directed against America as well as Israel.

Durban III will be held in New York!

It will be instructive to see if the U.S. government will send delegates to this hate fest or will officially and outspokenly protest and reject its message.

As Murdoch noted in October, there is a “curious situation we have today: Israel becomes increasingly ostracized, while Iran—a nation that makes no secret of wishing Israel’s destruction—pursues nuclear weapons loudly, proudly, and without apparent fear of rebuke.”

Murdoch said that anti-Semitism has found “a disturbing new home…in polite society, especially in Europe” and expressed concern that America was “distancing herself from the Jewish state.” He added that “the most virulent strains of anti-Semitism “come from the left”, often dressed up “as legitimate disagreement with Israel.”

He warned that Obama administration policies, generally called an outreach to the Muslim world, “Far from making peace more possible…are making hostilities more certain.”

The Iranian mullahs and their Syrian puppet have been supplying an enormous stash of rockets to Hezbollah, the Iranian's Palestinian entity in Lebanon, just as they fund and direct Hamas in Gaza. 2011 may well be a repeat of the 2006 hostilities and Israel will surely not repeat the mistakes that prolonged the last conflict.

So 2011 is yet another year in which to ask how are the Jews doing around the world.

The U.S. and its allies have been militarily engaging virulent Islamists since 9/11, but Islamist attacks predate that event by many years. The Islamist threat has spread to Europe and England, and remains active against America.

The Holocaust is a symbol and a warning of what happens when Jews or any other group is targeted for extermination. Death to America is chanted daily by some. Afterward, “genocide” entered the lexicon as the practice infected parts of Asia and Africa.

The Jews remain the most useful barometer to determine the advance or retreat of evil in the world.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → How Are the Jews Doing?

A War with Iran is Inevitable

 By Alan Caruba

If the U.S. and allies had known that Nazi Germany would embark on the genocide of six million Jews in Europe, along with five million others that included gypsies, homosexuals, and political opponents, is there any doubt they would have taken preemptive measures to stop the Holocaust?

What we know about the Iranian regime is that it is led by Shiite fanatics that believe that the only way the mythical Twelfth Imam can return is for the earth to be in a state of complete chaos and anarchy. Almost from the beginning, following the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, the regime has engaged in an effort to achieve nuclear weapons. Their use against Israel is a certainty, but they would also be targeted against Europe.

Thus, when Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) recently called for war with Iran, I assumed he has some information I do not. Sen. Graham said, “I think we’re to the point now that you have to really neuter the regime’s ability to wage war against us and our allies.”

In the 1980s, Iran fought an eight-year war with Iraq. It ended in a stalemate, a million casualties, and the need to rebuild from scratch what was left of its military. Iran is located in one of the nastiest neighborhoods of planet Earth. It shares borders with Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan.

The Gulf States deeply distrust Iran’s nuclear and other hegemonic ambitions. The Saudis and the Egyptians recently conducted joint military maneuvers for that reason.

Internally, it faces a growing opposition from its mostly young citizens to the rule of the Supreme Ayatollah, Mamoud Ahmadinejad, and others who support the dictatorship that passes for a government there. Given time and covert assistance, one assumes they might prevail, but the real question is whether the world has the time?

Iran’s economy is in a state of collapse. As recently as November 9th there was a report of the arrest of four prominent Iranian student activists and others in anticipation of a government plan to phase out basic food and fuel subsidies. “The government is bracing for social unrest,” said one report.

If Iran’s leadership were rational, the last thing they need at this point is a war. They are not and their openly expressed hatred for Israel gives every indication of that.

As the primary source of funding for Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza strip, Iran would seem to favor having its proxies take over Lebanon by force and to wage a new war on Israel. This would take some attention and pressure off of Iran as it works its will behind the scenes.

The Department of Defense and the CIA have war-gamed various plans against Iran over the years and the feedback was that neither liked the outcome because they always included the problem of an uncontrollable escalation.

As a point of reference, we put too few troops into Iraq in the 2003 attack on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq regime and, while Baghdad quickly fell, the result became a long, unpopular war.

This raises the question of why, before leaving for his Asia trip on November 6, President Obama, according to Debka File, ordered the Pentagon “not just to beef up American and NATO military pressure on Iran, but to do so as conspicuously as possible.”

There are three aircraft carriers, four nuclear submarines, and marine assault units in the vicinity of Iranian shores as this is being written. This suggests that U.S. intelligence has picked up some disturbing signs or that the Obama administration simply wants to send a message to Iran that any trouble-making in the Middle East would be unwise.

Meanwhile, Sen. Graham called for “sinking the Iranian navy, destroying its air force, and delivering a decisive blow to the Revolutionary Guards.” We can do that any time we want. What is the Senator not sharing with us that increases the urgency of such action now?

The problem Iran poses ultimately comes down to choking off the Straits of Harmuz through which flow millions of barrels of oil to the West. That would be a very destabilizing event and not permissible to the U.S., NATO nations, and others. If, however, Iran’s goal is to create world chaos, nuclear-tipped missiles would be the best way to achieve it.

As with so many geopolitical and military options, there are few good choices, but much of Iran’s bellicosity likely comes from its internal situation which, as we have seen, is an increasing threat to its regime. A show of force is a good idea. The use of it before Iran goes nuclear is even better.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

More about → A War with Iran is Inevitable

Iranian Hegemony, American Timidity

By Alan Caruba

Remember George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil”? Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Bush identified these three during a January 29, 2002 State of the Union speech. On March 20, 2003, the U.S. and coalition forces invaded Iraq in “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” We were assured that weapons of mass destruction would be found and, for the most part, few were.

The U.S. had been in Afghanistan since shortly after 9/11 in 2001, but Iraq became the focus and Afghanistan a backwater combat area where, as best as one can determine, nothing much has changed except that, reportedly, the U.S. is providing cover for meetings between the Taliban and President Karzai. The levels of corruption between these two are impossible to parse and, as usual, the only topic on the agenda is who gets to control the heroin industry that passes for Afghanistan’s Gross Domestic Product. Also reported is that Iran has been bribing top Afghan officials.

When I served in the U.S. Army, it was in a minor intelligence function as part of the Second Infantry Division. Its primary duty for a very long time has been the defense of South Korea where approximately 30,000 troops are stationed. They have been there since a truce was signed in 1953! The U.S. tends to stay on forever once we’ve invaded a country with the exception, of course, of Vietnam.

I mentioned my Army service only because the most recent intelligence “dump” by WikiLeaks evokes a visceral response to ever letting our enemies know anything about our conduct of the Iraq war and, in this case, the enemy is still Iran. It has been Iran since they took our diplomats hostage in 1979.

To my mind, WikiLeaks is engaged in an act of war against the United States, but I am sure that a legion of international lawyers would say they are not.

The worst part of all this is an analysis reported by an Israeli news agency, Debka File, over the past weekend. As often as not, one will find reports there that never seem to make it into the mainstream media here in the U.S.A.

For example, I suspect most Americans have no idea that we again have a second carrier group in the area of the Persian Gulf. That’s a lot of fire power and one or two such groups have been parked there for a very long time for a very good reason. Meanwhile, Egypt and Saudi Arabia just conducted “secret” war maneuvers together and it isn’t because either expects to be invaded by Bahrain.

The initial Debka File analysis of the U.S. classified documents “bared a catalogue of extreme abuse by Iraqi forces against fellow Iraqis and Iran’s deep involvement in terrorist operations against Americans and Iraqis alike—to both of which the U.S. turned a blind eye.”

Several very troubling facts emerge from the documents. U.S. troops “were instructed not to investigate any breach of the laws of armed conflict, such as abuses of detainees, unless it directly involves members of the coalition.” That kind of directive comes down the chain of command from the very top.

Iraq became a sovereign nation on June 30, 2004 and the fighting among its elected leaders has not ceased for a day as to how the oil riches will be divvied up between Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites.

The last elections were held on March 9, 2010 and Iraq still does not have a functioning government. In the days when Saddam Hussein ran everything, elections involved a 99% vote for the psychopath, but this year’s election involved 325 seats in the parliament and a coalition government has not been decided upon for the last eight months.

Granting that Saddam was evil incarnate, he was nonetheless a bulwark against Iranian ambitions. He had invaded Iran in the 1980s and spent eight years trying to win a war against it. Failing that, he turned around and invaded Kuwait, drawing the U.S. into the first invasion, but one in which he was allowed to remain in power after Iraqi troops were pushed out of Kuwait.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has had the backing of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. In the past he has had ties to Iran because both are Shiites and, according to Debka File he “headed Iran-backed Shiite terror networks responsible for political assassinations on his orders.”

The new intelligence data reveals even more about the extensive involvement of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps’ Al Qods Brigades in attacks on American forces in Iraq. Over the course of the conflict there since 2003, American troops suffered 4,287 dead and 30,000 wounded in combat.

Out of all this expenditure of American treasure and lives, Iran has emerged with a strong network of puppet militias in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. It has forged strong ties with Syria. It has a network of allies inside Iraq. And it has pursued its quest for nuclear weapons and the development of the missiles to deliver them as far away as parts of Europe.

All of this suggests that America’s expressed policy of establishing a democratic Iraq and the total lack of confrontation with Iran adds up to failure at this point. The problem with that assertion, however, is that Saddam was an unpredictable, disruptive figure who had to be neutralized.

It looks like George W. Bush’s Axis of Evil is still very much intact and an understandably war-weary United States is leaving a battlefield whose nations were created in 1919 by the Treaty of Versailles way back when Woodrow Wilson was the president.

As the French say, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

More about → Iranian Hegemony, American Timidity