Don’t look now but…

Don’t look now but Donald K. Trump has won his war with the traditional media, the Hollywood luminaries – and left the Democrats gasping for breath [and a missing program for action].

It will take historians a while to figure out just what happened.

But our colleagues in the leading news media continue to carp at every misstep Trump makes, especially those sometimes uninspired uses of the alternative media. The fact is we have a politician who has learned to use these new communication tools to his advantage even when he sometimes does so awkwardly. That goes for a lesson to Hollywood’s politicians too who finally may be learning that while that whatever their popularity in their make-believe roles, they are rejected by the general population as authorities on government policy.

The naked truth is that neither the leading media titles nor Hollywood’s luminaries have accepted the fact that a rebellious public decided they would not take the instruction in the 2017 elections from what my Mother and a few of her rebellions old lady friends in retirement in Florida used to call “the all-rightnicks”. They turned down both Establishments’ candidates. They voted in the outside choice as president – and even as their somewhat tainted continuing opponents’ opinion polls suggest, may even have increased their support.

And while nothing could be as dangerous as predicting where a free and vocal forgotten majority of the electorate is going to go in November, we are willing to lay a small wager that not only will they not follow the usual history of major losses for the incumbent president’s party, they may even boost the Republicans in the House – that minority who support him enthusiastically and those more lukewarm Trumbites – and nibble at that wavering stand-off in the Senate.

The confusion is rampant, of course. We have a major investigation that was supposed to sort out of the domestic mess under Robert Mueller, a man who seems to have turned leading such investigation as a profession. So far what we have from him and his commission is an expansion to other subject than those they were originally named to find. [There was no Russian-Trump collusion, but growing evidence, to the contrary, that there has been a crossing of the palm with silver by the Russians and Hillary Clinton’s minions.]

There isn’t much of a secret in Trump’s success. As a successful businessman who inherited a small fortune and turned it into a gigantic one, he is a gambler. He proffers something out of the extraordinary – even his original slogan of “making America great again” – then doubling back to compromise with his adversaries,

The fact is he has gone on to successfully pass the greatest tax reduction in American history – the political effects will only be felt after this spring’s reductions are being calculated. He made an unsuccessful pass at the massive problem of the American health system, something that probably shouldn’t be undertaken in one piece of legislation anyway. He is well on his way toward a bombastic attack on the trade disparities the U.S. has given its European, Japanese, and more recently, Chinese partners. He won’t get those massive across the board tariffs he has proposed, but, of course, like his other policy exercises, he never expected to get all of it.

Note that a second term is almost an accepted fact in the general political discussion. That infuriates – and discombobulate his proponents even more – but one the majority of American voters probably now accept.

Sooner or later, the President is going to have to turn his full attention to foreign policy.

They are not problems which turned up only on his watch but have been around for a while and festering. First, of course, is what to do about a rogue regime in North Korea which maybe close to getting a transcontinental nuclear-clad missile. That would be an unbearable threat for U.S. domestic security and our role as leader of the Free World. It’s China’s direct and indirect support to Pyongyang that appears to be the Gordian’s knot which will have to be cut, not a small job. In the Middle East, the festering mess Washington had faced since the beginning of the post-World War II is worse. Tehran’s aggressive revolutionary regime is under domestic pressure and the U.S. will have to find ways to apply non-military pressure, agajn sometimes despite our European allies’ greedy trade ambitions there. Not the least is the third threat – Vladimir Putin’s attempt to pick up the imperial roles of Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union. already threatening Ukraine and the Baltic states.

But then no one ever said the presidency of the U,S. was not a demanding job even when challenged by an inventive and original Trump, our first businessman to take on America’s business as business.

Sws-03-05-20

 

 

 

 

 

21Donald K. Trump’s new nationalism

 

 

There may be some who will denigrate President Trumps’ inaugural speech to the United Nations as lacking in subtlety. They may have an argument although an examination  indicates that the American chief executive ignored little essential detail in his arguments.

 

What Trump delivered was a a new call to the civilized world for the reevaluation of the nation-state, reminding them that though he spoke favorably about the prospects of the international body he was addressing, it had not fulfilled its promise. That promise, he also reminded his listeners, as President Harry S Truman had said, was the joining together of the world’s political polities through their every accent on the fulfillment of their individual sovereignty.

 

Trump laid out for his readers the three major crisis areas in international affairs which faced the institution’s 193 members. There was no diplomatic falderal in his presentation of the problem of a criminal regime in North Korea has brought the world to near disaster with its development of nuclear and missile weapons. He spelled out individual cases of its unsurpassed cruelty to its own citizens as well as interlopers. Nor did he let the Russians and the Chinese off the hook on their continued support of the regime where UN and USA sanctions were largely irrelevant. He echoes the earlier warning by the Permanent U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley to the UN that the U.S.’ military option to deal with the problem may have been reached.

 

Trump made no excuse for inadequacy of the Obama Administration’s deal to postpone development of nuclear weaponry by the Iran regime which he reminded listeners had a reputation as black as any historical tyranny. He suggested that his Administration would move to denounce that agreement and curb the export of terrorism through its own and its satellites in the Mideast.

 

Again in language no listener could fail to understand, he pointed out the Venezuelan regime had bankrupted a once prosperous country – one where the dictatorship of Nicolas Maduro has indeed successfully, Trump said, instituted socialism. What Venezuelan democrats know is that U.S. oil refineries have been fitted for import its particularly heavy crude, in 2016 more than 270 million barrels worth about $10 billion.  The decision of whether to close off those imports and further cripple the Maduro regime has to be on the docket at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

 

Trump went out of his way make a demonstration of his own personal support for Israel, and its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, so often a target of anti-Americanism in the UN. The new emphasis on the American alliance with Israel in the Mideast was not only in sharp contrast to the Obama Administration. But it was also by implication a warning there would be no more American support for a Palestinian movement which refused to accept the existence of a Jewish state and continued to sponsor terrorism and assassination.

 

Trump made short shrift of the Hurricane destruction in the United States which he argued would be overcome by this country’s energy and proficiencies.

 

But inmplicit throughout Trumps message was his theme of “America first”, a new U.S. nationalism based on an emphasis on Washington  – as he urged other nations – to assert their national sovereignty. While promising the U.S. would continue its support of the UN – and lending Sec. Gen. António Guterres help in his effort to reform its bloated and inefficient bureaucracy – he warned that sovereign nations could not pass their obligations to international organizations.

 

Donald Trump’s UN speech will go down in U.S. history as a call for a new American nationalism, one based on its sovereignty as he urged other countries to assert theirs.

sws-09-19-17

 

 

 

 

The end of World War II

In a sense, the current Hamburg meeting of the world’s most important economic powers represents the end of the more than six decades of the Post-World War II Era.

In 1945, the second civil war among the European powers ended with the almost total devastation of Europe. Although the U.S., as a late arrival on the scene, suffered almost a half million deaths, its homeland remained isolated from the conflict.

Furthermore, the war effort had left behind an enormously new powerful industrial and managerial revolution.

It therefore seemed logical enough that not only would the U.S. participate in the rebuilding of Europe, but that it would assume a greater proportionate share of the burden.

That arrangement, in which the U.S. “inevitably” assumed a larger per capita role in any international undertaking has continued as the norm. That is despite the fact that the rebuilding of Europe with American production enhanced its already overwhelmingly leading worldwide economic role.

The Europeans – to a greater or lesser degree, notably Germany most of all, ironically one of the originators of the war and the major enemy.– profited from this assigned disproportional contribution. It became part and parcel of an international strategy of the American political Liberal Establishment – which profited from being its administrators, aided by the more conservative/corporatist business community which gained directly from its activity.

But left behind was the debris of the policy; not least was the growing erosion of the U.S.infrastructure which had not kept up nor pushed forward with the maximum new technology.. Also there was the burden – with whatever incidental profit to the economy and it was considerable – of a military defense force against the new threat to Western Europe of Soviet Communism and its international appurtenances.

The losers in this macroeconomic arrangement were the American constituency of lower middle income families and especially those which saw their more menial industrial jobs move abroad to lower wage countries. Their rebellion against their disadvantaged situation suddenly, unperceived initially by the political and bureaucratic establishments, brought the election of Donald K. Trump to the presidency. Trump, of course, was neither a rebel nor an innovator, but ipso facto he began to speak for what he himself labeled “the forgotten Americans”.

It was inevitable, perhaps, that this new domestic American scene was to be reflected on the international tableau. Rather suddenly it was recognized that there was nothing sacred about the rule of thumb which had assigned the U.S. a larger than proportionate cost in any international economic undertaking. The most dramatic, of course, was the American military expenditures [$600 billion in 2017] which maintained armed forces far larger than all the others in the world in order to defend a European constituency which as individuals for the most part did not bear its share of the load.

The expression of this new call for the U.S. 350 million gross national product, almost one quarter of the world’s total, is now being put forward by the Trump Administration in such international fora as the G20. To a world – and even part of the American public – that does not recognize the change of mood and its U.S. policy and strategic implications, it is seen in the Establishment circles – including the Mainsteam Media – as a reversal of all the chosen criteria for U.S. policy, and to an extent it is just that.

But the world – and the American Establishment – is going to have to live with a new U.S. strategy which claims “what is mine is mine”, not what is mine could be partly yours. The political manifestations could turn ugly.
Sws-07-06-17

One president at a time

Former Pres. Barack Hussein Obama refuses to leave the stage.

He is defying the tradition of former presidents who too a senior statesman role with philanthropic, scholarly and other non-political activities. True, he has a different problem with a decimated Democratic Party bereft of leadership.But stationing himself in Washington, with a $8.1 million house, despite the fact he has no roots in the District, was generally seen as an expression of his continued search for political leadership.

He also has violated the tradition of former presidents of taking only a ceremonial role in visits overseas. When Pres. Donald K. Trump was making his first visit to Europe, for a controversial NATO summit, Obama turned up simultaneously to court German Chancellor Angela Merkel. It’s true, of course, again, that Obama was recalling his pre-presidency May 2017 Brandenburg Gate speech before a wildly enthusiastic 70,000 Europeans. He got a premature Nobel Prize for Peace for that performance. But his activities made Trumps’ simultaneous diplomatic efforts more difficult. The sitting president, of course, had taken up the cudgels for NATO members to pay up and Washington is facing difficult trade issues with Merkel, who is playing domestic politics as she approaches an election with lagging support.

Obama “…push [es] back against those trends that would violate human rights or suppress democracy or restrict individual freedoms” and to “fight against those who divide us”. These charges are widely interpreted as being aimed at Trump.
There has been, of course, a tradition that former American officials do not criticize Washington policy from overseas venues. Longer lifespans have proliferated the number of former chief executives increasing the importance of the issue with so many ex-presidents around.

In early June, speaking to the Montreal Chamber of Commerce, Obama called on people, in the face of uncertainty, to stand by some of the very post-World War II economic and political institutions. These are postwar positions Trump has repeatedly called into question.

“In periods like this, people looking for control and certainty — it’s inevitable,” Obama told the Canadians. “But it is important to remember that the world has gone through similar moments. … Our history also shows there is a better way.”
He said people should overcome fear and not listen to those who “call for isolation or nationalism” and those who “suggest rolling back the rights of others.”

The fact is that although Obama is touted as “the first black president”, he neither comes from the Urban Ghetto nor the rising black professional class but a multicultural environment in Hawaii with time out as a student in Indonesia. On June 30 in Jakarta, Obama, greeted by a crowd of thousands of leaders, students and business people, where he opened the Fourth Congress of Indonesian Diaspora, struck out against Trump’s withdrawal from the agreement on climate change. “In Paris, we came together around the most ambitious agreement in history about climate change, an agreement that even with the temporary absence of American leadership, can still give our children a fighting chance.”

At a time when the Trump Administration is facing difficulties in its own Republican Party and with the President’s unpredictable – he says it is a strategic tactic – approach to issues, Obama is becoming a center of anti-Trump activism.With his own fanatical following within the left, Obama may continue to pursue his own set of domestic and foreign policies in public debate with Trump. But it is neither appropriate nor helpful to defy the traditional American withdrawal of former executives after they have had their “innings”.
It’s time for Obama to make a dignified exit to the traditional role of elder statesman.
Sws-07-01-17

The Syrian crisis deepens

With growing civilian casualties and some nine million refugees, Syria’s civil war has taken a turn for worse.

Direct participation of both the U.S. and Israel now appears to have become inevitable. That adds a new dimension to what too often has been seen as a parallel to the Spanish Civil War [1936-39]. That war, with Mussolini and Hitler aiding the Nationalist/Fascist revolt with weapons and advisers while the Allied powers remained neutral, has often been seen as the prelude to World War II.

In a recent defense engagement the U.S. brought down one of Syrian Dictator Bashar al-Assad’s fighters, its first direct intervention in the war where it has maintained a defensive shield protecting U.S. interests. But it has carefully avoided conflict with either Russia or Iran, allies both on the ground supporters of the al Basher regime. Israel, a contiguous neighbor, has tried to remain neutral. But it recently returned artillery fire across its northern Golan Heights border when bombardments inside Syria from ISIS strayed albeit with no casualties. But both ISIS and Hizbollah, Moslem terrorists operating as part of the rebellion against the al Assad regime, but are also Jerusalem’s opponents.

With this threat of direct U.S. and Israeli intervention, Syria now becomes a critical test for Pres. Donald Trump’s foreign policy. A threat to intervene directly if al Assad or the Soviet and Iranian forces allied with him use chemical weapons, in effect against unarmed populations, would be a major test of Trump’s overall policy of nonintervention. That includes, of course,Washington’s close alliance with Israel. Trump had made such nonintervention basic to his new foreign policy following “America First” goals.

Chemical warfare in Syria would put into question three very different but important aspects of U.S. policy:

1] Chemical warfare in the increasingly chaotic conflict would lead to a massive increase in noncombatant victims. The Syrian fighting, much of it for control of strategic urban areas, has taken heavy casualties among women and children as well as the combatants. The fighting often involves unrestrictive bombing by Soviet aircraft supporting the regime. These civilian casualties have become an increasing concern for American public opinion as well as official government policy.

2] although Trump has recently endorsed the strategy of keeping his policy options secret in oder to use ambiguity as a strategic tactic, the fact is the rest of the world sees opposition to the spread of chemical weapons as a basic American policy in Syria. It is assumed that their use would bring direct U.S. intervention as was threatened but ultimately rejected by a more reluctant Obama Administration.

3] Chemical warfare was initiated in World War I with an arms development race among the warring parties. By the end of the war, scientists working for both sides had tested some 3,000 different chemicals for use as possible weapons. Some 50 of these poisons were actually tried out on the battlefield including a widespread use of chlorine for which there were continuing postwar casualties for U.S. military., But the horror and fear of the weapons’ use – even though responsible for less than 1% of WWI’s fatalities and about 7% of its casualties – led to repeated and relative success in banning them in various international treaties and wars leading up to WWII. Nor were they used in WWII.Were chemical weapons to become pervasive in Syria now it would be not only be a serious new development in the war there, but would break the general taboo that has held them in check since 1915 as a weapon of even in all-out war.

sws-06-28-17

The Obama Legacy

Historians will debate the importance of the Obama Administration and its role in American history for decades to come, of course. The legacy which presidents leave behind them is always a concern of our chief executives, and it has been of even more importance to Barack Obama. As he marked a milestone in his tour of duty. leaving on a foreign tour, with a successor he opposed now chosen, he publicly drew his own optimistic record. He carefully picked, of course, in a press conference, what he considered the best interpretation of events over the last eight years. But at least for the time being, when his policies and their repercussions are still relatively fresh, it is hard to draw a balance sheet which is less than disastrous.
Obama, of course, perhaps more than any other recent president, is an ideologue – and he insisted in his political campaigns that he aimed at a “transformation” of American society. His framework for events is a combination of his studies of history but overlaid by the socialist and pro-Communist views of the little social-political group around the University of Chicago who launched his career.
There is no doubt that he has effected changes, whether they are indeed transformations, and whether any have been beneficiary, only time will tell.
But any honest examination of the effects of his strategies is a record of miscalculation and failures. Perhaps the most dramatic ones have been in foreign policy. His campaign to withdraw American power and decision-making from the international scene has demonstrated what had always been apparent to serious students of foreign affairs: the enormous power of the U.S., economic, political and military, has a role in any international confrontation even when Washington chooses to remain neutral or withdraw its influence. A world order without U.S. participation is not only unimaginable to our allies but something our adversaries always question as a possibility.
The Middle East is the most dramatic example of the failure of Obama’s effort to remove American leadership and power in the interelated conflicts there. First, his effort to weaken the U.S.-Israel alliance encouraged the Moslem terrorists in the area. Then, Sec. Hillary Clinton’s courted the brief Moslem Brotherhood regime in Egypt – overthrown by the military through popular demand. Obama and Hillary attempted to boycott the new military rulers thus providing an opportunity for Russian arms sales and influence where it had been expelled a half century ago by pro-Western Egtptians. In Syria, Obama’s initial declaration of opposition to the Basher al Assad regime was followed by withdrawal. Washington’s retreat assured the descent into a bloody, irresolute civil war sending a flood of millions of refugees into neighboring countries and Europe. The threat of force followed by its withdrawal has returned Moscow to a base in the eastern Mediterranean and helped extend Tehran mullahs’ state terrorisn excesses across the Fertile Crescent, even into Latin America. A treaty to curb Tehran’s nuclear weapons, never submitted to the Senate as the Constitution fdemands, is rapidly disintegrating
In East and South Asia, Obama’s ambivalent policies toward Chinese aggression have encouraged Beijing to aggressive territorial claims against its neighbors, discouraged unity among the Southeast Asians against Chinese Communist threats. Again Hillary’s much publicized pivot to the Western Pacific has failed to materialize. Slowly, the rape of the American economy by the Chinese through export subsides and currency manipulation – begun in the Bush Administrations — has become so clear that the Trump Administration qill have no option but a dangerous crackdown.
Obama’s role as the first American Afro-American president was, whether admitted in public discussion, seen as an important opportunity to continue to heal the historic American race problem. But whether in part because his own exotic background linked him neither to the rising black middle class nor the poor of the ghetto, he either took nondefensible positions on individual race incidents or neglected completely the mayhem of his own Chicago hometown. One has to assume that the American black leadership can only see these past eight years as a failure by a president, whatever his color, to contribute to solution of the race problem which appears to most observers to be in an even worse condition than at his entry into office.
Obama’s claim for his Affordable Care solution to long-term U.S. medical care is nearing collapse with skyrocketing costs and failure of the insurance framework which was to support it. His steady stream of executive directives for additional regulation and environmental restraints has contributed toward the slowest and most erratic economic recovery since World War II.
Despite his rhetorical skills and personal popularity as the first black president, Obama’s legacy will be a negative one. As the anti-Obama vote for Donald Trump has demonstrated, it will also cast a shadow on many of the techniques and political forms his very talented political team gave the nation.
sws-11-14-16

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The decision laying on the table

In the last critical hours before the American people decide their new leadership, the hyperbole will mount into near hysteria. Much, if not most, of what is said is either irrelevant or grossly inaccurate. Even the descriptive monologues of The Talking Heads are either exaggerated or dead wrong.
No, it is not certain this is the most important election in history, even recent history. That would have to left to historians with a more dispassionate view decades if not centuries from now.
No, it is not the most dramatic or controversial presidential election ever. Greybeards will remember when a dashing, young, handsome utilities executive organized the balconies at Philidelphia in 1940 to wrestle away the convention from the floor and domination of the historic Taft family of Cincinnati. [In many ways he set the style for the Kennedy brothers a generation or so later.]
No, not the most drama ever? going to work an early November 1948 morning on an overnight shift through an empty Time Square bereft of its NYC Democrats only to find a few minutes later that Harry S Truman had won a victory that surprised almost everyone included the professional politicians.
American presidential campaigns have always been as much show and tell as serious electoral proceedings. The parties were one of the few major governing features the Founding Fathers did not envisage. But even the otherise untouchable George Washington complained to his Thomas Jefferson follower, soon to be president himself, that Democratic-Republican critics were out of hand in their fight against they saw as the royalist Federalists around the first president.
None of this is to minimize the importance of the decision coming in next week’s voting booths. [Early voters by mail or whatever as a new innovation not to be discounted]. The voters are being given a choice of two candidates who may represent more differences than usual. They are not reflected in the policy arguments – which have been few and far between. Hillary Clinton, despite her enormous reliance on the Baracl Obama Presidency’s support, would likely drift quickly away from many of his policies, the disastrous Obamacare and the American overseas withdrawal where she is quietly much more hawkish.
But it is the tone that sets the two contenders apart, not their differences on policies. One has to take Donald Trump’s more flamboyant throw-away proposals with more than a dash of salt. Yes, Washington and the American people have tired of bearing what they consider an overload for the maintenance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But the argument, like all policy conundrums, is complex: is the solution in an expansion of European forces in thegface of new Russian aggression in Georgia, Crimea, Ukraine. There are the complicated payments for resident American forces [which in any event would have to be maintained if in North America]. It’s an old and complicated argument, as old as the Treaty itself. But as the most successful alliance in history, NATO won”t be abandoned overnight whatever Trump’s throwaway suggestion.
But what Trump is adding to the political mix is a sense of the amateur, the non-professional political – one he rides to success on and cherishes. He may know, as he claims and which seems likely, that as a successful big businessman he has more than the novice’s share of understanding of how the system operates. That makes him, he claims in an interesting argument, the one to best tackle and reform it.
But what really sets this election apart – if, indeed, it is that unique – is that that the amateurism which Trump represents and the knowledgeable if tarnished professionalism of Hillary introduce a new and basic “feel” to the contest. There’s little doubt that Trump has reversed the traditional party roles, the mystic that the Democrats since at least Franklin Roosevelt’s time that they represented the little people and their Grand Old Party opponents were the creatures of Wall Street. We may never see those speeches Hillary gave at enormous fees for the corporations [nor Bill gold auxiliary speaking tours from the Clinton Foundation] but her ties to big capital are now well known.
The big policy questions may indeed be how much Trump could and would change major trends in the U.S. economy with his “amateurism”. Some of his [and Hilary’s] economic promises are downright foolish. Neither can nor would “return” the “jobs” they are promising. Washington’s actual contribution to the economy – even with such expensive outlays as FDR’s and Obama’s – has minimal effect. In fact, what business craves at the moment is the withdrawal of Washington’s bear hug. Meeting the demand for jobs against a tsunami of technology which is routinely eliminating them would be an enormous feat; America’s economy even traveling at its current slow rate demonstrates that new phenomenon.
So what’s at stake in a few hours is not thoughtful contradiction of ideas but the contest between a rank if talented amateur and a gifted is tarnished politico.
sws-11-04-16

Mr. Kerry in Wonderland

There is a disputed old argument that extensive air travel causes pgysical injury and distorts cognitive thinking. [Stewardesses did remark that during the changeover in mid-20th century from internal combustion and jet-prop engines interrupted their menstrual cycle.]
Perhaps that is the explanationof a recent responses by Secretary of State John Kerry to a group of University of Chicago political science students. Kerry, like his predecessor Sec. Jillary Clinton, is in constant motion, most of it to foreign parts.
Kerry was presenting his case for the success of the Obama Administration’s foreign policy.
Syria, he said, had actually proved that Pres. Obama’s famous red line had been drawn and was a success. He said it had ushered in a program of the export of chemical weapons of the Assad regime. The fact is, of course, that statement would depend on your definition of chemicals since it is certain Assad and his Russian and Iranian and Hezbollah allies continue to use tear gas in abundance. Nor can the Russian delibe air attacks on civilian air targets including medical facilities – nothing as barbaric seen since the 1930s—be ignored.
Obama’s “deal” with Iran to postpone their introduction of nuclear weapons, however, effective it may be, is another of Kerry’s victories. Again he ignores that within weeks Tehran had boasted of developments in intercontinental ballistics missiles tests – their only utility, of course, would be to transport weapons of mass destruction including nuclear. Nor is their any elucidation if the accusation, quietly confirmed by Washington, that billions in payments to Iran at the same time as the release of American citizens would go to fund the world’s number one state terroruist campaign.
Kerry skirts completely the March 2009 highly staged gift of a badge marked “reset” in English and Russian to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in n March 2009 U.S. The red button Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had the English word “reset”. But the Cyrillic transliteration was “peregruzka”, Russian for “overload”, perhaps a significant mistake!What the Obama Administration believed was to be the beginning of a new cooperative era turned into Vladimir Putin’s seizure of Crimea, his sponsorship of of the Russian-speaking minority toward the destruction of Ukraine, and hints at similar operations in the Baltic states. That was after Hillary Clinton’s State Department approved the transfer of 20% of America’s uranium holdings to Russia [while nine investors in the deal funneled $145 million to the Clinton Foundation]. This was supposed to be another clever maneuver to halt Moscow’s expanding its own production of uranium as a fuel for nuclear weapons.
Kerry claimed the U.S. had preserved freedom of the seas by what must be described by others as a tepid response to China’s claims in the South China Sea. Beijing, despite a fimr denunciation of its sovereignty claims by the Permanent Coiu of Arbigration in the Hague, has moved now from an unsubstantiated claim to negotiations with Washington on how its claims are to be compromised.
Perhaps most egregious of Kerry’s maneuvers has been his courtship of the Vietnamese Communist regime. Ignoring its persecution of Cthe religious and other political prisoners, the argument that a stronger Vietnam in tacit alliance with the U.S. against China’s encroachments in Southeast Asia might be sustained. But the elaborate courtship of the chairman of Hanoi’s Communist Party rather than its government figures reminds us of Kerry’s past. He was, after all, a flamboyant supporter of the cutoff of military aid to a South Vietnam army which had performed well after the American withdrawal. He and his friends assured us there would be no human castrophe. Tell that to the families of a million South Vietnamese who went into fetid political pisons, tens of thousands never to exit, the thousands who lost their lives trying to flee by sea from the new regime and the murder of prominent anti-Communist leaders without trial.
The Mad Hatter told Alice that the truthfulness of his statements was of his own choosing. Kerry obviously has taken that advice.
sws-10-28-16

Mexico plays US politics

Pres. Enrique Peña Nieto’s invitation to the two U.S. candidates for president is one more instance of the growing role of Mexico in domestic American politics.
There was a time, now long ago politically, when Mexican politicians preferred to ignore what they considered an embarrassment of the Mexican American population in the U.S. and the massive flow of migrants from Below the Border. In more recent times, Mexican politicians have seen the growing size and activism in the Mxican American population as one of their negotiating weapons in the increasingly complex relationship with the U.S.
That relationship is one of the most intense of any neighbors in the world with U.S. goods and services trade with Mexico totaling an estimated $583.6 billion in 2015. Exports were $267.2 billion; imports $316.4 billion, with a goods and services trade deficit with Mexico almost $50 billion in 2015.
To some extent this business – the third largest foreign destination and source of American trade – is underpinned by the huge American Mexican American population. It is now estimated at 33 million or a tenth of the U. S. population, a third of whom were born in Mexico.
With its own population tripling in a half century to some 135 million by 2012, Mexico’s long-time monopoly ruling party, the Party of the Institutionalized Revolution [PRI], always had seen immigration to the U.S. as its steam escape valve. Still a largely subsistence agriculture economy with crippling leftwing ideological modifications introduced in the 1930s, Mexico could not provide jobs and livelihood for its population. The PRI did everything it could to push migrants over the border, all the while ignoring their existence in the U.S., but welcoming their remittances to relatives who hadn’t made the journey. [Trump has said he would block the largest remittance channel in the world, more than $23 billion annually. But like so many of Trumps’ proposals, it’s not clear how he could do that and if he could, how to avoid serious consequences to both economies.].
In more recent decades, Mexico has not only begun to try to acknowledger the large Mexican presence in the U.S. but its government – including a short ill-fated opposition interregnum by the Catholic-oriented and northern states based National Action Paty [PAN] has tried to exploit it. Mexican politicians have seen the possibility of its using the growing Mexican American political influence as a weapon in bilateral national negotiations.
Peña Nieto’s invitation to the two candidates to come to Mexico to discuss bilateral issues was a daring maneuver in this new game of growing interrelations. The invitation came despite what some would interpret as Trump’s hostile attitude toward Mexican emigration, including the illegals crossing a very leaky U.S. southern border.
Mexico’s population control policies, and the inevitable fall in birthrate with rising living standards, has somewhat reduced the pressure to push more Mexicans across the border. But even though the birthrate has been cut by two thirds in recent decades, at 1% in a population half of whom was under 25 in 2010, there are surplus workers even which a growing industrialization and modernized corporate agricultural sector [with exports to the U.S.] cannot absorb.
Donald Trump’s immediate acceptance of Peña Nieto’s invitation, despite what some in Mexico and the U.S. might have characterized as his antagonistic statements, was characteristic. He obviously saw it as another opportunity, whatever the outcome of his disussions with the Mexican president, as another of his successful media exploitations. And Hillary Clinton’s delayed response was equally characteristic of her inability to meet Trump’ unpredictable hursts – perhaps an omen for the what most observers believe will be the crucial candidate debates.
Trump has promised to slap restrictions on multinational companies’ exports from migrating U.S. manufacturing which moves south of the border to exploit lower wage and other operating costs. That would call for a renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA], and perhaps negotiation of a new “Bracero” treaty – contract imported agricultural workers – to satisfy the agroindustrial lobby for unrestricted immigration.
Whatever the outcome of Trump;s talks in Mexico City – and they are likely to lead only to publicly announced generalities – he has scored points against Clinton. And at the same time, Peña Nieto will have made his point that Mexican policies [and [politics] can no longer be ignored by American politicians.
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Add to GoodReads
Mexico
Chaos on our Doorstep
Sol Sanders
Paperback
Sol Sanders presents a panorama of Mexico’s problems, gives reasons for the current situation, and explores the possible impact on the United States.
Madison Books
Pages: 232 • Size: 6 x 9
978-0-8191-7296-9 • Paperback • July 1989 • $14.95 • (£9.95)

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sws-08-31-16

Obama’s Syrian legacy

It would be hard to exaggerate the mess in the Middle East that Pres. Barack Obama is leaving his successor.
While the five-year Syrian civil war continues unabated, pitting a number of different armed groups against each other with their foreign sponsors, Washington is caught in its own contradictions. In August American special forces assistance and bombing was given a Turkish incursion into northern Syria even though Ankara’s target was the American Kurdish Syrian ethnic ally most effective in the contest, and Washington’s target the Islamicist rebels now involved in the anti-regime movement.
Ankara fears Syrian Kurdish ethnics are attempting to set up a ministate, perhaps aiming to link up with its own Kurdish armed guerillas it has been fighting for three decades, often with Soviet assistance. The Turks fear America’s autonomous ally, the Syrian Kurds, the Kurdish region in Iraq, and ultimately, Iranian ethnic Kurds may try to form a new secessionist state with their own huge Turkish Kurdish minority.
Meanwhile, Turkey accuses Americans of having been involved in the recent failed coup against an elected Turkish government, one that under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is steadily headed toward an authoritarian Islamicist regime. Erdogan blames Fethullah Gulen. Muslim cleric and politician, once his closest infiltrating the state judicial and security system, for leading the coup and has formally asked for his extradition from the U.S.
Turkish airmen at the NATO-Turkish-U.S. base at Incirlik air base near the Syrian border were accused by Erdogan of implication in the failed coup, and U.S. operations there aimed at the Daesh [ISIS or ISIL Islamic terrorists] were halted temporarily. Not a comforting thought for Washington planners with nuclear weapons deployed there.
Erdogan’s leaky southern border has seen Islamicist support move south from Ankara and hundreds of thousands of migrants — some refugees from violence, others economic immigrants – moving on to Europe. His effort to blackmail German Chancellor Angela Merkel for additional aid and free movement of Turks inside the European Union in exchange for blockin the migrants has collapsed. Germany is hiccupping violently from the more than a million “refugees” it admitted last year with Merkel’s welcome.
Meanwhile, Obama courts Tehran’s mullahs. He signed what many believe was a no enforceable pact to halt Iran’s nuclear weapon, even though within weeks they publicly bragged of their firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile for carrying such a weapon. The American president went through secret contortions to pay $400 million – originally part of earlier arms purchases by the government of Reza Shah Palevi which Washington helped unseat – to free hostages. Billions more apparentlyis on its way.
The mystery is, of course, what Obama [and supporters of his Persian policy] think they are buying: Iran is already the world’s leasing sponsor of state terrorism and has lined up Mediterranean satellites in Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. Both, of course, threaten Israel. One of the troubled aspects between Jerusalem and Ankara, once close military allies, is Turkish support of Hamas, a common enemy now of Egypt and the Israelis.
Obama didn’t create the bitter and explosive Mideast animosities, of course. But he has built on that inheritance, antagonizing America’s tradition Sunni and Israeli allies in the region. In Syria, the crux of the conflict, Turkey is ostensibly an ally of the U.S. is seeking to oust the Damascus regime under Basher al Assad, supported in turn by the Russians as well as the Persians. Moscow, despite its still a crippled relic of Soviet power, is creating naval and air bases in Syria – culpable in mass bombing of civilian populations – aiming at the old Soviet influence.
Whether Obama’s original threat to intervene in Syria, then withdrawn, would have made the difference in controlling the Mideast chaos, is an unanswerable question. But there is no doubt that his policies have helped create the current chaotic situation, increasingly involving the major powers, that could be the beginning of a regional conflict spreading beyond its current confines.
sws-08-30-16

The Finns choose

Do the Finns know something we don’t?
Reporting out of Helsinki – as deficient as ever with the mainstream media – says the Finns have negotiated what amounts to a military alliance with Washington. Finnish Defense Minister Jussi Niinistö says he hopes the deal – incorporating joint military training, information sharing and research – will be concluded before the U.S. presidential elections.
Given Finland’s long and tortured effort to maintain its neutrality, one has to speculate. The move appears to fly in the face of growing American criticism and perhaps support of the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance as well as the Obama Administration’s general withdrawal.
Helsinki’s No. one concern [with its 5.5 million], of course, has to be its giant Russian neighbor [143.5 million]. It’s not a new one, nor a simple one: when Moscow grabbed Finland in its wars with the declining Swedish Empire, it made a distinction. The Grand Dutchy of Finland was not part of the Tsarist Empire; an Helsinki statute memorializes favorably the ill-fated Nicolas II as Grand Duke since he continued to permit Helsinki autonomy.
But in 1939 Josef Stalin made demands Helsinki would not meet, the Finns gave Moscow a black eye in the three-month Winter War. With their white-clad ski troops and wirery little Uzi submachine gun, the Finns held off the Russians long enough to win the hearts of most of the democratic world. Even the hardest-nosed U.S. “isolationist” cheered the Finns [except for an Communist English professor at Chapel Hill, N.C. – where else! – who set up an “Aid for the Soviet Unuion” desk!]
But the cheering didn’t include breaking the American Neutrality Act and the West Eutopean democracies were still appeasing dictators to avoid the outbreak of War. According to later statistics by Soviet Dictator Nikita Kruschev, 1.5 million Soviet men were sent to Finland and one million of them were killed, while 1,000 aircraft, 2,300 tanks and armored cars and an enormous amount of other war materials were lost. Little Finland’s losses were limited to 25,904 dead or missing and 43,557 wounded.
But in the end, the Finns paid a heavy price, reparations originally totaled $300 billion [1938 prices] in electrical goods, shipping and motors. But ironically the goods shipped to the Soviets – which did not do much for an already crippled economy there – industrialized a former agricultural country.
Even the territorial concessions were stark, in the long term, including abandoning the heartland of the old Finno-Urugian heartland in the Karelian peninsular [where workers were once recruited for building Peter the Great’s Petrograd window on the West]. More than 400,000 Finnish Karelians,] or 12% of Finland’s population, had to be relocated. But their generally higher skills and education spread across the remainder of Finland helped build the new economy wqhich by the 2000 was leading the world’s wireless telephony.
Stalin, who said he feared an alliance of the Finns with Nazi Germany because of its prominent Baltic German minority, produced a self-fufiling prophecy. Nazi troops employed Finnish bases after Hitler’s attack on Poland opening World War II. [The Finns held out against some of the more notorious Nazi repression, including moving against its small Jewish population.] In the postwar settlement, Finland lost access to the Arctic and more of Karelia. [But, again ironically, even large recent Finnish investments in Karelia timber and minning where Stalin moved in other Empire settlers, has left it a crippled appendage of Moscow.]
Successive Finnish governments since World War II have tried to maintain a neutrality between the Blocs in the Cold War, sometimes aided at its back by a nominally Swedish neutrality. [Swedish neutrality has often been honored more in the breach than in its observance: Stockholm permitted transit of Nazi troops to Norway in 1940 and was an important German source of high-tech weaponry during the War].
Helsinki has already signed a similar agreement with the U.K. and both Sweden and Finland have taken part as observers in recent NATO meetings and military exercises. Finland spokesmen, with a 800-mile border with Russia, say the option of joining NATO is open, but opinion polls show a majority opposed. Although Vladimir Putin has publicly announced the withdrawal of Russian troops on Finnish borders, that is not the case, and the threat – also hinted at in relations with the Baltic States including against fellow Finno-Urguians just a short ferry ride away in Estonia with its large Russian-speaking minority.
The general speculation is that Finland is abandoning neutrality because of the growing threat from Putin. But it may well be just the opposite: despite the recent attempt to rebuild Russian military forces after breakdowns in the August 2008 attack on Georgia, there is a widespread view that Putin is bluffing, that continuing threats against Ukraine and the Baltics are only feints. Russian Federation forces, more and more dependent on Moslem recruits from Central Asia, are in sad shape.
If that were the Helsinki view, it might well explain why neutrality before a diminished foe is less an option than an alliance with even an increasingly reluctant American intervention and a NATO badly needing reconstruction. And there are the American elections which could turn U.S. policy around.
sws-08-24-16

Islamcist infiltration

The nacent ideological conflict over the nature of Islam and its relation to the current wave of terrorism is just coming into focus. The tardiness of the delineation of issues is not only regrettable but to a certain extent mysterious. Why has the nature of Islamic terrorism not been examined even by those who unlike Pres. Barack Obama and his minions refuse to even name it?
However much sincere Moslems who abhor the jihafists, their ideology and their violence, try to detach themselves from it or a less sophisticated Islamic mass simply tries to ignore the issue, a bond exists. The Islamic terrorists identify themselves as Moslems, not as Southern Baptists or Christian Scientists. They argue, and they can quote chapter and verse in original Koran passages and the hadith [the vast histories and commentaries on Mohammed’s life and his beliefs], to “prove” that that their barbaric actions are rooted in the religion’s tenets.
Unfortunately, this relationship leads to a second and more threatening problem for the democratic societies. That is the wide acceptance in our free societies of individual Moslems who echo these sentiments, but often in more august surroundings such as the universities or even in organizations devoted to multicultural understanding and acceptance of others’ beliefs.
The “revelation” this week, finally, by even the mainline media that Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s long time closest collaborator and alter ego, has in fact been in the past a collaborator of radical Muslims. As the long kept “secrets” surface, it will be revealed that not only has Abedin written in the past supporting ultra-Islamic causes, but she is steeped in such ideology through a family long associated with those concepts. Her mother, in fact, widow of a prominent Pakistani Islamicist installed in what passed for a Muslim think tank iu Saudi Arabia, could well be considered the head of the Muslim Brotherhood’s female auxillary. The Brotherhood, of course, is the latest manuifestsation of the old Islamic drive for total political power throughout the world. And Abedin escorted Clinton on more than one occasion to counsels in the Middle East with her mother.
There is a frightening similarity between the growing infiltration of such advocates of Islamic supremacy – the totalitarian nature of Islam as a political movement with religious trappings – and Communism for half a century. Much as Western intellectuals often were persuaded to accept if not Communist doctrine itself but its toleration because it theoretically advocated so many of the utopian concepts of the whole socialist left, Muslim advocates of ultimately equally disastrous concepts are being tolerated. Islam, after all, is said to preach equality before a complete “submission” to Allah with no prejudice of class, ethnicity or race.
It was, insiduslously, this infiltration of the Communist ideologues – particularly in the early post-World War II reinforced by wictorious Soviet armies in eastern and central Europe – that threatened to win through the ballot box all Western Europe. Only the overwhelming strength of U.S. armed forces backed by a giant economy which had not seen the destruction of wartime Europe and the democrats of the non-Communist socialists that turned the tide. Unparalleled American generosity in rebuilding Europe was as much a miracle as the event itself. Even that finale intellectual outcome had to finally wait on the implosion of the Soviet Union itself, once and for all confirmation of the utter nonsense of Communist economics and its heinous threat to civil liberties.
Islamic terrorist spokesmen have by no means reached the high tide of Communist influence in Western intellectual circles in the 1930s. But the very fact that the most intimate collaborator of Hillary Clinton, a nominee for president of the United States in a highly contested election, has reached that height is a dire warning. The time to discuss the nature of Islam as an ideology and its adherents in the world of politics can not longer be denied under the false rubric of “political correctness” — the inability to distinguish honest, straight-forward intellectual discussion, from prejudice and religious intolerance.

sws-08-23-16

Facing facts

Facing facts

There is a consensus that Islamic terrorism is now the greatest threat to America’s peace and stability. [Some few would demur; that it takes a close second place to current economic stagnation.]

Yet within that consensus there are two distinct attitudes about what is the defense against this menace. One calls for a continuing, debilitating but long-term campaign to destroy the terrorists. The other calls for an all-out, immediate strategy to destroy the terrorists and their sanctuaries. These two approaches cross party lines, although Presidential Nominee Hillary Clinton despite her inheritance of the Obama Administration and its avoidance of foreign commitments tends to fudge that approach. Donald Trump bombastically takes the later route although he has been less than specific just how he would succeed. And so in fact, the two approaches cross party lines and often other ideologies.

For many, too young to have been in on its origins, the successful but long war against Communism is only vaguely appreciated. Sven F. Kraemer has recently published what may not be an easily readable text but the best compendium of data on the long campaign to resist Soviet-led Communism’s attack on European and American societies. “Inside the Cold War from Marx to Reagan” is, indeed, a bible for those interested in learning how much the conflict entailed. And perhaps no one other than Kraemer is more qualified to compile it, the son of a famous anti-Communist strategist, and himself a veteran of many critical government posts from which the fight was observed and led.

Will the fight against Islamic terrorism be that kind of long and tortured conflict that ultimately destroyed Communism as Kraemer documemts? Obviously it is the answer to that question which dictates the current two approaches to the problem.

There is evidence in historical analogies that the current resistance to Islamic fanaticism current drive into Western societies is a repetition of earlier struggles. The totalitarian political concept of Islam [“surrender”, indeed as its Arabic word signifies] coupled with religious mythology and moral concepts borrowed from Jews and Christians, has been repelled by the West before. But earlier Islamic efforts to overwhelm the other cultures were led by armies. This time, there is the threat of a doubled-edge weapon: an ideological assault on a Christian world which has lost its faith through its own institutions, and by a vast wave of Moslem migrants filling the empty spaces left by falling Western birthrates.

Furthermore, the West is disarmed by its attempt to give Islam irrational ideological tolerance in the open forums which are the essence of modern democratic societies. When in 2016 Pope Benedict XVI tried to reassert the valid arguments critical of the foundations of Islam, there was a torrent of negative controversy and even abuse from the elites. Benedict’s critics refused the basic argument that it matters whether God is essentially ;ogos (Divine Reason) or voluntas (Pure Will), which is from where Moslems approach their godhead. The first understanding facilitates civilization development, true freedom, and a complete understanding of reason. The second sows the seeds of decline, oppression, and unreason.

To sling the epithet of “Islamophobia” at those who argue for such fundamental differences between the Moslem culture and the West’s intellectual inheritance is to not only misunderstand the argument, but to threaten the security of our world.

sws-08-23-16

What to do about Turkey?

Vice President Joe Biden’s highly publicized visit to Turkey next week is likely to prove critical, if inconclusive. Whether he is able to establish a new relationship with a North Atlantic Treaty Organization [NATO], the one with by far the largest military forces after the U.S., is crucial to the whole Middle East as well as the U.S. bilateral alliance and with its European NATO allies.
Biden is seen as trying to make a new bargain with Pres. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In the past few months, Erdogan has accelerated his accumulation of power through the usual machinations of a popular leader but with authoritarian tendencies, shucking elements of Turkey’s secular constitution. The recent failed military coup – apparently by the last remnants of the secularists who through military dominance have been the guardians of an effort to maintain the non-Islamic state – has been an excuse for increased repression and rampant anti-American propaganda.
The fear is that Erdogan is now turning his back on almost a hundred years when the country tried to move to a modern state with top-down Westernization. The abandonment of the state capitalist role for liberalization of the economy over the last decade had delivered unprecedented growth and prosperity. But that boom has ended, in part another victim of the worldwide economic slowdown.
Turkey had always been a model for other Moslem governments trying fitfully to break away from traditional Islam which combines government with religion. That struggle goes on among the 1.3 billion people in the Arab-Moslem world – from Morocco to Indonesia. And while no adequate response has yet surfaced, Turkey had been perceived to have made the transition. That now appears dubious at best.
But once again, the world is in one of those periods when 1500-year-old concepts of Arab-Moslem conquest and forced conversion has been part of the religion’s creed. That many, perhaps most, Moslems would ignore this concept is not enough to block a determined, fanatical minority from jihad – propounding the duty of a Muslim to maintain and spread his religion by whatever means.
Erdogan has played a clever game. He has managed, despite the bitter rejection by many outspoken European Union officials, to continue the hope of Turkish adherence to the Bloc. His flirtation with the Islamists — with such moves as reestablishing the death penalty — has now, however, vitiated that prospect.
He blackmailed German Chancellor Angela Merkel for free movement of Turkish nationals within the EU, swapped for Ankara stemming the flow of Syrian and other Middle East refugees into Western Europe. But Merkel’s original welcome resulting in more than a million migrants entering her country last year is increasingly producing a backlash. Integrating newcomers with completely different cultural values has failed spectacularly, demonstrated in highly publicized crimes including rape.
Unlike the Europeans, Biden has the luxury of negotiating from a stronger hand, unlike the Europeans’ proximity and increasing problem of their growing largely unassimilated Moslem minorities. He can exploit Erdogan’s wildly fluctuating foreign policy which has failed in establishing a neo-Ottoman regime building on its once imperial presence in the region. A flirtation with Moscow – which supplies half its energy thereby running a huge trade deficit — is a feint aimed at Washington and its European allies. But just as they find themselves on different sides in the Syrian civil war, Erdogan cannot ignore Moscow’s threatening attempt to reinstall the Soviet role in the Black Sea and the Balkans.
Biden has to come home with something. One trophy would be at least promises for Turkey to tighten its borders, stop permitting aid to flow to the Muslim terrorists, and promising a more active Turkish collaboration in fighting Daesh [ISIS and ISIL], hoping that Erdogan recognizes that his Islamicism will not protect him from rising Moslem terrorism. But getting Turkey firmly back into the Western alliance would require stronger leadership of those partners than the Obama Administration can muster.
sws-08-16-16

Aleppo’s appeal

An epic continuing battle continues for control of Syria’ largest city, historically one of the most famous centers of urban civilization in the world. Before its demise in the post-World War I Franco-British partition of the Levant it ranked with Cairo and Istanbul [Constantinople] as a major cosmopolis, the Western end of the famous Silk Road from China to the West.
A call by 15 physicians in a letter personally directed to Pres. Barack Obama has dramatized the dilemma facing Washington. Obama’s history of “drawing red lines” in the Syrian conflict only to be forfeited has confused foreign participants in the struggle and the American people. His statements led finally only to America abandoning Syria to the tender mercies of the ruthless Basher al Assad regime which allied with the Russians wages war on an unprecedented scale on its civilian population, matched by the incredible brutality of Daesh [ISIS or ISIL] and its terrorist allies in the opposition.
Government and rebels in the past few days have clashed in southern Aleppo, voiding a truce promised by the Russians to enter the city. Moscow had earlier promised “humanitarian windows” to permit humanitarian convoys of food and medicines to transit. Mosocw now refuses to comment on the current situation including the use of Russian planes against the rebels and civilian populations. Human Rights Watch listed six deliberate strikes in the past two weeks by al Assad regime or Russian warplanes on health facilities in the north that killed 17 people.
Obama’s determination not to involve the U.S. in another irresolute Mideast war is certainly understood by a war-weary American public and justifiable to many of his supporters among the foreign policy experts. But now that has to be balanced with the possibility of another one of those catastrophic destructions of human life which the U.S. and the world have promised “never again”.
The doctors point out that hospitals and medical facilities have become not accidentally but deliberate targets in the warfare. This small group of health providers remaining in the city is dealing with an impossible situation as their letter dramatizes, including a shortage of medicines and supplies which often culminates in triage among wounded children. Furthermore, the rebels accuse government forces of carrying out an attack Wednesday using chlorine gas on rebel-held residential neighborhoods.
It seems unlikely that Obama can openly reverse his Mideast and particularl Syrian policy in the last few months of his administration, He has made American withdrawal the essence of his foreign policy and with serious and obvious U.S. failures on all fronts, its ideological goal is about all that is left of his tattered effort for “transformation” of U.S. foreign policy. Whether he has the courage to do so with a good deal of obscurantist rhetoric remains to be seen.
But we believe it is incumbent on the Congress immediately to take the lead in this human crisis. The physicians have pointed out that Americans earlier had promised to set up “corridors” into the embattled areas. These would carry drugs and foodstuffs to the estimated more than 1.2 million living in the government-held zone as well as some 250,000 now in the rebel-held areas of the city.
Also additional public pressure must be placed on the al Assad regime through Moscow and its allies in Tehran to end what have been reported as recent chemical warfare attacks on the rebels by government forces, apparently with the tacit cooperation of Russian air. French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said Thursday he was “concerned by reports of a new chemical attack… that is said to have claimed four lives people and left dozens injured.”
A United Nations framework is in place to handle humanitarian aid to both those in the rebel and government areas. It is incumbent now that the U.S. tale the lead in utilizing it to prevent a monumental human disaster.
sws-08-11-16

Obama’s deadly compromise

President Barack Obama confirmed in his press conference Thursday that he has accepted as unavoidable the recurrent, periodic Islamic terrorist attacks in the U.S. and abroad. That was the import of his answers to questions wherein he indicated that he would not modify what he considers his winning policy in the Mideast to “degrade and destroy” Daesh [ISIS or ISIL].
His response to criticism and demands that the U.S. should undertake a more aggressive policy toward the Mideast source of Islamic terrorism was to warn about additional civilian casualties from any such American action. Yet he acknowledged that Russian intervention in the Syrian conflict is accompanied by massive attacks on the civilian population. He mocked spokesmen, including inferentially the Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who have called for the kind of all-out military effort against ISIS that destroyed Nazism and held the Communists at bay during the 35 years of The Cold War. Obama’s response is despite the fact that most American military commanders and planners argue that ISIS falls only behind Russia as Washington’s principal threat.
In effect, Obama’s program of action accepts an unspecified duration when the current worldwide wave of terrorist activity would continue. His rationalization for accepting such a level of violence against the civilian population was that there has always been terrorist activity from many different quarters over the past decades and that it was therefore not a new phenomenon. The implication was that terrorism is a natural phenomenon and may not ever be completely eliminated.
Obama outlined at some length the failure of his continuing negotiations with the Russians to end their support of the Basher al Assad regime in Syria. However, he took no note of the limited Moscow commitment in Syria today compared with Soviet times because of Russia’s diminished military capacity. Admitting that negotiations with the Russians have not produced any diminishment of Moscow’s activities in Syria, he offered the admonition that should such activity continue, it would condemn Russia as an international pariah in world opinion. That such an epithet would have already been accepted in most democratic circles around the world did not seem to reduce for him the importance of such additional evidence coming out of the Syrian civil war. Nor did Obama’s concentration on the Syrian conflict take account of Russian aggression in the Crimea, its subversion among Russian-speakers in the eastern Ukraine, and its continuing threats to the Baltic states.
The President did argue that the U.S. military activity against Daesh in the Mideast, however successful, would require a more comprehensive program to meet ISIS’ ideological concept. Yet, he failed again, to grapple with that very problem, that is to meet the challenge of the terrorists’ allegiance to Islam which forms their ideological framework. Obama continues, as do most observers, to acknowledge but intellectually ignore that however perverted and distorted their view, the terrorists base their creed on their own version of Islam. Obama ignores that a discussion of Islam and its relation to the terrorists is critical to any examination of their ideology.
Like other important international spokesmen, in fact Obama refuses to advocate that the world examine and discuss whatever tenets that religion holds which produce the current wave of terrorism. Instead, he like others fall back on such clichés as “Islam is a religion of peace” and the obvious conclusion that most Moslems are not advocates of terrorism. What Obama and his supporters ignore is that the terrorists are not Christian Scientists nor Mormons, but while all Moslems are not terrorists, all terrorists are Moslems. They ignore the long history of Arab and Moslem holy war [jihad] to force non-believers [kafirs] or face death or enslavement.
Obama’s acceptance , in effect, of the current level of world terrorism will lead to further augmentation of ISIS as it spreads it network around the world, gaining psychotic and fanatical adherents of an aggressive version of Islam because of its “success” in terrorizing the civilized world.

sws-08-04-16

The Iran mystery

In all the torturous puzzles of the current Mideast chaos, perhaps the greatest unknown is what the Obama Administration thinks it is accomplishing with its Iran policy.

Again, in the past few days, we have had evidence that Pres. Barack Obama is moving – this time secretly – to accommodate the mullahs in Tehran. The explanation for the payment of an old debt to the Shah’s regime is worse than ludicrous. Even more evident is the extreme secrecy with which the $400 million was paid, indicating that the Obama Administration was perfectly aware that it was conducting a dubious deal at best.

The latest revelation builds on a series of negotiations and concessions Washington has made to Iran. The assumption has to be made that Obama believes that some sort of overall settlement can be made between the U.S. and the Tehran regime as part of an effort to stabilize the Mideast.

However, any objective review of the current situation – excluding of course the secrets passing back and forth between Obama and the mullahs – indicates there is no such possibility of an accomodation with the religious fanatics who direct the regime and its worldwide terrorist campaign. So, the mystery is what does Obama knows or thinks he knows that is not generally acknowledged by others viewing the relationship.

In fact Obama is dealing with a regime of religious fanatics who have chosen the most egregious tenets of traditional Islam to wage war against “infidels”. Their stock and trade has from the beginning of the regime been anti-Americanism. They are based on accusations of U.S. intervention in Persia’s affairs which ignore the pro-Nazi regime on the outbreak of World War II and the post-war effort of the Soviet Union to take over the country with satellite regimes among its several minorities.

Furthermore, there is considerable evidence that the regime no longer commands the majority of Iranian public support and rules only with the use of vicious internal repression. That revulsion against the regime – which in the end makes it fragile and any “deal” with it equally precarious – came with the carefully controlled elections of 2013 when the regime was threatened by a general rejection. At that time, despite calls from the dissidents who had been cheated of their victory, for American support, Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ignored them

As the Obama Administration constantly acknowledges, Tehran’s mullahs are supporting anti-U.S. movements in the Mideast and terrorist activities in Latin America. It was, in fact, suicide bombers belonging to Hizb’allah’s earlier organization that killed 241 U.S. marines and 58 French servicemen, six civilians in Beirut in 1983. Today not only Hizb’allah but the Hamas terrorists in Gaza are projections of the mullahs’ power in the eastern Mediterranean. The fact that Hamas is Sunni and originally a creature of the ultra-Sunni Moslem Brotherhood of Egypt, suggests Tehran’s growing international clout.

Obama’s extended negotiations – and concessions to the Tehran mullahs – has alarmed the U.S. traditional Sunni Arab allies, the Egyptians, the Saudis and the Gulf oil states. Israel, a target the mullahs have announced they want to wipe out, is having to adjust its relationship with other players in the region – including recently returned Moscow to Syria — in an effort to meet a Tehran regime strengthened through Obama’s efforts.

The Obama Administration’s rationalization that its courtship of the mullahs and the recent payment is part of settling long-standing accounts is even more ridiculous. Administration spokesmen have been forced to acknowledge that its payments are not only fungible – that is substituting for other expenditures of the mullahs – but probably actually going to support its terrorist activities.

There continue to be 4,700 private US claims against Tehran for seizure of prosperities after the fall of the Shah.. An international special tribunal has ordered payments by Iran to US nationals totaling over $2.5 billion. By 2014, almost all private claims had been resolved, but several intergovernmental claims were still to be negotiated – hardly a record on which to base a new and accommodating relationship.

It is time that the President tells the rest of us on what basis his Iran policy is formulated, the secret behind his negotiations with one of the most hideous and destructive regimes in the world?

sws-08-04-16

Misplaced charity

Pres. Barack Obama’s proposal for what would be a substantial new entry of Syrian refugees is a major miscalculation of traditional American morality and generosity.
It is true that the 13.5 million Syrian refugees, half of them expelled or hounded out of their country, are a momentous human tragedy. And America has almost always responded to some calamities.
But the question of additional Syrian refugees coming to the U.S. is part of a challenging failing American immigration policy which has become an extremely divisive political issue.
While generally unrecognized, it has arisen because of the profound changes which have taken place in worldwide migration patterns and the traditional one of entry into the U.S. Rapid and cheap transportation and communication has changed the pattern of the lives of newcomers to America.
In the great wave of American immigration of the late 19th and early 20th century, Europeans abandoned their homelands with a desire to build a new life in The New World. Ties to the old country, while culturally deep, dissolved – and, indeed, some ethnic and religious groups such as the Jews did not want to look back on persecution. Even the Italians, with their celebrated family ties, came and for the most part to their new neighborhoods, only occasionally maintained their European ties, mainly for remittances for family to follow them.
In the 21st century, immigrants to the U.S. may have much of the same motivation. But large numbers come for economic benefits and either maintain their relationships with their home countries, return at frequent intervals, or, indeed, return to their original homelands.
Those New York City Indian and Pakistani taxi drivers, for example, rarely bring their families, and return on long “vacations” to their families with whom they are in constant contact through cheap communication. This group, like other migrants with similar patterns, have no intention of becoming ‘Americans” in the traditional way although they might acquire U.S. citizenship for convenience and profit. Important, often influential, groups such as these exist today at every level of American society including the highest echelons of business and culture in our major cities.
Another significant difference from past patterns of immigration is that welcoming ethnic or religious communities in the U.S. which once helped integrate the newcomers are no longer prominent if they exist at all. Syrian Moslems, for example, find little institutional aid from coreligionists when they immigrate to the U.S. And, in fact, some of the existing Moslem organizations are suspect with ties to the Moslem Brotherhood, the fountainhead of Islamic terrorism. Ostensibly pursuing an electoral policy [The Brotherhood’s strategy of “One man, one vote – one time!”], Its attempt to establish an Islamic dictatorship was proved quickly to the satisfaction of the Egyptian electorate which welcomed the military back to power.]
On August First U/S. Homeland Security Jeh Johnson issued “temporary protected status” to some 8,000 Syrian, many of whom had arrived in the U.S. illegally. He did so, he said, because ““Syria’s lengthy civil conflict has resulted in … [A]ttacks against civilians, the use of chemical weapons and irregular warfare tactics, as well as forced conscription and use of child soldiers have intensified the humanitarian crisis.” Another 7,000 Syrian refugees – many of them persecuted Christians and other non-Moslem minorities — have been admitted legally to the U.S. since Oct. 1, 2015. Obama announced in September that the U.S. would admit 10,000 Syrian refugees by Sept. 30, 2016.
But GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump has attacked this decision, arguing that – as FBI Director John Comey has admitted – despite elaborate UN and US procedures to process them, little is known of the refugees’ background. Daesh [ISIS or ISIL] like other Mideast terrorists has made no secret of their attempt to infiltrate refugee communities. Only a few such subversives, given the gruesome “effectiveness” of suicide bombers, could defeat efforts to defend Americans against attacks such as took place in Orlando, San Bernardino and Ft. Hood by immigrants.
American charity might better be directed toward relief efforts for the Syrian refugees in the region. Oil-rich neighbors in the Persian Gulf have not met demands that they absorb, at least temporarily, Syrians [and other Mideasterners masquerading as Syrians] who have moved into Jordan, Turkey and Western Europe by the hundreds of thousands. [Germany took in more than a million migrants from the Mideast last year, and difficulties of absorbing them and with highly dramatized attacks on women and other crinmes, are now producing a backlash against Chancellor Angela Merkel’s welcome].
Illegal migration from Mexico and Central America has already become a major problem for U.S. immigration policy, developing into a political football between the parties based on a still nebulous growing influence of Spanish-speaking voters. Adding the Syrian problem to this controversy neither benefits the humanitarian goals of its sponsors nor the formulation of new American immigration policies to meet a new world of migration.
sws-08-4-16

Shame on us!

The almost total absence of public mourning for an 85-year-old Christian priest whose throat was slit by Islamicist terrorists while he led prayer in a small church in Normandy, France, is a scandal.
Even the French have demonstrated less feeling for this horrendous deed than one would expect from an event which took place in the village which once hosted the trial of Joan of Arc, France’s national heroine and a saint of French Christianity.
There was no moment of silence in the U.S. Democratic Convention, not unexpected given its total avoidance of the worldwide terrorist threat. One could have expected that Pres. Barack Obama, too, would have made a special effort to acknowledge this incident, so gratuitously evil as to be virtually indescribable. But that might be charged to his continuing effort to obscure the terrorist threat by refusing to name its origin in Islam and his elaborate courting of the terrorist mullahs in Tehran.
Searching for the answer to our question is the general concern above all others of the American and European political elites to avoid any hint of criticism or Islam. To be accused of Islamophobia now is an accusation in the Establishment which ranks above all others by the moral standards of those believers in bien pensé Being “politically correct” bans any negative reference to Islam.
Not only is this errant nonsense but it is a continuing impediment to the forceful pursuit of a worldwide campaign to end Islamic terrorism. Moslems, above all, must concede that the terrorists now among us who pledge their loyalty to Islam as a religion must be confronted on that ideological score..As the crude phrase has it, not all Moslems are terrorists, of course. But all terrorists are Moslems.
What is it, indeed, that however twisted in the history and practice of Islam which can be misinterpreted, if you will, into a rational for the kind of killing of innocents that took place in Etienne du Rouvray, in an almost empty church, involving three parishioners, two nuns and a very old priest. Knife-wielding ISIS terrorists interrupted the service and slit the throat of Father Jacques Hamel and recorded their crime to use to attract new followers.
The truth is that much of the rationale which is constantly mouthed by our leadership about Islam simply is not true. It is not one of the three Abrahamic religions. It is a totalitarian concept which demands total adherence on the part of its believers for whatever its tenets as expressed by its largely uneducated clergy. The test of Greek knowledge which early was applied to Judaism and was a part of early Christianity was rejected almost a thousand years ago by Moslem theorists. The few Moslem voices who oppose Islamic terrorism are nevertheless reluctant to take on the problem of the political movement Islam represents.
Since its founding in the Arabian deserts, Islam has not been a religion of peace is so often stated. It has, in fact, from its origins been spread largely by the sword with the death of “non-believers” and those Moslems who have rejected its principal tenets.
The history of Europe shows how since its founding 1500 years ago, organized Islam – when it has existed – has challenged the political status of the European states. At its high points of strength, it has come near overpowering European armies and putting the West to the sword of forced conversion.
Yes, it is true, that Islam has absorbed – after its initial brutal and primitive organization among the Arabs – some of the rich philosophical background of its conquests such as from the Persians. But it remains, largely, a religion of conquest wherein now reside many, perhaps a majority, of supposed adherents who reject this concept. But it is also true that often through intimidation and intellectual confusion this vast majority refuses or fears to publicly oppose its ignominious concepts.
Until this problem of the fundamental relationship between Western societies and the peaceful Buddhist societies of Asia is addressed, there is no hope of defeating the continuing worldwide terrorist threat.
sws-07-30-16

The coming clash with China

Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the fall of 2011 used the buzz word “:pivot” three times to announce a major shift in the Obama foreign policy, putting major emphasis on South and East Asia Asia. But the reality – as detailed in a report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies commissioned by Congress – is that the Administration’s rebalance effort may be insufficient” to secure American interests. Clinton herself, in her campaign for president, has reversed her stand on the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact, one of the major diplomatic and economic initiatives after spending years working on it.

Whether or not Clinton makes it to the presidency, what is becoming increasingly clear is that China, itself, is headed for a crash which will not only threaten her Communist regime but the U.S. – and its allies – ability to deal with it.

A similar breakdown of the Chinese state occurred in the 19th Century. But in the heyday of European colonialism and American expansion into the Western Pacific, it came piecemeal. And however catastrophic for the Chinese people, its effects largely were relegated to the sidelines of world history.

But in the 21st century, as China and its 1.3 billion people again appear likely to crash, a failed state with all its new and intimate trade and political relation ships to the rest of the world will also be catastrophic for its partners.

The signs of the approaching crisis are not that hard to discern. But precisely because they carry such weight, they are being studiously ignored in Washington’s political corridors in favor of much more publicized domestic and international events.

The evidence for a prediction of a Chinese crash is stark:

Xi Jinping, China’s Communist Party head and chief of state and government, is failing in his attempt to make himself an all-powerful reincarnation of Chairman Mao Tse-tung. His increasing repression, despite the new environment of the digital revolution with its pervasive social media, been Maoist in its aspirations. But a recent conference on China’s growing economic, political and social problems sponsored by Xi’s Prime Minister Li Keqiang dramatically excluded Xi’s participation. It was immediately seen that contrary to a general perception abroad, the struggle within the Party for control continues, to the detriment of governance in a time of rising economic and political crisis.

That crisis arises from the fact the raison d’etre of the regime stripped of its Marxist ideology in all but name, has been sensational economic growth, is under siege. The increasingly suspect Chinese statistics claim its gross national product is still growing at 6.7 percent, a long way from 2003 to 2008, when annual growth averaged more than 11 percent,

But this growth is at the cost of a rapidly escalating debt. Beijing borrowed its way out of the 2007-8 world financial crisis with a massive stimulus program. The ratio of such continued borrowing is rising rapidly. This year it has taken six yuan for every yuan of growth. China’s money supply is now 73 percent higher than in the United States, an economy about 60 percent larger. Furthermore, that debt is being incurred disproportionately by the giant inefficient state enterprises through their Party allegiance rather than the small but entrepreneurial semi-private sector. China’s export oriented economy is not as virtually all informed observers suggest ranging toward domestic consumption, and the political season makes it almost certain the U.S.] new administration, whichever candidate wins, will move toward curbing Beijing’s violations of fair trade.

Meanwhile, whether as a result of its growing influence on government or as an attempt to detract from domestic issues, Beijing is pursuing a more and more aggressive foreign policy. Sensing the Obama Administration’s attempt to reduce overseas American committeemen’s, it has ploughed ahead with flimsy claims to shoals in the South China Sea thousand miles from its Mainland. By militarizing them at a rapid rate, it has openly challenged that most hallowed of I.S. foreign policies, freedom of the seas, straddling athwart one of the world’s most important waterways.

It appears unlikely that either of these three trends will be reversed in the near term. Not only do they threaten U.S. interests, but those of China’s neighbors – whether a rearming Japan, or the more vulnerable Southeast Asians whom Beijing attempts to dominate one by one. Again, whether by direction or at their own initiative, Chinese naval and air units are challenging the U.S.in international waters. The likelihood of a clash, perhaps one that cannot be managed short of war, appear likely in the offing.

sws-07-24-16