FRIDAY, MARCH 7, 2008

JERUSALEM AFTERMATH

There was an intriguing bit of diplomatic action in the aftermath of yesterday's terror attack on a Jewish school in Jerusalem.  The New York Sun reported this:

In a rare move, Jerusalem initiated a late night meeting of the Security Council, where it is more accustomed to fending off denunciations of Israeli actions than hoping for sympathy after its citizens are attacked. But the Arab representative on the Council, Libya, demanded to make an American-proposed statement about the Jerusalem attacks "balanced" by also mentioning Israel's attacks in Gaza, preventing a unified council statement. The terrorist attack in Jerusalem "stands out," said Russia's U.N. ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, who serves as the council president.

"What would it take for the council" to condemn one attack "specifically, without going through the entire history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?" Mr. Churkin asked.

Now that's quite remarkable, coming from a Russian delegate.  Does it signal some change in Russian attitude, following Russia' recent election?  Or is it a gut reaction to the attack itself, an attack that reminds Russia of the terrorist assault on a Russian school several years ago?

I have no way of knowing.  But the Russian statement, ironically, was one of the more direct and articulate that we've heard recently on the subject of terrorism.

YOU MEAN, WE'RE NOT HATED?

Michael Gerson, who was President Bush's chief speech writer, has a contrarian view on the subject of America's image abroad.  I'm glad someone finally said this, and Gerson has the goods:

WASHINGTON -- The one goal that unites and explains the Democratic approach to foreign policy is this: America must try -- urgently and desperately -- to be more popular in the world.

"The world was with us after 9/11," explains Hillary Clinton. "We have so squandered that good will and we've got to rebuild it." Barack Obama has said that the "single most important issue" of the current election is picking a leader who can "repair all the damage that's been done to America's reputation overseas."

This argument depends on three premises -- all of which are questionable.

First, listening to the Democrats, one would assume that America in the Bush era is universally despised. The reality is more complicated.

According to the Pew Global Attitudes Project, the United States is very popular in sub-Saharan Africa, where President Bush has just finished a triumphant tour. (People in Kenya, the Ivory Coast and Ghana have a more favorable view of America than Americans do.) India and Japan are strongly pro-American. America remains popular in parts of "new Europe," as well as in Mexico, Peru and even Venezuela -- though there has been some erosion in both Latin America and Europe in recent years.

Gerson goes on with his argument, including this point:

Yet the tensions between American and European worldviews ultimately have little to do with specific policies. Europe is an increasingly pacifist continent -- which is an improvement upon its bloody history, but a source of inevitable tension with a superpower that must occasionally enforce world order. European governments generally view international institutions as a way to constrain American power. Any future American president will continue to view those institutions as a way to amplify our influence in keeping the peace.

He concludes with this:

The real lesson in the years since 9/11 is different from what the Democratic candidates imagine: It is easy to be loved when you are a victim. It is harder to be popular when you act decisively to protect yourself and others.

A successful president should strive for America to be liked -- and expect, on occasion, for America to be resented in a good cause.

Very well said.  Read the whole piece.  It is filled with logic and information.  We are running a great nation, not a contest for Miss Congeniality.  Most Americans understand that.  Those who majored in anthropology do not.

THE OBAMA DILEMMA

I'm sure the Obama people didn't think they'd have a dilemma today, but they do.  David Brooks very incisively points out that Obama, to counter Hillary Clinton's new surge, is slipping into the mold of a conventional politician, but that this negates the very source of his popularity.

Barack Obama had a theory. It was that the voters are tired of the partisan paralysis of the past 20 years. The theory was that if Obama could inspire a grass-roots movement with a new kind of leadership, he could ride it to the White House and end gridlock in Washington.

Obama has built his entire campaign on this theory. He’s run against negativity and cheap-shot campaigning. He’s claimed that there’s an “awakening” in this country — people “hungry for a different kind of politics.”

This message has made him the front-runner. It has brought millions of new voters into politics. It has given him grounds to fend off attacks.

But...

The Obama campaign is now making a big issue of Hillary Clinton’s tax returns and dropping hints about donations to President Clinton’s library and her secret White House papers. It’s willing to launch an ethics assault. “If Senator Clinton wants to take the debate to various places, we’ll join that debate,” the Obama strategist David Axelrod told reporters the other day.

These attacks are supposed to show that Obama can’t be pushed around. But, of course, what it really suggests is that Obama’s big theory is bankrupt. You can’t really win with the new style of politics. Sooner or later, you have to play by the conventional rules.

The implication?

As the trench warfare stretches on through the spring, the excitement of Obama-mania will seem like a distant, childish mirage. People will wonder if Obama ever believed any of that stuff himself. And even if he goes on to win the nomination, he won’t represent anything new. He’ll just be a one-term senator running for president.

In short, a candidate should never betray the core theory of his campaign, or head down a road that leads to that betrayal. Barack Obama doesn’t have an impressive record of experience or a unique policy profile. New politics is all he’s got. He loses that, and he loses everything. Every day that he looks conventional is a bad day for him.

Besides, the real softness of the campaign is not that Obama is a wimp. It’s that he has never explained how this new politics would actually produce bread-and-butter benefits to people in places like Youngstown and Altoona.

If he can’t explain that, he’s going to lose at some point anyway.

Hmm.  Brooks might be right.

ANOTHER VIEW OF OBAMA

Charles Krauthammer has another, equally thoughtful view of Obama - that his campaign is cursed by a huge non sequitur:  Obama can transcend race, therefore he can transcend the divisions of politics.  Krauthammer concedes that Obama does in fact transcend race, and gives him great credit for that.  But he shows that Obama doesn't begin to transcend political division:

The effect of such sweeping invocations of unity is electric, particularly because race is the deepest and most tragic of all American divisions, and this invocation is being delivered by a man who takes us powerfully beyond it. The implication is that he is therefore uniquely qualified to transcend all our other divisions.

It is not an idle suggestion. It could be true. The problem is that Obama's own history suggests that, in his case at least, it is not. Indeed, his Senate record belies the implication.

The Obama campaign has sent journalists eight pages of examples of his reaching across the aisle in the Senate. I am not the only one to note, however, that these are small-bore items of almost no controversy -- more help for war veterans, reducing loose nukes in the former Soviet Union, fighting avian flu and the like. Bipartisan support for apple pie is hardly a profile in courage.

On the difficult compromises that required the political courage to challenge one's own political constituency, Obama flinched: the "Gang of 14" compromise on judicial appointments, the immigration compromise to which Obama tried to append union-backed killer amendments and, just last month, the compromise on warrantless eavesdropping that garnered 68 votes in the Senate. But not Obama's.

Who, in fact, supported all of these bipartisan deals, was a central player in two of them and brokered the even more notorious McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform? John McCain, of course.

Yes, John McCain -- intemperate and rough-edged, of sharp elbows and even sharper tongue. Turns out that uniting is not a matter of rhetoric or manner, but of character and courage.

Exactly.  And the McCain people should hammer it home.  Obama the uniter is a mirage.  There never is great unity in democracies, except around broad and fundamental principles.  Democracy leads to division, to debate, to the constant competition of ideas.  What, precisely, is wrong with that?

THE MAN WHO SHOULDN'T BE KING

Queen Elizabeth's longevity has a number of benefits, chief of which is keeping Charles off the throne.  The prince now has become a hotshot global warmist, denouncing the heresy of the scientific dissenters:

Unfathomably however, there still seem to be some climbing skeptics, those who view the case of rapid action to counter climate change is overstated or indeed completely invented," he added.

"If I may speak plainly among friends, this is sheer madness. The scientific facts are as plain as they are alarming. Worryingly in the last few months we have learnt that the North Polar ice cap is melting so fast that some scientists are predicting that in seven years it will completely disappear in summer."

Yeah, Charlie, but the southern ice cap may well be increasing.  And many of the dissenters are leading experts in climatology, not "scientists" from other disciplines.

The real madness is simply accepting the alarmist view without solid study, and spending tens of billions of dollars on programs that may fail, or may make matters worse.  It wouldn't be the first time.

God save the Queen.  I mean that.

GOOD PAY, TRAVEL, BENEFITS

It's always a pleasure, especially in a tight economy, to report job opportunities.  If you are a Jihadist, with a flair for the technical and the artistic, this is a dream not to be missed:

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — In an Internet age, Al Qaeda prizes geek jihadis as much as would-be homicide bombers and gunmen. The terror network is recruiting computer-savvy technicians to produce sophisticated Web documentaries and multimedia products aimed at Muslim audiences in the United States, Britain and other Western countries.

Already, the terror movement's al-Sahab production company is turning out high quality material, some of which rivals productions by Western media companies. The documentaries appear regularly on Islamist Web sites, which Al Qaeda uses to recruit followers and rally its supporters.

That requires people whose skills go beyond planting bombs and ambushing American patrols in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"The Al Qaeda men who are coming today are not farmers, illiterate people," said Qari Mohammed Yusuf, an Afghan and self-declared al-Sahab cameraman. "They are Ph.D.s, professors who know about this technology. Day by day they are coming. Al Qaeda has asked them to come."

Hmm.  Professors?  Maybe we're not so wrong about our suspicion of universities. 

But enough of conspiracy theories.  Look at the potential here.  I can see the day when Al Qaeda gives out its own equivalent of the Oscars - the Osamas.  The stars would arrive in armored vehicles.  They'd stroll into the Death to the Infidels Center in downtown Karachi, walking on a Persian rug laced with land mines.  The survivors would become the nominees. 

Can you hear the acceptance speeches?  "I'd like to thank the madrassa for teaching me how to destroy the crusaders and Zionists..."  And that's from Vanessa Redgrave.

I'd love to be there for the lifetime achievement award.  Who gets it?  Well, just paste up a list of members of the Middle East Studies Association, and throw a dart.

And who will host the Osamas?  Michael Moore is available.  Has tux.  Or robe.

I'm marking my calendar.  I'll be back later.

Posted on March 7, 2008.