Commentary Magazine


Contentions

The Price of Partnership with Turkey

President George W. Bush sought to make Poland and the Czech Republic central to the NATO anti-ballistic missile shield, but President Obama chose to go with Turkey instead. Today, Turkey is showing the diplomatic cost of that decision. While the United States envisioned that missile shield and radar system to provide security not only for NATO, but for our other regional allies, Turkey has now vetoed sharing any early warning to Israel regarding potential Iranian missile launches. According to a report in the Turkish press:

Davutoğlu insisted that information gathered by a U.S.-led radar system, to be stationed in Turkey’s Malatya province as part of a NATO missile-shield project, would be available for use only by alliance members, denying suggestions that intelligence would be shared with Israel. “We will provide support only for systems that belong to NATO and are used solely by members of NATO,” he said. The minister dismissed as “manipulation” a newspaper report that quoted an unnamed U.S. official as saying that data collected by the radar would be used to help defend Israel, stressing that Washington had assured Ankara that no such official existed. According to a Wall Street Journal report Friday, U.S. officials said they planned to fuse data from radars in Turkey, Israel and other sites to create a comprehensive picture of the missile threat to the region. Turkey, for its part, could also benefit from real-time data from radar the United States already operates in Israel, the report said.

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Taiwan Losing Ability to Deter China

The Osama bin Laden raid notwithstanding, the Obama administration continues to project an air of weakness and irresolution on national security that will come back to haunt us. The latest example is its refusal to sell F-16s to our democratic ally Taiwan.

Taiwan is facing a growing imbalance of cross-Straits power as China continues to increase its defense budget by double-digit figures every year. This buildup is tilting the odds against the U.S. Navy in the western Pacific and making it increasingly likely Taiwan would be on its own in any crisis. That makes it all the more imperative Taiwan have the ability to defend itself.

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If the World Won’t Enforce Previous Deals, Why Should Israel Sign Another?

The run-up to the Palestinians’ UN bid has produced many surreal moments, but it would be hard to top this one: The U.S. and Europe are pressuring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to penalize the Palestinian Authority following the UN vote. In other words, the “international community” is urging the PA be allowed to violate its previous signed agreements with total impunity. And then, in the same breath, it’s urging Israel to sign a final-status agreement entailing much greater concessions in exchange for “international guarantees” it’s just proven it won’t enforce.

A brief reminder: The UN gambit blatantly violates the 1995 Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement, which states that “Neither side shall initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations.” Clearly, recognizing these territories as a state would change their status drastically. The U.S. and EU both signed this agreement as witnesses, as did Russia, Egypt, Jordan and Norway.

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Obama’s Millionaire Tax Strategy

President Obama will finally present his deficit-reduction recommendations to the super committee this morning, and one of the proposals will reportedly be a “Buffett tax,” which will raise taxes on millionaires whose earnings come from capital gains:

The White House will propose a new tax rate for people earning more than $1 million a year to ensure they pay at least the same percentage of their earnings in taxes as middle-income Americans, a senior administration official told CNN on Sunday.

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Time for a Moroccan Model?

This past weekend, Morocco’s Foreign Ministry sponsored a conference on the Arab Spring and constitutional reforms. While I was part of a small and bipartisan delegation of Americans who could accept their last-minute invitation to the two-day affair, there were a number of current and former ministers and other officials from Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Mauritania, Libya and the European Union.

Morocco is a pretty tolerant place, and while its government was as surprised by the Arab Spring as its fellow Arab countries, its government did quickly conclude the time for significant constitutional reform was sooner rather than later. Admittedly, the fact the King appointed the constitutional reform panel in a top-down approach says a lot about Morocco’s point of departure, though his efforts appear sincere. The speakers addressed a number of issues, ranging from broad discussions of principle about what makes an Arab constitution work, as well specific discussions of various proposals.

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Obama in Trap of His Own Making

In researching his new book, Ron Suskind interviewed President Obama earlier this year, during which Obama told  Suskind:

The area in my presidency where I think my management and understanding of the presidency evolved most, and where I think we made the most mistakes, was less on the policy front and more on the communications front. I think one of the criticisms that is absolutely legitimate about my first two years was that I was very comfortable with a technocratic approach to government … a series of problems to be solved.… Carter, Clinton and I all have sort of the disease of being policy wonks. … I think that if you get too consumed with that you lose sight of the larger issue. … The reorganization that’s taken place here is one that is much more geared to those [leadership] functions.

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Cronyism as Usual

For an update on how all that “hope and change” is going, let’s check in with LightSquared financial backer Phil Falcone, who’s currently under scrutiny for his company’s too-close-for-comfort relationship with the White House:

Falcone characterized email communication between LightSquared employees and White House staff — which mentioned political fundraisers while trying to coordinate a meeting — as business as usual. The emails were first reported by the Center for Public Integrity’s iWatch News.

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A Tax on Excess Wealth Creation

“Obama Tax Plan Would Ask More of Millionaires,” reads the headline of the lead story in today’s New York Times. Nice touch that “ask” part, as if paying taxes were voluntary.

President Obama wants to invoke the “Buffett Rule,” named for multibillionaire Warren Buffett, who complains that his tax bill is too low because his effective rate is less than his secretary’s. Buffett wrote in the Times last month,

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The UN Disaster is Obama’s Fault

For many liberal pundits, the blame for the circus that will unfold this week at the UN with the start of a debate over Palestinian statehood is to be assigned to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu whom they wrongly claim has obstructed peace talks. Others are inclined, with more justice, to put the onus for the problem on Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas whose pursuit of UN recognition of statehood without first making peace with Israel is seen as both futile and counter-productive to the end that he claims to seek.

But the lion’s share of the blame ought to fall on President Obama. Though peace talks were stalled when he took office in January 2009, the deterioration of a relatively stable standoff into the volatile situation that exists today is due in no small measure to the blunders that the president’s team has committed over the past 32 months. Though friends of Israel will rightly give Obama credit for sticking to his word and vetoing the Palestinian resolution — a stand that will be undertaken as much if not more in defense of U.S. interests than those of the Jewish state — the diplomatic disaster that is about to be played out is the fruit of his own misjudgments.

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Don’t Mourn the Death of Percy’s GOP

The death on Saturday of former U.S. Senator Charles Percy at 91 was noted today in a laudatory obituary in the New York Times. Percy had a distinguished career in business and served three terms in the Senate from Illinois as a Republican. The Times quoted a scholar from the liberal Brookings Institution lamenting the fact that members of the GOP today are nothing like Percy. But that ought to be a cause for celebration. He is best remembered today as the exemplar of a type of Republican that is now extinct: a liberal establishmentarian who was an opponent of the state of Israel.

Percy blamed supporters of Israel for his defeat in 1984. This is a theme that was picked up by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer in their ludicrous book The Israel Lobby in which the duo paints Percy as a martyr to the power of the all-powerful conspiracy for Zion. It is true that many in the pro-Israel community embraced the candidacy of Paul Simon, his Democratic challenger. However, the Times, which omitted any mention of Percy’s record as one of the most vociferous opponents of Israel in the Senate, was closer to the mark than Walt and Mearsheimer when the paper said of his defeat that the senator had become “old goods” to Illinois voters when they rejected him despite having a triumphant Ronald Reagan at the top of the GOP ticket. By that time, having a Rockefeller Republican senator with higher ratings from liberal groups than conservative ones wasn’t something that excited voters from either party.

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Bachmann’s Disgraceful Refusal to Apologize

In his column today, Michael Gerson makes a very strong case that Representative Michele Bachmann, who said earlier this week that the HPV vaccine might cause mental retardation, “seems prone to a serious condition: the compulsive desire to confirm every evangelical stereotype of censorious ignorance.” Ms. Bachmann, meanwhile, has dug in, insisting  she will not apologize for her remarks.

She should.

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Other Than That, Mrs. Lincoln, How Was the Play?

This week Democrats lost two significant special elections that were referendums on the president, with Democrats sustaining an eight-point loss in a district (NY-9) they had controlled since the Harding presidency and getting blown out by 22 points in a swing district (NV-2) of a battleground state. Perhaps more ominously for Democrats, the “Mediscare” tactics Democrats have used against Republicans for decades was completely ineffective.

Americans are increasingly gloomy about the future, with a gauge of expectations falling to the lowest level since 1980, according to a new survey. The Census Bureau informed us that the poverty rate in 2010 rose for the third consecutive year, with 46.2 million people in poverty in 2010, the largest number in the 52 years for which poverty estimates have been published. The report also indicated that median household income, adjusted for inflation, was lower last year than any year since in 1997.

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Would Jews Be Welcome in “Palestine”?

Yesterday, Jonathan ably fisked a leftist attempt to dismiss the statement this week by the PLO’s ambassador to the United States that Jews would not be
allowed to live in a future state of Palestine.

But there is another important point to be made about the comments that ambassador and other Palestinian officials later made to try to clarify that he really didn’t mean what he had said. At least one American news outlet sees their words as sufficient cause to headline an article, “Jews Welcome.” Still, these newer comments demonstrate, perhaps even more clearly, that Palestinian officials remain incapable of the basic understanding and acknowledgement of the Zionist proposition a true peace will require.

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Waxman Uses Anti-Semitic Trope in Blast at GOP Jews

Lost in the avalanche of commentary about the shocking victory of a Republican in a heavily Jewish New York Congressional district this week was one inexcusable comment from a prominent Democrat about the prospect of just such a defeat for his party. Rather than defend his party on the issues, and echoing a well-established anti-Semitic cliché, Rep. Henry Waxman claimed the reason many Jews were trending Republican was only because they care about their money.

Here’s the complete quote in an article in The Hill published Tuesday:

“I think Jewish voters will be Democratic and be for Obama in 2012, especially if you get a Republican candidate like Gov. Perry. But there’s no question the Jewish community is much more bipartisan than it has been in previous years. There are Jews who are trending toward the Republican Party, some of it because of their misunderstanding of Obama’s policies in the Middle East, and some of it, quite frankly, for economic reasons. They feel they want to protect their wealth, which is why a lot of well-off voters vote for Republicans.”

This is odious.

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Media Blasted for Obama Coverage

Gone are the days when all Obama had to do to charm the news media was don a pair of blue jeans. Now the Solyndra scandal has become a Jon Stewart punchline, news outlets are joining the mockery of the the AttackWatch campaign site, and even James Carville is advising the White House to panic.

David Axelrod, clearly longing for the good old days, is now blaming the media for hyping Obama’s bad month (in a memo he released to the media):

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Perry Lays Down Pro-Israel Marker

The best indication an American politician was seriously considering a run for president used to be either a trip to Israel or lending their name to an effort to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Most of the candidates have already taken their trips, and hypocrisy on the embassy is a bit old-fashioned (especially since all of the candidates who pledged to move it never did so). But if you’re a presidential candidate who wants to lay down a pro-Israel marker, putting your name on an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post as a supporter of the Jewish state will do just as well.

It is in this moderately cynical light that backers of Israel will read the piece published in the Post yesterday as well as the Wall Street Journal today) with Perry’s byline. Pro-Israel rhetoric is not wasted even in Republican primaries in which few Jews vote, as so many evangelical Christians also care about the issue. But though the text of the article is excellent, the main point is it is the beginning of Perry’s outreach to American Jews on the one issue on which he can appeal to them.

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Anti-Israel Rally Flops in Jordan

With the sack of Israel’s embassy in Cairo last week fresh in everyone’s minds, the prospect of a repeat of that debacle caused Jerusalem to evacuate their diplomatic staff from Jordan prior to a scheduled rally in Amman. But as it turns out, worries about a proposed “million man march” were, to put it mildly, exaggerated. Only 200 Palestinians showed up outside the embassy yesterday, illustrating not only the impotence of their movement in a country that has peaceful relations with Israel.

The flop of the rally at a time when anti-Israel ferment in the Arab world is peeking shows the vast differences between the situation in Jordan and what is going on in Egypt.

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The End of Palin Derangement Syndrome?

Joe McGinniss’s new book on Sarah Palin has had a surprisingly strong backlash from the left, as Politico reports this morning. Most of the focus has been on this unfavorable New York Times review by Janet Maslin, but even progressive activists have been jumping to Palin’s defense.

“If male political figures were subject to the cataloging of hookups and reverie from their young-and-single years as Sarah Palin apparently is in this book, these invasions of privacy and dignity would stop. I am no fan of her politics, but she doesn’t deserve this gossip,” wrote Adam Bonin, the chairman of Netroots Nation on Politico’s Arena yesterday.

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Harmful Defense Cuts and Wishful Thinking

Leon Panetta is rightly warning lawmakers if they continue to eviscerate defense spending there will be considerable cost not only to the nation’s defense
but to our economy as well. The defense secretary estimates trimming $1 trillion from the defense budget during the next decade–as could occur this fall–would add one percent to the unemployment rate. Given that unemployment is now at 9.1 percent, that’s a further hit that our economy simply can’t afford. That is in addition to what Panetta describes as the “devastating” consequences for the Department of Defense and U.S. power around the world if these cuts are implemented.

Against Panetta’s economic and strategic arguments–and they are coming, remember, from a noted fiscal hawk–what does the anti-defense side have to offer?  An unholy alliance of the National Taxpayers Union, a conservative group, and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, a left-wing group, have  issued recommendations for cutting more than $400 billion during the next decade. They are a combination of harmful cuts and wishful thinking.

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Compromise and the Constitution

Tomorrow is the 224th anniversary of when the delegates to the Federal Convention voted to approve a new Constitution.

One of the encouraging things we’re witnessing in our time is a renewed interest in the Constitution, most especially among Tea Party activists, many of whom consider themselves to be “Constitutional Conservatives.”

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