The Spine

War All The Time

2009-07-02T02:33:00Z

War on poverty, war on drugs, war on cancer, war on hunger, war on crime, war on obesity, war on illiteracy, even war on guns. Somehow the society likes the metaphor of war despite the fact that it is usually a prelude to failure.

I don't know what President Obama feels about these martial specimens. But we all know that he does not like "the war on terror." He told us that from early on in his campaign. In the spring, there was a rumor around Washington that the White House had even circulated a memo banning the use of the phrase. This was denied, and I believe the denial. Still, the utter elimination of the expression from the discourse of the administration is so stark that it suggests the axiomatic discipline of an executive order.

Now, the secretary for homeland security, Janet Napolitano, who wouldn't have a job were it not for the war on terror, told the Financial Times Tuesday on a trip to London that the term was inapt because it does not properly describe the terrorist threat to America. My, the lady is finnicky. And so is her boss.

But the defining question is not whether the U.S. wages war on terrorism and terrorists. It is whether the loosely connected but ideologically associated terrorist international is waging war on us. Alas, the decision of whether there is a terrorist war against America is not the secretary's to make. And it is not the president's either. That war started long ago, and it has been declared many times, certainly long before September 11. And after. Lest we forget, moreover, these pronouncements were made and endorsed by Islamic clergy and many none-clerical epigones all over the world. So we know, usurpers though they may be, who they are and where they live. Denying that there is a war going on won't change the realities one bit.

The FT headline to its article by Edward Luce and Daniel Dombey reads "US shifts its tone on terrorism and discards language of war." Not even Napolitano can believe that this will alter the bloody facts on the ground. And she doesn't really claim that it will. Maybe she and the president are persuaded that this cleaning up of language start a spiritual revolution. I believe that Muslim terrorists here, there and everywhere are laughing at us right now.

Napolitano, who is in charge of the federal department that coalesced 22 formerly stand-alone internal security agencies, made her name in Arizona where, as governor, she systematically subverted the laws about illegal immigration. The fact is that I sympathize with immigrants, illegal and legal, so I can't be sure that I want to criticize her for this, although I suppose I should. But if she doesn't think that there are terrorist warriors out there isn't she likely to be soft on them too?

For all her heaving about the elimination of "war on terror" language, she ends up taking refuge in a transparent deceit, lecturing us as if she were a school marm with a ruler at her side. It's all a matter of definition: "One of the reasons the nomenclature is not used is that 'war' carries with it a relationship to nation states in conflict with each other and of course terrorism is not necessarily derived from the nation state relationship."

The fact is that most of the wars fought in the late 20th century and in the near first decade of the 21st have not been fought by nations states, at all. For the most part, true nation states have more or less stopped warring with each other. Even India and Pakistan, which are hardly model nation states, have managed to contain their war-making capacities against each other. Although there are nearly two hundred governments in the United Nations most of them are not nation states. But only someone who doesn't read the papers (or who doesn't grasp what they are saying) would imagine that there is a sudden shortage of war in the current era.

As a matter of fact, wars are being fought now on many fronts, within splintered societies, against ruling tribes and sects by insurgent counter-groups, and by armed gangs who without ideology but with grievance aplenty can mobilize the wish to kill and the willingness to die. This occurs from Pakistan and Afghanistan to Sudan, Somalia and Congo. One such 20 year carnage has just ended in Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon and ruled by a thoroughly dogmatic Trotskyite family regime. So it is just nonsense that the absence of nation states from the theatre of war means that war is passe' or even obsolete. On which world does the secretary for homeland security live?

But there is one very serious consequence to the decline of nation states, and it is the growing moral irrelevance of the United Nations which was premised precisely on the the model of such representative polities. Power in the U.N. now, however, is built on shady alliances among mostly illegitimate governments, many of which sit on top of actually warring factions, using the weapons and tactics of terror. So it is not surprising that there is no real power at all in the organization. It is an elaborate and costly charade, and it wouldn't even be a charade if it did not reside in New York.

Still, Susan Rice seems to believe in it. She could be doing greater damage elsewhere.

150 Years And Not One Day More

2009-06-30T12:42:00Z

Bernie Madoff has been sentenced to 150 years in prison. He deserves every minute of his stay, although he probably doesn't deserve the comparatively lush prison arrangements made for white collar criminals. After all, this crime was about as intricately planned and self-consciously executed as any financial transgression in history.

I know that many very smart people still don't get the particulars of Madoff's depravity. If you don't (and even if you do and want to know more), the scholar of business iniquity Edward Jay Epstein has written a lucid exposition with more proof than a lot of folk thought possible to muster without subpoena powers.

What's more, Epstein now brings to the line-up a few of Madoff's associated culprits who have received neither the attention nor the justice which has now been meted out to the great swindler. But there are more to come.

Postscript To "He Hit Me..."

2009-06-29T13:09:00Z

Now, the president is proud that the United States "has gone out of its way not to interfere..." It's a strange fact of which to be proud. If, that is, it is a fact at all. But several reliable analysts make the point that we couldn't intrude even if we wanted to. Maybe yes, maybe no.

In any case, Barack Obama has assured us that America would continue its negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. But I actually wondered what he meant by "continue." I do not believe that there are any negotiations at present between Tehran and Washington.

Here, however, are President Obama's exact words in suggesting that, as Saturday's FT put it, "US-Iran dialogue faces postponement in wake of Tehran crackdown":

We have a continuing set of national security interests that are going to have to be dealt with because the clock is ticking...

There is no doubt that any direct dialogue or diplomacy with Iran is going to be affected by the events of the last several weeks and we don't yet know how any potential dialogue will have been affected until we see what has happened inside Iran.

I am all but certain that Tehran is puzzling over exactly what the president means. And so is everyone else. This is a bit odd for someone like Obama who usually knows how to make himself quite clear.

The FT which usually adores everything Obama says and does in the Middle East--especially about the Israel-Palestinian dispute on which the president had made his feelings perfectly obvious--searched for some way to characterize his position on Iran. This is how the paper put it in a subhead: "President's firmer view mirrors Russian stance."

That says it all.

Targeting Munich Re

2009-06-29T13:02:00Z

Munich Re is an insurance and reinsurance colossus. A part of its business is selling coverage for oil tankers ferrying petroleum in and out of Iran. An article by Benjamin Weinthal, an American journalist working out of Berlin, was posted in Slate on Friday. It recommended six measures that President Obama could take to influence Iran 1. from continuing its frantic quest for nukes and 2. stopping its rulers' war against the Persian people. Munich Re is a vulnerable target of American policy if only American policy makers would make it so.

But Munich Re also owns Munich Re America which happens to be in the health insurance business. It would be a travesty if in the administration's overhaul of the structure of the American health industry it would permit Munich Re America to (continue to) feed from the fresh new trough now being erected for medical. Either we are setting up a serious sanctions regime or we are not.

He Hit Me And It Felt Like A Kiss

2009-06-29T01:24:00Z

I know that many of you are not nearly old enough to remember Carole King's early 60's hit lyrics for The Crystals--no, not those Kristols--called "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss"), arranged by Phil Spector who has just received 19 years to life in a California penitentiary for murdering his girlfriend. The lyrics are still oddly and ironically relevant. Certainly against the abuse of women which is what the punch was about ... and, for that matter, also the kiss.

But, frankly, it came to mind with reference to the president's stubborn sense that his foreign policy, despite its near collapse, is a great success. And so successful, in fact, that raw and brutal facts don't cause him to pause, let alone rethink. Despite his preaching at Cairo University, almost every Muslim country has been punching him in the face, and not just on the tiresome matter of the Palestinian quarrel with history. Yet Obama still seems to feel that he is being kissed, and so he is going back for more.

One day the administration announces that it is dispatching for the first time in four years an American ambassador to Damascus. On the very morrow, the Assad regime responds during a ceremony at Quneitra, adjoining the Golan Heights and restored to the Syrians by Henry Kissinger's shrewd diplomacy, that it is ready to go to war to regain the rest of the territory captured by Israel in the truly defensive 1973 war. See a Jerusalem Post article, headlined "Syria Again Threatens War Over Golan."

Now, the fact is that the kleptocratic Ba'athist tyranny of the Assad family is reeling from the present calamitous events in Iran. The regime is built around the country's small minority of Alawites (a heretical offshoot of the Shi'a) and tightly, actually brutally, controlled by the Kalbiyaa clan and the Rasian tribe. This tells you a lot about the Syrian nation, more apparently than our oh, so clever journalists care to know. Still, who among the Arabs, except Egypt, can make a stronger case for their peoplehood.

Why in Allah's name would the president give the Assads the gift of American representation in their capitol exactly at the moment when their patron is being challenged by literally millions of Persians who have a wholly different view of themselves and of their country than as God's battle line against the heathens?

It is true that almost nobody in power in the West anticipated this self-disciplined popular rising all over Iran. This was a rising against a cruel despotism that didn't need to fix the election it actually did fix. And I, for one, don't really care whether Ahmadinejad had 2/3 of the vote or 51% of the vote or, for that matter, 49%. A rising against a terrorist clerisy like Ahmadinejad and Khameinei's deserves our support whatever its numbers among a public that had been manipulated--with the backing of American leftists, by the way, including "human rights activists" like Richard Falk for fully three decades.

This is an exhilarating moment in contemporary history. As exhilarating as Budapest in 1956, Prague Spring in 1968, and the utter collapse of the Communist system in eastern Europe in 1989-1990. It is exhilarating even where, as in Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the first instances, the regimes survived. An old Stalinist, the poet-playwright Berthold Brecht, wrote only one anti-communist poem of which I know, "The Solution." And it goes like this:

After the rising of the 17th June
the Secretary of the Writer's Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts.
Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

By beating down the students and the middle class in the streets the ruling inquisitors (and that is just what they are) are actually attempting to dissolve the Persian people and Persian history in one fell swoop.

We don't yet know just how desperate is the situation of the great mass of Iranian dissenters. But this is a moment about which presidents and prime ministers, ordinary people and the so very savvy foreign policy elites will be held to account: "which side are you on?"

Let's face it. The American president has not exactly been on the wrong side. No, he has not said what Hugo Chavez has said: "Chavez Reaffirms His Support for Ahmadinejad." But he has certainly not been on the right side. Not with his mincing and parsimoniously petty escalations of do-nothing rhetoric. Day after day a tiny bit more, perhaps what his handlers tell him he needs to say not to lag behind his public.

In behalf of what cause is this oratorical master so reserved? It is actually his doomed conceit that he will entice the ayatollahs to give up their nukes.

So the American people must learn this lesson from the winning "yes, we can" candidate. And this lessson is that we won't even try when the stakes are as obvious as other people's decent freedoms. We won't even cut off trade with Tehran. The smug and cool Brent Scowcroft is now enthroned as the foreign affairs sage of Washington, D.C. Here is what he had to say late last week: U.S. government support for those Iranians who are protesting against electoral results would provoke a more intense crackdown by the government in Tehran. I think he gave the good news to the mullahs over Al Jazeera.

There has been much written about Iran while I was away in a hotel that didn't have wi-fi. One piece I commend to you is Fouad Ajami's op-ed in the June 22 Wall Street Journal, "Obama's Personal Tutorial: The president has to choose between the regime and the people in the streets."

And that is really the choice. The president and his desperate nochloifers like, as Ajami points out, poor Madame Albright have apologetically evoked the ghost of America's role in the 1953 overthrow of prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh somehow to clear the ethical decks. This is prehistoric nonsense. In the coming years the people in the streets and in classrooms across west Asia will not remember the United States as their friends. That will be a much heavier burden than what Ike and John Foster Dulles did to Mossadegh 56 years ago.

The new issue of TNR is just out. If you had a subscription to the hard copy it would already be in hands. If you don't you'll have to wait until the rich little essays on the Iranian revolt go on-line. They are all informative, really each and every one of them. Let me especially commend one. It is by Nader Mousavizadeh, a former student, a good friend and past assistant editor of this magazine. Oh, yes, he is also a senior fellow at the Institute of Strategic Studies in London. Nader really knows what he is talking about, unlike many of those whose attitudes are drawn from their always cool and detached temperaments . I've learned much from his disciplined yet morally engaged mind, from this piece perhaps more than any other.

The G8 Farce

2009-06-26T18:13:00Z

As prospects for what are essentially Iranian freedom fighters grew ever more grim, the Group of 8 met in Trieste, Italy, uttering nothing of any consequence. Yes, according to Nazila Fathi and Alan Cowell in the Times, the foreign ministers "deplored" this and "urged" that, all without any hope of affecting anything. The Soviet foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, expressed Russia's "most serious concern" about violence while also assuring the mullahs that "it would not intervene in Iran's internal affairs."

This meeting was actually a charade. No one is going to intervene in Iran's internal affairs. Not one of the most powerful countries has even made moves to impose drastic sanctions on the Tehran regime.

And where was Hillary Clinton? She was nursing a fractured elbow.

Totally debilitating, we are to assume.

While I’m Gone …

2009-06-22T23:25:00Z

I'm out of the country for the next few days. In the meantime, here's an important speech delivered by Elena Bonner, the widow of Andrei Sakharov. Read the whole thing. It's wonderful.

Wall Street Confidential: Madoff's Secret Service

2009-06-16T14:17:00Z

General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler never really got into the small and efficient car business. So now they have become mini-minors. And that's the financial news for the moment.

So even Bernie Madoff has been off the front pages of the financial press. In the meantime, Irving Picard, the court-appointed trustee for the whole balagan, is meticulously suing everybody who's done dubious rake-in business with the major financial gangster of our time. But all of the work is tedious. So Madoff isn't getting that attention that ongoing scandals usually command.

On the other hand, the great intelligence and financial sleuth, Edward Jay Epstein, has kept on unravelling the mechanics and meaning of the big and systematic heist. This piece reads like detective fiction. But it is not fiction at all. It's actually very clear. And if you think that J. Ezra Merkin and the other shysters who fed zillions to Madoff didn't know what was going on, well, you're an innocent. Put your money in the piggy bank or the pushka.

A missing piece in the Madoff puzzle is the motive of his early wave of investors in Madoff's operation before he had established an impressive track record. Why did a dozen or so multi-millionaire businessmen put both a large share of their personal wealth and that of their tax-exempt foundation in multiple accounts with Madoff? If these financially savvy investors only wanted to compound their wealth, other highly-regarded money managers, such as George Soros, Julian Robertson and Paul Tudor Jones, then offered better track records over longer periods as well as much safer financial controls, including outside custodian and auditing services. Presumably Madoff was able to offer these wealthy investors some other service they could not obtain elsewhere. But what?

The secretive way in which he personally ran his operation from a small office in the Lipstick building in New York may well have been part of the inducement. Since he alone handled each account and determined its profits and losses from each putative transaction, he was in a unique position to custom-tailor how they were allocated between a client's taxable personal accounts and his tax-exempt charitable accounts. In fact, presumably unknown to these investors, Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme in which he forged the paperwork to create imaginary profits. Even without such notional book-keeping, it would have been child's play for Madoff to provide his clients with the results that helped then minimize their annual tax bills. This service became particularly valuable to wealthy individuals after Congress in 1982, at the behest of Senator Daniel P. Moynihan, amended the Economic Recovery Tax Act to prohibit a common practice in which wealthy investors used commodity trades to shift their taxable profits into future years. Madoff's correspondence with his clients, according to one lawyer involved in the ongoing civil suit, shows that this was precisely the secret service Madoff was supplying his early clients. "If a client needed to offset taxable income in a given year," the lawyer explained, "Madoff would give him a paper loss, and put the off-setting profit in his tax-exempt account and then presumably return it in the next year, or when he needed it." As far as how he did this legerdemain he apparently had a "Don't ask, Don't Tell" policy.

Irving Picard, the court-appointed trustee in the bankruptcy liquidation of Madoff's firm, found correspondence in Madoff's files showing that investors specified the loss that would be helpful. Indeed, he charges in court papers that one of these early investors, who had $178 million in different Madoff accounts, requested. , as reported by the Wall Street Journal, "fictitious losses from Mr. Madoff's firm, apparently to offset gains he made through other investments in order to avoid taxes." He cites another early investor, who had nearly a billion dollars in 12 different accounts for his family and foundation, who, according to Picard, had an assistant at his foundation request a $12.3 gain for his foundation. According to him, there were wide variations in different accounts. Even though allocations between accounts might raise tax evasion issues, all the investors cited in the Trustee's suit deny any wrongdoing, and no charges have been brought against anyone to date except Madoff himself, who pleaded guilty to fraud in March 2009, and his firm's auditor, David Friehling, who is out on bail awaiting trial.

The bespoke tailoring of taxable income was not the only special service. Madoff also provided. these early clients with a steady increase in the reported value of their total investments in both good and bad times (such as in the crash of 1987). We now know that he achieved these results by inventing them. And they provided him with the sort of enviable track record he needed to attract a second wave of investors in his Ponzi scheme. As word spread among the rich of Madoff's amazingly steady returns in both good and bad years, he was approached by numerous"feeder funds." These are essentially money-raising operations that turn virtually all the money they raise over to another money manager. As compensation, they usually get a relatively-small placement fee from the money manager, who then charge the investors his own performance fee- typically 20 percent of the profits- and an annual charge- typically one percent of the value of their total investment.

Madoff offered these money-raising funds a far more lucrative deal in which he would waive his fee entirely, allowing the feeder funds to charge the investors a performance fee as well as asset fee on the profits that Madoff would generate each year. Madoff's explained that he could afford to provide this zero-fee service to funds because he earned commissions buying and selling options on the shares. Rather then looking a gift horse in the mouth, feeder funds eagerly outsource their investors' money into Madoff. The profits they earned from these fees were staggering. For example, in 2007 alone, Fairfield Sentry, a unit of the Fairfield Greenwich Group, raked in $160 million in fees on the money it had outsourced to Madoff based. Such fees of course were based on the fake numbers Madoff supplied. After the Ponzi scheme was exposed in 2008 by Madoff himself), many of these funds claim to be victims of his fraud. Perhaps so, but certainly the investors in these feeder funds qualified as the prime victims. As law suits brought by bankruptcy trustee Picard and the ongoing federal investigation proceed, and we learn more about the special services Madoff provided "victims," including the bespoken allocations that allowed them to reduce their taxable income and the zero-fee management that allowed feeder funds to harvest a huge bounty from his phantom profits, it may be useful to ponder W.C. Fields famous dictum "You can't cheat an honest man."

You Think The Iranian Police Are Uncivilized; Here's A Most Gruesome Tale About A Palestinian Family

2009-06-16T11:13:00Z

And here's the headline on a Jerusalem Post story by Khaled Abu Toameh: "Relatives of boy slain as 'collaborator' seek death penalty for family members who killed him."

First, they tortured him to death. And then they strung him up in the family warehouse where his father had left him as some sort of "discipline." The father says he did not expect his own brother--the 15 year-old's uncle---to murder him. The uncle says that he had lost his temper.

So what was Raed Sawalha's crime? He waved at an Israeli Border Police soldier driving by. Some say Raed was actually chatting with the soldier.

Yes, we all want a Palestinian state. Me, too. For one, the world's obsession with Israel may get a respite. But if (and when) it comes to pass many will regret it, and it won't really be the Israelis.

The Netanyahu Speech And The Peace Prospects

2009-06-15T14:32:00Z

Officials of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah took just about no time to pronounce the death of the peace process. Or, to quote Mahmoud Abbas's top advisers, Bibi Netanyahu is guilty of "burying the peace process." Khaled Abu Toameh in the Jerusalem Post cites several of Abbas's aides seriatim as accusing the Israeli prime minister of ushering in "another round of violence and bloodshed," of placing "restrictions on all efforts to achieve peace," and of being a "swindler and liar." As opposed to these men whose essential fraudulence runs ahead of them and behind them. To say nothing of the blood of Israelis and Palestinians that drips from their fingers.

"Netanyahu's speech," one of the spokesmen of the present and outgoing rais intoned, "is a blow to Obama before it's a blow to the Palestinians and Arabs." I suppose that Barack Obama was not thrilled by Bibi's entire speech. But he took seriously the prime minister's goal of two states as the end-game of negotiations. What's more, according to Natasha Mosgovaya in Ha'aretz, the president's press secretary Robert Gibbs went a bit further than repeating that "the president is committed to two states..." In fact, he didn't leave that hanging at all, adding specifically that these two states are "a Jewish state of Israel and an independent Palestine." Obama has compensated for some of his folly in the Cairo address.

Arab governments throughout the Middle East and over many decades have been obstinate in their rejection of the very idea of a Jewish state. After all, the idea recognizes the nationhood and the peoplehood of the Jews, perhaps the first cohesive nation and people in history, and certainly the most resilient. Frankly, one of the reasons the Arabs of Palestine choke especially hard on the notion of the nationhood and peoplehood of their neighbors is that it exposes the spectral thinness of their own communality, given that it is so much at war with their more rock-like loyalties to tribe and clan, family and mob, even within the armed gangs that do the killings.

I have written many times about the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan which sanctioned "a Jewish state" in Palestine and "an Arab state" in Palestine. Had there not been a Jewish struggle against the British who had betrayed the pledge of the Mandate, had there not been a Jewish state established between the river and the sea, what would have arisen instead would not have been a Palestinian state at all. The territory of western Palestine would have been divvied up between Syria, Jordan, and Egypt and we would have heard squat about the Palestinians and of their nation and history. To be perfectly truthful, it was the triumph of Zionism which seeded the resentments that now comprise Palestinianism.

Yet if President Obama thinks there is a Palestinian nation, so be it. I believe it will fail of its own insubstantialities. I do not believe that Israel should at all impede it. But it should not be able to make war on the Jewish state to compensate for its intrinsic deficiencies, and that is why a demilitarized Palestinian state is the sine qua non of a Palestinian state at all. No one can do anything about its teaching of Jew-hatred to its children, no one. And no one will even try. The Palestinian leadership, such as it is, corrupt and brutal, may believe that this gives strength to the revolution. Alright, go and believe.

Now, no one loves the Palestinians more than Jimmy Carter. He declared his love for them late last week when the Palestinian Authority honored him with some gold medal... or maybe bronze. According to the Jerusalem Post, Carter said he had loved them for decades. That's also perfectly O.K. with me. But one people he doesn't love is the Jewish people. And that not loving is certifiable. I would actually worry if he did.

Nonetheless and for whatever reason (and maybe even mischievous pique toward Obama), according to a dispatch by Tovah Lazaroff in the Jerusalem Post, on Sunday the former president made an unprecedented statement endorsing the retention by Israel of Gush Etzion settlements south of Jerusalem and near Bethlehem. There are 14 such villages and towns, including 4 kibbutzim. But Carter did not say in his visit to Neveh Daniel that all of them will or should remain in Israel's hands. Still, having conceded that having "been fortunate this afternoon in learning the perspective that I did not have," he for this first time publicly conceded that among the settlements over the 1967 "green line" these would be among those "that I think will be here forever." By "here" he meant Israel. An aide confirmed that while he had never made such a strong statement about the retention of the Gush Etzion settlements it "was in line with his thinking."

One of Israel's most deluded peace adventurers, the country's president Shimon Peres, said, according to Isabel Kershner in a comprehensive New York Times article, that the prime minister's speech was "true and courageous." Bibi might have lost some of his right-wing. But he has regained his country's center with a perfectly justifiable and rather open response to Barack Obama, the most significant actor in this drama.

Dennis Ross, Out As Special Envoy To Iran; Was He Ousted Because He's A Jew Or A Bit Hawkish On Nukes?

2009-06-15T13:24:00Z

The news that Dennis Ross, long time State Department strategist and peace processor, is being bounced as special envoy to Iran comes from an article by Barak Ravid in the reliable (at least on these matters) Ha'aretz. The story seems to assume that Ross was declared persona non grata by Tehran either because he was a Jew or because he believes that Iran should not be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons. If the Obama administration so readily capitulated to Dr. Ahmadinejad's masters or minions, there's another reason to be worried about its seriousness in this very serious encounter between antagonists. No, we are actually enemies.

To have crumbled precisely while the regime of the ayatollahs is facing a real crisis of confidence at home and something of a challenge to its legitimacy abroad is, well, just that: crumbling. It certainly does not testify to American resilience, even diplomatically. My instinct here is that the president and Mrs. Clinton are so eager to engage--engage even for its own sake--that they'll do anything to please the other. This does not come as a result of analysis. It is, I am sorry to say, a predicated formula.

I had an inkling of trouble a few weeks ago when The New Republic was negotiating to publish a small part of a new book, Myths, Illusions and Peace: Finding a New Direction for America in the Middle East, which Ross co-wrote with David Makovsky. Yes, the text of the book raises the possibility of a strike of last resort against Iran's nuclear installations. In any event, the State Department wouldn't give its approval. And you now know why. Or do you? I believe it's because the administration has given up the military option.

Now, as Ha'aretz has it, Ross may be moved into the Israeli-Palestinian peace process on which he worked forever and a day, for both George H.W. Bush (which also means James Baker) and Bill Clinton. He no longer is saddled with the illusions of their administrations about how you negotiate on that issue. But George Mitchell is, if anything, more encumbered by the make-believe reality that is basic to carrying on of the process. That would not be a good match for Ross. He knows too much. And Mitchell knows only ... well, pretty close to nothing but cliches.

No Schadenfreude Over Ahmadinejad's Re-Election But No Self-Deception Either

2009-06-15T03:02:00Z

I wish I could harbor even a smidgen of the confidence the vice president has that Dr. Ahmadinejad's sweep was really a fraud. In the Times on-line, Roger Cohen also harbors the belief that the balloting results were a fraud. And he came away with what for him must have been a desolating wish:

Majir Mirpour grabbed me. A purple bruise disfigured his arm. He raised his shirt to show a red wound across his back.

'They beat me like a pig,' he said, breathless. They beat me as I tried to help a woman in tears. I don't care about the physical pain. It's the pain in my heart that hurts.

He looked at me and the rage in his eyes made me want to toss away my notebook.

Well, yes, Roger, you and your little notebook have been misleading people on Iran for a long time. You can actually stop doing that without throwing away your notebook. The journalism profession does need one more unemployed.

My impression is that the incumbent's margin of victory was too big to have been fraudulent and the loser's numbers also too big. Tyrannies don't play around with the numbers like this. A dictator usually wants 99% of the voters to have been for him. But in Iran we were seeing the remnants of a true civil society, the last expressions of which were during the time of the Shah. It would be a blessing if this were to be the beginnings of a renaissance.

Maybe the regime fiddled around a bit with the numbers at the polls and after the polling. Still, the outcome had a sense of authenticity. A vast majority in the country is poor, and there is where the backing for Ahmadinejad and his ayatollah patrons is deepest. Mir Hussein Moussavi's support was most solid, among the economic and intellectual elites in northern Tehran and in other big cities and among students of which there are millions, many of them discontented and pro-western, at least in style-of-life and aspirations to openness to the world. Moussavi, however, is an old hack who drew closer to his backers once they seemed to have become a critical mass. And it was there, in these precincts, that the delusion of a coming victory was born.

It is a critical mass that terrifies regimes like the one in power. That is why the real brutality came after the elections and after the protests. And the brutality will continue. Robert F. Worth and Nazila Fathi report in the Times that more than 100 opposition members of parliament have been detained today, Sunday. Yes, there are many brave Persians in the country. But they should not be demonstrating against A'jad. This election was structurally already half a fraud. They should be demonstrating against the Supreme Leader, Ali Khameinei, who really sets the laws in the country. (You might want to read his hilarious disquisition on masturbation, doubtless only in the male expression.)

None of this deflected the Omaba administration, through the voice of Joe Biden, from reassuring whoever is reassured by such sentiments that American engagement with the criminal and war-making class in power will continue. But why in fact did the vice president rush on the very morrow of the election to hearten those he thought stole the process? Was he actually trying to demoralize the opposition? Maybe it is true that Biden talks before he thinks.

The fact is that, if Sa'ad Hariri's partial victory in Lebanon was also a partial victory for Barack Obama's tenets at Cairo, the triumph of the mullahs in Persia is an utter rejection of the president's words, his tone and his very message to the Muslim world. I suppose that's too bad. But it does clarify something, doesn't it? And please don't tell me that there was no relationship between the balloting and the speech. Had Moussavi won the tally the press would have credited the Cairo inspirational with the results.

Pace the vice president's eagerness to assuage Tehran, there will presumably still be an internal struggle in the administration over U.S. positions vis-a-vis Iran. One of the tout va bien crowd, Reza Aslan (a friend of my son's and someone I like), has just been appointed to Dennis Ross' Iran staff. Do not be put off by the fact that he is assistant professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside and has held the Truman Capote Fellowship in Fiction. His latest gig is as a writer for the Puffington Host. Still, Aslan may yet be able to recognize a fact. Now is a good time to see.

Republicans, Democrats, and Jews

2009-06-14T05:05:00Z

I am sure that many of you want nothing to do with Bill Kristol, not even to read him. And probably that goes double for Kristol writing in the Weekly Standard. That's your problem.

But he's got a desolating surprise for many of us. Just trust me this far: read his observations on the topic above on his mag's website.

Ahmadinejad: 1; Obama: 0

2009-06-13T15:34:00Z

All of us were so eager for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to lose that we got caught up in the popular enthusiasm, especially among Iran's younger voters, for Mir Hossein Mousavi. Of course, we knew very little about the president's opponent in the beginning. But by election eve Mousavi's political profile looked very much like that of his incumbent rival. Except that he seemed a bit less nutsy. As for what Mousavi thought about nukes, no one could be found to say that he was much different than Dr. A'jad. Still, we were rooting for the candidate of the more refined people, and that made us feel good.

Had Mousavi won his victory would have been attributed in great measure to Barack Obama's Cairo speech. His oration reduced the pressure on Iran and so there was some reason to think that a victorious Mousavi might have been a bit more responsive to the president's overtures.

Now, maybe Ahmadinejad's triumph is a great big lie. After all, the Interior ministry which does the tally is under his boot. But I think there must be gloom in the White House tonight. Because, while Sa'ad Harari's election in Lebanon was in some manner a response to Obama's address to the Arab world, the ur test was what happened in Iran. And, I am afraid, that the canny meshugana won and that Obama lost.

The State Department may try to gussy up the "enhanced sanctions" voted unanimously by the Security Council against North Korea in Friday's Resolution 1874 as a threat also to nuclear-driven Iran. But read Neil MacFarquhar's story in the Times to grasp just how facile and, in fact, false that would be.

The price of getting the Council to pass a motion (and for China and Russia to agree to it) calling for all United Nations members to inspect cargoes vessels and airplanes suspected of carrying military materials in and out of North Korea was precisely that this is all voluntary. Which means: "go fly a kite." Maybe a similar resolution will pass about Iran. So what. Although I am certain that Ambassador Rice will fight strenuously to get this done for the Tehran regime, as she probably did for the Pyongyang family tyranny.

Anyway, it doesn't much matter. As I pointed out a few days ago Secretary Clinton has given up the ghost on Iranian nukes. She did not do this alone, believe me. What she said was that there would be retaliation (from whom she did not say) if Iran bombed Israel. You know what that means. America has punted on atomic weapons.

Obama And The Need For A 'Truthful' History Of Israel

2009-06-12T18:41:00Z

My colleague and good friend Michael Crowley doesn't seem to get Judea Pearl's point in this morning's Wall Street Journal about President Obama's Cairo remarks about the intellectual and sheer-factual history of Israel.

Let me try to clarify it for Michael. The history of Israel cannot be fathomed without understanding that it emerges from the Zionist idea (both ancient and modern), from the Zionist struggle (both ideological and with arms) and the Jewish response to Zionism which was a successful in gathering of the exiles. After all, half of the world's Jews now live in Israel and speak their revived-by-Zionism Hebrew language. The point is that if the president truly wanted to give an honest rendering of the conflict he wouldn't have omitted this essential ingredient of the narrative.

So it's not whether the Zionism argument would have persuaded the Arabs and the Arabs of Palestine, in particular, about the justice of the establishment of Israel. No, it wouldn't have, not by a long shot. But it would have been truthful history and not potted history like that which Obama has endorsed.

Attributing the birth and development of Israel solely to the Holocaust is, then, simply wrong, egregiously wrong. Moreover, the presidential attribution justifies and reifies the Arab grievance that they are paying for Hitler's crimes. Did the president imagine--I cannot believe he did--that this account might not soften Palestinian feelings towards their neighbors? This means it was both largely false and undermined Obama's stated goals.

Actually, I believe that the enemies will now count the president's words as added evidence for their long-time grievance. This will harden Palestinian positions and general Arab positions, as well. Let's wait and see.

As it happens, I have written a big piece on the presidential address, "Narrative Dissonance," for the print edition of TNR. It is now published on the web site, too.

With Apologies to Roger Cohen

2009-06-12T15:09:00Z

Ahmadinejad does seek equality for Jews...but not for the Bahai:

Iran: Ahmadinezhad Updates Blog Day Before Polls To Appeal To Ethnic Minorities
Tehran Ahmadinezhad's Blog

Iran belongs to all Iranians and, in principle, I do not, and have never, believed in drawing boundaries among the diverse Iranian tribes and faiths. I believe that the entire Iranian people, whatever their faith, religion, ethnicity, and language, have equal rights to every inch of Iranian territory and the country's resources and facilities. And, for my part, I have tried to eliminate some of the wrong and deviant attitudes in that connection.

The president must be answerable to all the people of Iran. He must treat Shiites, Sunnis, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians equally. If he fails to do so, he will have to bow his head in shame and guilt before the Divine Justice.

I have reiterated to the officials many times that they must never allow differences in religious customs, languages, or ethnicity, make even the slightest dent in their resolve to serve those whom they have a duty to serve. And I have said that anyone who is not capable of serving these people with passion to alleviate their pains, shortcomings, and sufferings, does not, and will not, have a place in this government. That is clearly the reason why I allocate more time to pursuing the development of South Khorasan, Sistan and Baluchestan, Hormozgan, Bushehr, Khuzestan, Ilam, and Kordestan provinces and the deprived parts of the country. I feel that the people of these regions, who were deprived of some of their natural rights in the past, should be paid special attention and helped so that they may enjoy just development, in keeping with the rest of the country. This warrants promotion of compassion and justice. If we do not pay special supportive attention to the country's deprived regions, the slogan of justice will never be realized.

[Signed] Written by Mahmud Ahmadinezhad at 1543 [local time, on 11 June]

Depression Hits The Colleges And Universities

2009-06-12T00:41:00Z

If Harvard loses to Yale in next year's rowing regatta we'll know why. It will be because, said one rower to the Crimson, Yale will still have hot breakfasts, which Harvard won't. The depression has hit the big time educational institutions as well as everyone else.

The saddest story about the financial catastrophe I've read recently was an article by Jonathan D. Glater in the June 10 New York Times. It was about Reed College, an elite institution intellectually and not quite a pauper financially. But, after the Wall Street disaster, that it is how it's being forced to behave.

Reed's admissions committee was just about ready to send out its "good news" letters when it realized it couldn't afford the cohort. So it dropped "100 needy students before sending out acceptances, and substitute(d) those who could pay full freight." "Full freight" is just shy of $50,000 per year. In fact, just $50 shy.

It also admitted 45 more students than it did last year, and these without financial aid.

I am not picking on Reed. Virtually every college and university is doing some version of the big cut.

It may be hard to remember that it was just about one year ago when congressional populists on the left and the right were proposing legislation to tax rich schools to pay for poorer ones. This is was demagoguery, disgusting demagoguery.

Housing Prices Going Down, Down Down; Parking Spaces Going Up, Up, Up

2009-06-12T00:29:00Z

I recall reading a few months ago about parking spaces selling for unsightly and unseemly prices. And, if I am remembering right, a parking garage in New York City had gone co-op.

There's a story in today's Boston Globe giving its readers the low-down on the high price being paid for a coveted but not covered parking space in Beantown, this one at 48 Commonwealth Avenue in the Back Bay area, near the Boston Common. This one went for $300,000.

Last year, the average sale price for parking spots in Back Bay and nearby Beacon Hill was $134,000. Ah, if only I'd had the foresight to buy parking spots instead of a magazine.

Litani Of Failures

2009-06-11T21:54:00Z

The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon has been stationed in the country since 1978. "Interim force," my foot. According to Security Council Resolution 1701, passed after the second Lebanon war in 2006, UNIFIL's primary mission is to prevent Hezbollah from rearming and from infiltrating south of the Litani River. Oh, yes, and to keep Syria (and Iran) from smuggling arms through the Lebanese-Syrian border. Guess how much of that it is doing.

But its personnel, operating in different national units and shucking their real obligations, have to be kept busy. Some of the troops are high, very high, on drugs.

The Spanish unit has joined in the search for Israeli spies. Read the admission of this activity in an article from The Jerusalem Post.

Another Triumph For Ambassador Rice

2009-06-11T13:28:00Z

Four especially reassuring elections occurred at the United Nations on Wednesday. So I hasten to bring you the good news.

Let me give it to you seriatim:

1. Libya was elected President of the U.N. General Assembly. The Libyan minister for African affairs has been designated for the post.

2. Sudan as been elected as vice president of the General Assembly. This bodes well for Darfur.

3. Algeria has been elected as chair of the Assembly's Legal Committee, known in the U.N.'s streamlined bureaucracy as the Sixth Committee.

4. Iran has been elected vice-chair of the Sixth Committee.

Susan Rice will have a wonderful time engaging with these men. Especially since the president's Cairo speech, which has changed the world.