Letter From The Capitol

Index 3/7/08

3 posts: (1) A Medal for a Hero--The Home Front; (2) Terror Strikes Jerusalem--The Home Front; (3)  Will Hugo Chavez Mug Colombia?--Us v. Them.

A Medal for a Hero

On Monday, President Bush presented the Congressional Medal of Honor, posthumously, to Woodrow Wilson Keeble.  Keeble, fighting in Korea in 1951, took a hill in the face of gunfire and grenades, knocked out several machine guns, killed 16 soldiers, thus saving his comrades.  Oh, he did all this with 83 grenade fragments in him, from a wound but one day earlier, having ignored doctor's orders to stay put.  On another occasion, he led his troops through a minefield, walking in front.  President Bush's remarks are well worth reading.

Terror Strikes Jerusalem

Yesterday's atrocity in Jerusalem, writes the Jerusalem Post's Calev Ben-David, is more than a simple act of terror.  Mercaz Herav Yeshiva is the "flagship institution" of Zionism.  Its impact--an assault that took place in the library, no less--transcends the horror of more conventional terrorist acts.  That the attacker came from East Jerusalem--inside the perimeter fence, deals another psychological blow to Israel's sense of security.

Claiming responsibility was a previously unknown group, the "Jail Freedom Battalions - the Martyrs of Imad Mugniyeh and Gaza."  (Mugniyeh was the Hezbollah terror mastermind killed by a car bomb in Damascus last month.)  Hamas labeled the atrocity "heroic"; Mahmoud Abbas, who earlier this week bragged of his role in the 1965 PLO attacks on Israel, condemned the act, as did the US and the UN Secretary-General.  The Security Council, true to form re attacks on Israel, failed to pass a resolution condemning the attack, thanks to Libya.  A spokesman for Israel's government revived the "We will not let the enemies of peace win" trope used in the 1990s by the hapless Shimon Peres.  That the "peace process" is an obscene fraud escapes such people.

All of this makes this eyewitness account of life in rocket-plagued Sderot seem tame by comparison.  If Israel does not decisively answer this, look for worse to come.  Until the stopping of terror attacks is made a precondition for peace talks, there is no basis for serious negotiations.  At this writing, neither Israel's government nor the US gets this.  Nor, judging by this catalog of global condemnation, do such folks as UK PM Gordon Brown and French FM Bernard Kouchner.  One shudders at what kind of butchery it would take to bring them up to speed.  Reading Commentary Online might help them.

Will Hugo Chavez Mug Colombia?

Venezuelan thug-tyrant Hugo Chavez is beating the war drums at the Colombian border, while Colombian troops crossed into Ecuador in pursuit of FARC guerrillas.  Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa sought to persuade other Latin countries to line up against Colombia.  Colombian President Alvaro Uribe may bring genocide charges against Chavez.

Pending before the Congress is a 2006 Free Trade Agreement that Democrats are holding up, asserting that there is too much violence against union members.  In fact, such appalling violence is down 80 percent since protective measures were implemented by the pro-US Colombian government, one of our best allies in Latin America.  Holding up an FTA, with a country that did $17 billion of trade with US in 2007 (comparable to our trade with Chile and nearly twice our trade with Peru, both FTA countries),  due to complaints about violence against union members, shows how unfit today's Democrats are to manage national security.  They would, it seems, help Chavez destabilize a key US ally south of the border, in pursuit of their political agenda of propitiating union demands on everything.  NRO notes that the Colombian FTA contains the same environmental and labor safeguards that are in the Peru FTA.

As Chavez  mobilizes his Grand Duchy of Fenwick military (pray Chavez does not get the Q-Bomb), the Organization of American States, much like the UN, passed a resolution calling Colombia a violator of international law for killing FARC guerrillas in Ecuador (B.S. - Ecuador has a legal obligation to prevent its territory from being used to launch aggression abroad).  Meanwhile, the OAS essentially ignores Chavez's provocations--and his provision of sanctuary to FARC guerrillas.  As an extra re affairs south of the border,  savor George Will's dissection of the absurd, vile pretensions of Fidel Castro, Chavez's idol.

Index 3/6/08

5 posts: (1) Economy: More Yeech!--"It's the Earth Stupid!"; (2) Russia's Super Sunday--Weenie Watch; (3) ) Nukes: UN, Iranian and Russian Rumblings--Weenie Watch; (4) Ghastly Gaza: Iran's Latest Push--Us v. Them; (5) Israel's Ides of March - One Week Late?--Us v. Them.

Economy: More Yeech!

US News & WR editor Mort Zuckerman warns that a "credit contagion" will force a long-term workout of bank balance sheet problems, thus stalling economic recovery; his two-pager is chock-full of depressing detail.  Hudson Institute scholar Irwin Stelzer sees recession in our future, in marked contrast to his earlier optimism.  Economist Judy Shelton, who in 1989 predicted the economic implosion of the Soviet Union, says (rightly) "It's the dollar, stupid!"  She harks back to the rules-based monetary system created in 1944 at Bretton Woods, demolished by President Nixon in 1971; since then, devaluing a currency for trade advantage is no longer seen as cheating by many leaders.

Newsweek columnist and foreign policy maven Fareed Zakharia reports that overseas observers are petrified that the Democrats will kill free trade, if they win; both Obama and Hill sang the "kill NAFTA" gospel in Ohio.  Hudson Institute scholar Rod Hunter echoes this theme.  He points out that any one of the World Trade Organization's 151 members can block a trade deal, and that Hill & Obama don't support greater free trade with allies South Korea and Colombia--both are in America's national interest.

WSJ columnist Holman Jenkins fingers arcane accounting rules (aren't all accounting rules arcane?) as a culprit contributing to the subprime mess; specifically requiring institutions to regularly "mark to the market" assets that they re carrying, without intent to liquidate, can force fire sales and damage the holders.  The WSJ editors blast Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke for pushing the banks to write down assets, warning that other borrowers who could work out their loans will instead now be motivated to await further pressure on banks.

Economist Lawrence Lindsey testified before the Senate yesterday, on how to fix the home mortgage market.  He offers a historical perspective, beginning with the creation of the mortgage market in the late 19th century, and then notes that subprimes are only 5 percent of the housing market, but that all homeowners are affected by today's troubles.

Russia's Super Sunday

Challenger Garry Kasparov recounts the Sunday un-funnies from Russia, where Tsar Vlad the Bad's stooge won a rigged election Sunday; Kasparov believes the West squandered its post-Cold war leverage.  Ralph Peters chimes in with more, calling Russia under Tsar Vlad a "banana republic."  Anne Applebaum uses "a farcical election" to describe what went on, held only because Russian insecurity required going through the motions to placate opinion in the West.  Human Events posted an eyewitness account of polling place thuggery.  Discovery Institute Fellow Yuri Mamchur offers a set of eyewitness accounts from inside Russia.

But give the final words to former Czech President Vaclav Havel, quoted in several places in an article in the Prague Daily Monitor.  Havel, chillingly, sees a resurgence of the Russia of the Cold War, driven by a fascism and a desire to regain influence and territory.  Read, in the article, his eloquent words.

Nukes: UN, Iranian & Russian Rumblings

A New York Times front-pager explores an emerging debate over Iran's nuclear status.  The disclosure cam on the same day the Security Council voted 14-0-1 (Indonesia abstaining) to adopt a third round of sanctions on Iran, including a ban on importing dual-use items ("dual-use" means an item can be used for civilian and military purposes), plus additional asset freezes and travel bans on designated individuals.  Meanwhile, the (nuclear) clock is ticking.  America's UN Ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, points out how Iran has failed to meet its obligations to the IAEA, failing to disclose relevant information.  But Caspar Weinberger, Jr. writes (likely correctly) in Human Events that President Bush's mild reaction to Iran's support for jihadists inside Iraq, and staying within the UN to implement sanctions,  means that the next President will have Iran's nuclear program to deal with.

Meanwhile, former senior Reagan administration defense official Richard Perle debunks Russia's threat of a "new arms race" if Poland adopts missile defense aimed at Iran.  Perle argues that the old arms race was less of a race than widely thought, citing work by my late uncle, Albert Wohlstetter, that conclusively showed the arms race to have been one-sided: As even Jimmy Carter's SecDef , nuclear physicist Harold Brown, came to concede, the Russians built new nuclear weapons regardless of whatever we did; their effort was massive and continuous, ours merely episodic.  But myths, if sufficiently cherished, live on.

Ghastly Gaza: Iran's Latest Push

The Palestinian assault against Israel escalated last week, with rockets striking Ashkelon, 10 miles from the Gaza-Israel border.  The New York Times reports that Israeli retaliatory strikes killed mostly terrorists, no mean feat given that terrorists, in flagrant violation of international law (a consideration only cited by the international community against acts of self-defense by Israel), secrete themselves amidst the civilian population, using men, women and children as shields, behind which they launch rockets targeting Israeli civilians (another, equally flagrant, violation of international law).

The Jerusalem Post notes that the new, longer-range Grad rockets capable of reaching Ashkelon, a city of 120,000, which lies outside the range of the Qassam rockets (named for 1930s terrorist Izzd ad-Din al-Qassam) that have terrorized Sderot, were supplied by--who else--Iran; Grads number 21 of 200 rockets fired to date.  There are now 200,000 Israelis within range of the Gazan rocketeers.  On top of all this, the JP reports that IDF forces are being killed by Hamas gunmen using US weapons seized from the Palestinian Authority last June.  Hamas militants celebrated the IDF troop pullback, with a spokesman for Hamas saying that the group "had gone from the stone to the rocket."  Hams is taking its pages from Hezbollah's 2006 Lebanon playbook.

At the heart of this latest assault on Israel is the suicide-bomber mom phenomenon that legal eagle Alan Dershowitz writes about in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.  A Lebanese "mother" put it this way, as noted by Dershowitz:

At the recent funeral for the assassinated Hezbollah terrorist Imad Moughnaya -- the mass murderer responsible for killing 241 marines in 1983 and more than 100 women, children and men in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994 -- Ms. Maladan was quoted in the New York Times giving the following warning to her son: "if you're not going to follow the steps of the Islamic resistance martyrs, then I don't want you."

AD points out that the former bright line between combatant and non-combatant civilian is now a continuum.  A mother who urges her son to become a suicide bomber arguably should be classed as a combatant.  But mistakes are more easily made, too, and the West's anguish over such mistakes makes Israel, or the US, the loser in the global debate, a reality the terrorists well know and gleefully exploit.  AD quotes Golda Meir (emphasis mine): "We can perhaps someday forgive you for killing our children, but we cannot forgive you for making us kill your children."  Condi Rice, for her part, in the latest "both sides" diplomatic equivocation yesterday, said, pace Golda, and in what coming from any American official is an insult to an ally: "Israelis have to be very concerned about the innocent people in Gaza who were caught in this crossfire, and the Israelis need to be very concerned about the humanitarian situation. Those are discussions we're going to have."

So what does Foggy Bottom's favorite peace doll, Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, say of all this?  He blames Israel: “We tell the world: watch and judge what’s happening, and judge who is committing international terrorism.”  White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe was more sensible than the State Department Arabist contingent, and, fortunately, is the public voice for Bush administration policy re this latest development: “We call for an end to violence and all acts of terrorism directed against innocent civilians. There is a clear distinction between terrorist rocket attacks that target civilians and action in self-defense.”  Israeli PM Ehud Olmert, as clueless as Foggy Bottom, divines a difference between the West Bank Palestinians and their brethren in Gaza.  The only discernible difference in their policies LFTC can see is that those who want to kill Jews from the West Bank are northeast of those in Gaza who wish to do the same thing.

A New York Sun op-ed notes that Secretary of State Condi Rice, now in the Mideast, is largely ignoring Iranian and Syrian machinations inside Lebanon.  She slammed the Arabs for not helping the Palestinians (she seems unable to grasp that the Arabs hate the Palestinians, and use them as a weapon against Israel.  She is pursuing a deal with Abbas, who recently bragged that he was one of the first to fire his gun at Israeli targets in 1965, when Palestinian Liberation Organization terror began (more than two years before the 1967 six-Day War, that many wrongly believe triggered PLO terror).  A New York Sun article sees Iran as the big victor, and those whose hopes were raised at Annapolis last fall as the big losers, in the Gaza escalation.  Abbas, in another revealing nugget, likened Israel's air-strikes, which have killed around 100, to "more than a Holocaust," and Saudi Arabia chimed in with "emulating the Nazi war crimes."  Rice, in what has to be a quintessential example of what Esquire magazine calls "dubious achievement," in pressing Abbas to resume talking to the Israelis, does nto understand that it is the Israelis who should refuse to parley until rocket attacks stop, a concept that the clueless Olmert also doesn't grasp any better than our charming musical Secretary of State.

Israel's Ides of March -- One Week Late?

In an Oliver North Washington Times column Ollie offers this, recently given Congress by an Israeli senior intelligence official:

Those who claim that this delay won't hurt us should heed the warning proffered this week by Gen. Amos Yadlin, the chief of Israeli military intelligence. Testifying before the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Security Committee on Feb. 26, the normally tight-lipped general forecast: "Hezbollah will likely time its reprisals for the 40th day of mourning for its commander, Imad Mughniyeh. That will be March 22-23."

Inferentially indicative that such calendar milestones be taken seriously: September 11, 1683, was the date that European troops commanded by Polish King Jan III Sobieski vanquished the Ottoman Empire's forces in their second, and last, assault on Vienna.  The Turkish invaders did leave behind one precious non-Trojan Horse gift: coffee, which became a staple in Vienna coffee houses.  How does one say "Starbucks" in Austrian-accented German?