The Iran Deal – still pending
Last week, the McLaughlin polling group published the results of a survey regarding Iran and the results leave no question about where the American people stand on Iran’s nuclear weapons program. A large majority of Americans strongly opposes the administration’s appeasement policies. 76 percent of Americans support escalating the nuclear sanctions against Iran. Only 14 percent support the administration’s intention to weaken them. Indeed, when asked directly about whether or not to weaken sanctions, 69 percent of Americans said not to. Instead, a plurality of 45 percent of Americans think the U.S. should attack Iran’s nuclear installations if sanctions fail to stop Iran’s nuclear operations.
As for the nuclear deal itself, 63 percent of Americans believe that the nuclear deal is a graver threat to U.S. national security than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
And yet the Biden administration is pursuing this terrible deal, just as the Obama administration did when Biden was vice president. They simply do not care what the public thinks, and they certainly are aware of what the public thinks. Likewise, even members of their own party have voiced reservations about the deal. They are worried about the midterms, and rightly so. The Biden administration doesn’t seem very concerned – or at all concerned – about that, either. That’s how important this Iran Deal is to them.
Glick describes the coalition of Israel-supporters in the US who oppose the deal:
The majority pro-Israel camp is comprised of many factions. The two most important ones are national security hawks and faith-based communities, particularly Evangelical Christians…As a nation who fights its own wars, and whose enemies are also America’s enemies, national security hawks recognize that the stronger Israel is, the more secure U.S. interests in the Middle East are.
Faith based voters and communities base their support for Israel first and foremost on their belief that the Jews are God’s chosen people and that the reborn Jewish state is proof that God’s covenant is eternal.
Those may be the two “most important” camps, according to Glick, but I would add that many Americans who don’t fit either of those two descriptions also support Israel, because they recognize it as a functioning democracy struggling to exist in a rough neighborhood, and they are also well aware of the lengthy and terrible history of anti-Semitism as well as the Holocaust.
Glick goes on to describe the anti-Israel camp:
…[I]ts factions can be roughly divided into three groups – hard right isolationists and white nationalists; progressives, and Arabists…
…[O]ver the past generation, progressives have taken over the institutions of the Democrat Party. They have become the dominant faction in the party and they control the Biden administration’s policies.
…The Arabist view posits that U.S. support for Israel undermines U.S. ties with the Arab world. Consequently, Israel is a burden, rather than an asset for the U.S. Arabists argue that U.S. ties with Israel should be downgraded.
Over the past decade, the Arabist camp has been weakened because its key regional anchor, Saudi Arabia has abandoned its hostility with Israel.
And yet, as Glick also points out, a revised Arabist point of view is strong in the Biden administration:
Tellingly, U.S. Arabists have not abandoned their anti-Israel position. Instead, they have turned on the Saudis and the UAE and now rely for justification on Iran’s closest Arab partner Qatar – itself a prolific supporter and financier of terror groups from ISIS to Hamas — and on Iran itself. It is hard to ignore that in their anti-Arab policies, the Arabists among the U.S. foreign policy elite expose a darker motive for their strident opposition to the U.S.-Israel alliance.
As for Israel, Glick describes a pro-US-alliance faction that is fairly straightforward in its strategy of appealing to the pro-US majority:
The first camp, which we can call the American camp, recognizes that Israel cannot influence members of the anti-Israel camp in any of its various factions. But it also recognizes that this camp is the minority in the U.S. and while it is the dominant camp in the Democrat Party, it isn’t the only faction in the party. Members of the American camp believe that the way to preserve and expand U.S. support for Israel is to support and strengthen Israel’s supporters on both sides of the partisan aisle. The American camp advances this goal by speaking straightforwardly and unapologetically about Israel’s interests and actions, and how both advance U.S. interests and values.
And then Glick discusses an “elitist” faction whose position is more complex:
Members of elitist camp believe that the anti-Israel camp, particularly its Arabist and progressive factions is all-powerful. In their view, the State Department is the beginning and the end of U.S. foreign policymaking. Under these circumstances, Israel’s job is to foster good relations with the anti-Israel camp and seek to appease it, even if that appeasement undermines the credibility of Israel’s supporters.
Israel’s radical left supports the elitist approach because its members share the U.S. anti-Israel camp’s hostile ideological convictions about their country. The Lapid camp is a major faction of the elites camp because its members are elitists. Lapid and his supporters prefer the company of progressives and Arabs, who share their habits and personal preferences to the company of security hawks and Evangelicals.
Glick feels that because this second group is in power right now in Israel, it disempowers the American pro-Israel wing to fight off the Biden camp. Perhaps that’s true, but I don’t think it really matters. After all, back in the time of the first Iran deal at the hands of Obama, Netanyahu was in power and he was strongly against the Deal and reached out to the large pro-Israel community in the US – to no avail. Netanyahu even addressed Congress. The majority of the Senate was against the deal, but not enough of them to be able to pass some sort of legislation against it.
The same would be true now, in my opinion, with the Biden administration’s deal. It seems the administration is grimly determined to do this and unless enough Democrats join against them, they will do this.
What did the people who promoted Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee think was going to happen if he was elected?
Did they not realize it’s dangerous to prop up a cognitively-challenged man of 78 who probably would be declining even more, who would have a lot of power even if others were at least partly controlling him behind the scenes, who would be the visible head of the party, who could not be hidden forever and would say unpredictable things, and who was never smart or especially appealing even when he had possession of all his faculties? (That he’s a liar wasn’t an issue; that was probably felt to be a feature and not a bug.)
My guess is that they thought some or all or any combination of the following things would occur:
(1) He’d be temporary, just a mechanism – not a great one, but the best one available – to beat Trump. Then once that all-important task was accomplished, they’d get rid of him and Kamala would become president (oops; they miscalculated on her attributes, as well). Turns out it’s harder than expected to oust him and come up with a better replacement. Also, Biden might not be as tractable about that as predicted. He might enjoy this gig, since he’s been chasing it for his entire adult life.
(2) He’d be good enough, and wouldn’t decline all that precipitously. Meanwhile, the Democratic-controlled Congress and his Cabinet would make decisions. They didn’t bargain for the defection of Manchin/Sinema on their most important actions, such as HR1 or ending the filibuster.
(3) They’d actually be running the show, competently, instead of Joe. But they didn’t bargain for their own inability to run a government competently. Bad judgment all around. After all, it’s not so hard to run a country, is it? Especially when you’re bunch of geniuses (in your own minds) – and with the press, social media giants, education, sports and business heads, and the population of Europe behind you. Turns out it’s harder than they thought. And people are actually noticing, which they didn’t bargain for either.
(4) None of this mattered because they would pass HR1 and permanently weaken the voting laws to give them the opportunity for fraudulently winning all elections hence if needed. Or they would make DC and Puerto Rico states, and that would give them a cushion. Or both. That was really the whole ballgame and nothing else mattered.
Open thread 4/16/22
If you want to know why Trump endorsed Dr. Mehmet Oz…
…in the Pennsylvania senatorial GOP primary, here’s a good explanation.
Sounds reasonable to me.
Passover and liberty
[The following is a slightly edited repeat of a previous post.]
Tonight is the beginning of the Jewish holiday Passover.
I’ve been impressed by the fact that Passover is a religious holiday dedicated to an idea that’s not solely religious: freedom. Yes, it’s about a particular historical (or perhaps legendary) event: the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. But the Seder ceremony makes clear that, important though that specific event may be, freedom itself is also being celebrated.
A Seder is an amazing experience, a sort of dramatic acting out complete with symbols and lots of audience participation. Part of its power is that events aren’t placed totally in the past tense and regarded as ancient and distant occurrences; rather, the participants are specifically instructed to act as though it is they themselves who were slaves in Egypt, and they themselves who were given the gift of freedom, saying:
“This year we are slaves; next year we will be free people…”
Passover acknowledges that freedom (and liberty, not exactly the same thing but related) is an exceedingly important human desire and need. That same idea is present in the Declaration of Independence (which, interestingly enough, also cites the Creator):
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
It is ironic, of course, that when that Declaration was written, slavery was allowed in the United States. That was rectified, but only after great struggle, which goes to show how wide the gap often is between rhetoric and reality, and how difficult freedom is to achieve. And it comes as no surprise, either, that the Passover story appealed to slaves in America when they heard about it; witness the lyrics of “Let My People Go.”
Yes, the path to freedom is far from easy, and there are always those who would like to take it away. Sometimes an election merely means “one person, one vote, one time,” if human and civil rights are not protected by a constitution that guarantees them, and by a populace dedicated to defending them at almost all costs. Wars of liberation only give an opportunity for liberty, they do not guarantee it, and what we’ve observed in recent decades has been the difficult and sometimes failed task of attempting to foster it in places with no such tradition, and with neighbors dedicated to its obliteration.
We’ve also seen threats to liberty in our own country – more potent in the last couple of years. This is happening despite our long tradition of liberty and the importance Americans used to place on it.
Sometimes those who are against liberty are religious, like the mullahs. Sometimes they are secular, like the Communists or their present-day Russian successors. Some of them are cynical and power-mad; some are idealists who don’t realize that human beings were not made to conform to their rigid notions of the perfect world, and that attempts to force them to do so seem to inevitably end in horrific tyranny, and that this is no coincidence.
As one of my favorite authors Kundera wrote, in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting:
…human beings have always aspired to an idyll, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of harmony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men, where the world and all its people are molded from a single stock and the fire lighting up the heavens is the fire burning in the hearts of men, where every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily caught and squashed between the fingers like an insect.”
Note the seamless progression from lyricism to violence: no matter if it begins in idealistic dreams of an idyll, the relinquishment of freedom to further that dream will end with humans being crushed like insects.
Dostoevsky did a great deal of thinking about freedom as well. In his cryptic and mysterious Grand Inquisitor, a lengthy chapter from The Brothers Karamazov, he imagined a Second Coming. But this is a Second Coming in which the Grand Inquisitor rejects what Dostoevsky sees as Jesus’s message of freedom (those of you who’ve been around this blog for a long time will recognize this passage I often quote):
Oh, never, never can [people] feed themselves without us [the Inquisitors and controllers]! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, “Make us your slaves, but feed us.” They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious. Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man?
Freedom vs. bread is a false dichotomy. Dostoevsky was writing before the Soviets came to power, but now we have learned that lack of freedom, and a “planned” economy, is certainly no guarantee even of bread.
I think there’s another very basic need, one that perhaps can only really be appreciated when it is lost: liberty.
Happy Passover!
More on the Moskva sinking
We still don’t know exactly why the Moskva sank. But we do know that it did sink, and that the cause was a fire igniting munitions onboard and causing structural damage. The Russians say the cause of the fire was unknown; the Ukrainians say it was an anti-ship cruise missile they had fired.
It would be a little coincidental if a fire had broken out on the ship for no particular known reason right smack dab in the middle of a war, and therefore it makes more sense to me that it was more likely a Ukrainian missile. But either way:
“Both explanations for the sinking of the Moskva indicate possible Russian deficiencies — either poor air defenses or incredibly lax safety procedures and damage control on the Black Sea Fleet’s flagship,” analysts Mason Clark, Kateryna Stepanenko, and George Barros at the Institute for the Study of War wrote in their daily war briefing…
Carl Schuster, a former US Navy captain, said the doubts went all the way to the Kremlin.
“It raises questions about naval competence 10 years after (Russian President Vladimir) Putin announced he was going to restore the navy’s capabilities, morale and professionalism,” Schuster said.
Furthermore, other countries could learn something from this:
Timothy Heath, senior international defense researcher at the RAND Corp. think tank, said the strike on the Moskva would underscore to both China and the US “the vulnerability of surface ships” in any potential military clash.
The Moskva was considered “a symbol of Russia’s military power.” So the sinking has to be a morale-sinker as well for Russia, although it’s not clear how much strategic military importance it has.
Open thread 4/15/22
A man who doesn’t shy away from Big questions:
Roundup
(1) Here’s a good summary of the Michigan “kidnapping” case and the FBI’s involvement. Perhaps we should rename it the FBE: Federal Bureau of Entrapment. Here are some interesting things that I hadn’t remembered. The first is that – if I’m interpreting this correctly – the future defendants were identified as suspicious by none other than Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook:
Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg testified to Congress in October 2020 that Facebook had “identified” the Whitmer kidnap plot “as a signal to the FBI about six months ago” regarding “suspicious activity on our platform.”
But the plot didn’t exist at that point.
The second is how SCOTUS enabled the FBI’s move towards more flagrant entrapment by making if far more difficult for defendants to claim it as a defense:
Prior to the 1970s, defendants often successfully challenged entrapment as a violation of due process. But in 1973, the Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, gutted most defenses against government entrapment by focusing almost solely on the “subjective disposition” of the entrapped person.
If prosecutors can find any inkling of a defendant’s disposition to the crime, then the person is guilty, no matter how outrageous or abusive the government agents’ behavior. Justice William Brennan dissented, warning that the decision could empower law enforcement agents to “round up and jail all ‘predisposed’ individuals.”
Justice Brennan would get to say “I told you so” if he were still around.
(2) Russia makes nuclear threats if Sweden and Finland join NATO. See also this:
One of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s closest allies warned NATO on Thursday that if Sweden and Finland joined the U.S.-led military alliance then Russia would deploy nuclear weapons and hypersonic missiles in an exclave in the heart of Europe…
Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, said that should Sweden and Finland join NATO then Russia would have to strengthen its land, naval and air forces in the Baltic Sea.
Medvedev also explicitly raised the nuclear threat by saying that there could be no more talk of a “nuclear free” Baltic – where Russia has its Kaliningrad exclave sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania…
Lithuania said Russia’s threats were nothing new and that Moscow had deployed nuclear weapons to Kaliningrad long before the war in Ukraine. NATO did not immediately respond to Russia’s warning.
Can’t imagine why they’d want to join up, right? As I’ve said before, in the Hotel Russian Empire you can check out any time you like but you can never leave.
(3) Elon Musk is trying to buy Twitter:
Elon has offered to buy Twitter for $43 billion in cash. He wants to take it private and “transform” it into “the platform for free speech around the globe” (his words).
The left thinks the idea of a Twitter that allow people like Donald Trump to tweet is anathema.
Trump’s 2018 warning to Europe and especially Germany
Trump made some prescient – although obvious – points back in 2018. He was speaking to the secretary of NATO:
TRUMP: We’re protecting Germany, we’re protecting France, we’re protecting everybody and yet we’re paying a lot of money to protect…
So we have to talk about the billions and billions that’s being paid to the country that we’re supposed to be protecting you against. Everybody’s talking about it all over the world. They’ll say wait a minute we’re supposed to be protecting you from Russia but why are you paying billions of dollars to Russia for energy? Why are countries in NATO, namely Germany having a large percentage of their energy needs paid to Russia and taken care of by Russia?
Now, if you look at it, Germany is a captive of Russia because they got rid of their coal plants, they got rid of their nuclear plants. They’re getting so much of the oil and gas from Russia. I think it’s something NATO has to look at.
I think it is very inappropriate. You and I agree it’s inappropriate. I don’t know what you can do about it now but it certainly doesn’t seem to make sense that they’ve paid billions of dollars to Russia and now we have to defend them against Russia…
…[H]ow can [NATO] be together when a country is getting its energy from the person you want protection against or from the group that you want protection?
STOLTENBERG: Because we understand that when we stand together, also in dealing with Russia, we are stronger. I think what we have seen is that —
TRUMP: No, you’re just making Russia richer. You’re not dealing with Russia. You’re making Russia richer.
STOLTENBERG: Well, I think that even during the Cold War, NATO Allies were trading with Russia, and then there have been disagreements about what kind of trade arrangements we should (inaudible).
TRUMP: I think trade is wonderful. I think energy is a whole different story. I think energy is a much different story than normal trade. And you have a country like Poland that won’t accept the gas. You take a look at some of the countries — they won’t accept it, because they don’t want to be captive to Russia. But Germany, as far as I’m concerned, is captive to Russia, because it’s getting so much of its energy from Russia. So we’re supposed to protect Germany, but they’re getting their energy from Russia. Explain that. And it can’t be explained — you know that.
Just another reason Russiagate was absurd on the face of it. And destructive.
Did Ukraine sink the Moskva?
Stephen Green reports, you decide:
Regardless of whether the Moskva is at the bottom of the Black Sea or the burned husk of what was once the pride of the Black Sea Fleet, the question remains: Did Ukraine do that?
The Kremlin admits that an ammunition explosion caused an onboard fire that “severely damaged” the Moskva, leading to the order to abandon ship.
But there’s good reason to doubt that the fire was an accident.
I have no idea and no expertise in this area, but I find Green persuasive in his argument that Ukraine’s claim is quite credible.
Open thread 4/14/22
He has every right to crow: