… but not for the gander. 

We hope that Israel will destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities by force. We have noticed that talking to Iran  accomplishes nothing.

Obama’s anti-Israel administration is plainly trying to make it hard for Israel to take action against Iran.  

But Israel is a sovereign state and will make its own defense decisions.   

When Sarah Palin said so, her media critics called it ‘stupid’.

When Joe Biden says it  … 

James Taranto writes in the Wall Street Journal:

Over the weekend, as we noted yesterday, Vice President Biden said that if Israel decides it needs to take military action against the Iranian nuclear-weapons program, the U.S. will not “dictate” otherwise. A reader points out that Sarah Palin, who ran against Biden in last year’s election, said much the same thing in a September interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson:

Gibson: What if Israel decided it felt threatened and needed to take out the Iranian nuclear facilities?

Palin: Well, first, we are friends with Israel and I don’t think that we should second-guess the measures that Israel has to take to defend themselves and for their security.

Gibson: So if we wouldn’t second-guess it and they decided they needed to do it because Iran was an existential threat, we would cooperative or agree with that.

Palin: I don’t think we can second-guess what Israel has to do to secure its nation.

Gibson: So if it felt necessary, if it felt the need to defend itself by taking out Iranian nuclear facilities, that would be all right.

Palin: We cannot second-guess the steps that Israel has to take to defend itself.

Palin reiterated the point in a later interview with CBS’s Katie Couric.

This column agrees with both Biden and Palin and is glad to see that the bipartisan consensus recognizing Israel’s right to defend itself appears sturdy. But we suspected not everyone would be so consistent, so we went back to see what people had said about Palin.

Matthew Yglesias, who when he was young drew much praise for his thoughtful and fair-minded commentary, wrote a blog post titled “Palin: If Israel Wants to Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran, That’s Okay With Me”:

Palin reiterated her absurd view that the President of the United States shouldn’t “second-guess” Israeli policy under any circumstances.

Palin is okay at repeating various “pro-Israel” buzzwords, but she can’t run away from the fact that her underlying position on this topic is stupid.

So when Biden said the same thing, did Yglesias call it “absurd” and “stupid”? Well, is the pope Italian? Here’s what he wrote yesterday:

This is being read by some . . . as a “green light” for an Israeli attack. . . . I think the most straightforward reading of what Biden said is rather different, he’s trying to distance the United States from any possible Israeli military action by making it clear that what Israel does or doesn’t do is decided in Israel rather than in Washington.

The main problem with this, I think, is that probably nobody’s going to believe it. Already you see many Americans taking Biden’s statement that the U.S. doesn’t control Israeli policy to “really” mean that the U.S. is encouraging Israel to attack.

When Palin says it, it’s stupid. When Biden says it, he gets graded on a curve: The problem is that other people are too stupid to understand the deep subtlety of Biden’s thinking.

Then there’s M.J. Rosenberg of TalkingPointsMemo.com. In September, he described Palin as “robotic” and suggested that she is the puppet of a Jewish cabal:

Now we know why among the very first people Sarah Palin sat down with after being nominated was [sic] Joe Lieberman and the head of AIPAC.

She needed the latest talking points and, boy, did she learn her lines. . . .

In other words, under the Palin administration, we won’t second guess Israel. I think I’ve got it.

Palin sure has.

And when Biden said it? Rosenberg kept mum until he was persuaded that the vice president’s words didn’t really reflect U.S. policy. Then he wrote this:

The President said today that he has “absolutely not” given Israel a “green light” to attack Iran.

So Biden either misspoke, was misinterpreted, or has just been corrected by his boss. Israel will get no green light to attack. We will, as Obama said all along, rely on diplomacy to solve the Iran problem.

Fair enough, right? Wrong. Look what Palin said to Charlie Gibson just before he asked about a hypothetical Israeli strike:

Gibson: So what do you do about a nuclear Iran?

Palin: We have got to make sure that these weapons of mass destruction, that nuclear weapons are not given to those hands of Ahmadinejad, not that he would use them, but that he would allow terrorists to be able to use them. So we have got to put the pressure on Iran and we have got to count on our allies to help us, diplomatic pressure.

Gibson: But, Governor, we’ve threatened greater sanctions against Iran for a long time. It hasn’t done any good. It hasn’t stemmed their nuclear program.

Palin: We need to pursue those and we need to implement those. We cannot back off. We cannot just concede that, oh, gee, maybe they’re going to have nuclear weapons, what can we do about it. No way, not Americans. We do not have to stand for that.

What Palin said last year was precisely what Obama and Biden have now said: Diplomacy is the optimal way of dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat, but if it fails, Israel has a right to defend itself. In a way, the inconsistency of some of Palin’s critics is reassuring. It shows that a good deal of anti-Israel sentiment is mere partisanship masquerading as something uglier.

North Korea has vowed to enlarge its atomic arsenal and warns of a “fire shower of nuclear retaliation” in the event of a US attack.

The North “will never give up its nuclear deterrent … and will further strengthen it” as long as Washington remains hostile, Pyongyang’s main Rodong Sinmun newspaper said.

In a separate commentary, the paper blasted a recent US pledge to defend South Korea with its nuclear weapons, saying that amounted to “asking for the calamitous situation of having a fire shower of nuclear retaliation all over South Korea.”

…

The new UN resolution seeks to clamp down on North Korea’s trading of banned arms and weapons-related material by requiring UN member states to request inspections of ships carrying suspicious cargo.

North Korea has said it would consider any interception of its ships a declaration of war.

Honduran soldiers have arrested the President

The arrest comes after President Zelaya defied a court order that he should re-instate the chief of the army, Gen Romeo Vasquez.

The president sacked Gen Vasquez late on Wednesday for refusing to help him organise a referendum.

Mr Zelaya, who under current regulations leaves office next January, also accepted the resignation of the defence minister.

The referendum was to ask the population if they approved of a formal vote next November on whether to rewrite the Honduran constitution.

One of the most bizarre stories I’ve heard this year

Pensioners battered a financial adviser with Zimmer frames before kidnapping and torturing him for losing £2million of their savings.

James Amburn, 56, was ambushed outside his home in Speyer, western Germany, bound with masking tape and bundled into a car boot.

‘It took them quite a while because they ran out of breath,’ said Mr Amburn, who was driven to the Bavarian lakeside home of one of the gang.

…

Forty armed officers rescued Mr Amburn who was naked except for his underwear.

A physician had to be on hand to help his captors into police vans because of their various infirmities.

J Post reports on the continued riots.

Here’s a video of live ammunition being fired into the crowd.

Hard to tell how much is true of this, but there is no doubt of the cruel methods being used by the authorities:

“We can see the smoke and the helicopters from our house,” said a source in Teheran. “They have closed down all the roads, trapping the people, who are being bombarded.”

People were chanting “Allah Akbar” and “We will kill those who kill our brothers” from their windows, balconies, and rooftops, he said.

Most of Mousavi’s supporters “are not leaving our homes,” he went on.

“God help those people [who have gone out] in Freedom Square. The last we heard, helicopters are pouring boiling hot water on the people,” said another source. His account could not be confirmed, but other reports also spoke of boiling water being dropped from the helicopters, and of an undefined “acid” being sprayed at demonstrators by security forces on the streets. “Hospitals are overflowing and the embassies in Teheran have left their doors open to provide a haven for the injured for sanctuary,” the source added.

Obama’s starting to speak.

He is urging Iran’s leaders to “govern through consent, not coercion” And in a statement from the White House on Saturday, he said: “The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.”

No direct condemnation. A country that funds the murder of your soldiers in Iraq is crippled with angry young voters. If the protesters had the backing of the world’s most powerful man behind them, it would give their cause an energy and possibility of success. Some have argued that this would give the hardliners real ammunition: the chance to blame America – the interfering superpower. But this is nonsense, the protesters are people young and old, deeply religious and not at all. They have the chance to change something here. And they won’t for the most part believe that the whole protests are being fomented by Israeli and US agents – as the regime is claiming.

Iran seems to have a revolution every 35 years, and they’re overdue for one now.

The Presidential elections results have shown that Ahmadinejad has received 2/3 of the vote, a landslide; but do the people believe it?

Chaos in Tehran

Well, a group of English Classical Liberal students are going to be contributing to this blog for the next few weeks. I’ll start off by stating that Prime Minister’s Questions is occurring now. The topic of debate is reform of the Houses, separation of power of the legislature and executive, and the creation of a written constitution.

If you’re a British reader, you can watch PMQs live here.

But Mr Brown does not plan to allow the people their say on reform. Both Iain Duncan Smith MP (Con) and Bob Wareing MP (Independent) have demanded that the executive become accountable to the Commons.

Mr Brown leads a fragile government, and after a year of continuous scandal for the Labour Party, he knows that to leave any decision to the people will be just another disaster for his drowning Party’s attempt to survive.

Joshua Muravchik writes in the Wall Street Journal: 

The results of Kuwait’s elections last month — in which Islamists were rebuffed and four women were elected to parliament — will likely reinvigorate the movement for greater democracy in the region that has stalled since the hopeful “Arab spring” of 2005. It also puts pressure on the Obama administration to end its deafening silence on democracy promotion.

Although ruled by a hereditary monarch, Kuwait is the most democratic of the Arab countries. The press is relatively free, parliament has real power, and politicians are chosen in legitimate elections. However, Kuwait is a part of the Persian Gulf, where the subordination of women is traditionally most severe. Historically, Kuwait’s political process was for males only. But in 2005 parliament yielded to female activists and approved a bill giving women the right to vote and hold office.

In 2006 and 2008, several women ran for parliament, though none won. The women that captured four of the 50 seats last month weren’t aided by quotas; they won on their own merits. Their success will undoubtedly inspire a new wave of women’s activism in nearby countries.

Almost as significant as the women’s gains were the Islamist losses. The archconservative Salafist Movement’s campaign for a boycott of female candidates obviously fell flat, and the number of seats held by Sunni Islamists fell sharply.

Thus continues a string of defeats for Islamists over the last year and a half from west to east. In September 2007, Morocco’s Justice and Development Party, a moderate Islamist group, was widely forecast to be the winner. Its support proved chimerical: It came away with 14% of the seats, trailing secularists. Iraq’s provincial elections this January signaled a turn away from the sectarian religious parties that had dominated earlier pollings. This trend, capped by Kuwait’s elections, has important implications.

What sapped the vitality of the “Arab spring” was the triumph of Islamists — the Muslim Brotherhood’s strong showing in Egypt’s 2005 parliamentary election, Hamas’s victory in Gaza, and Hezbollah’s ascendance in Lebanon. In response to these election results, the Bush administration muffled its advocacy of democracy in the Middle East. Some democrats in the region even took a go-slow stance.

To put it bluntly, these outcomes renewed questions about whether the Arabs were ready for democracy. If elections produce victory for parties that are not themselves democratic in practice or philosophy, then democracy is at a dead end. But the Kuwait election, following those in Iraq and Morocco, suggests that such fears may have been overblown.

If this election is a harbinger of larger developments, its symbol is Rola Dashti, an American-educated economist who led the fight for women’s political rights in Kuwait and who lost narrowly in 2006 and 2008 before triumphing this year.

Her victory was remarkable for several reasons. Half-Lebanese by birth, Ms. Dashti speaks Arabic with a distinct Lebanese accent that stamps her as an outsider in a relatively insular country. She is also proudly secular. She wears no head covering and makes no effort to conceal the fact that she remains unmarried although she is in her forties.

This flies in the face of the custom that is the essence of women’s subordination in the culture of the Gulf. The system of “guardianship” requires that women be under the supervision of some male — father, uncle, husband, brother or even son — at all times. Ms. Dashti lives with her divorced mother in a household devoid of males. She has brothers, but they serve as campaign aides rather than as guardians.

The fact that Kuwaiti voters sent Ms. Dashti and three other women to parliament suggests that the Arab world may be ready for democracy after all. The Obama administration should take heed.

The most surprising thing to us in all this – that Muravchik thinks Obama gives a damn.    

The excellent governor of Alaska has it right again. 

From Investor’s Business Daily:

Back in July, when IBD first interviewed the then-little-known governor, Palin emphasized developing Alaska’s Chukchi Sea resources. Under those icy waters, it was then believed, was enough oil and gas to supply America for a decade.

“It’s a very nonsensical position we’re in right now,” Palin told us. “(We) ask the Saudis to ramp up production of crude oil so that hungry markets in America can be fed, (and) your sister state in Alaska has those resources.”

At the time, it was thought that Chukchi’s waters northwest of Alaska’s landmass held 30 billion cubic feet of natural gas.

Today, Science magazine reports that the U.S. Geological Survey now finds it holds more than anyone thought — 1.6 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered gas, or 30% of the world’s supply and 83 billion barrels of undiscovered oil, 4% of the global conventional resources.

That’s enough U.S. energy to achieve self-sufficiency and never worry about it as a national security question again.

The only thing left to do is drill. “Congress can do that for us right now,” Palin told IBD, urging Washington to open the territory.

That Congress hasn’t is the biggest part of the problem.

“Alaska should be the head, not the tail, to the energy solution,” Palin said.

It ought to be reassuring to Americans that energy can be developed here. Americans are environmentally conscious, and Palin herself has a good record on balancing development with ecology.

The alternative isn’t reassuring: If we don’t drill, the Russians will. Situated over on the eastern end of the Chukchi Sea, they have global ambitions of dominating the energy trade and no qualms about muscling in on the U.S.

Already, undersea volcanic activity has melted much of the Arctic ice cap and enabled more exploration than in the past. The U.S. has as much claim to the region as the Russians, but only the Russians seem to be taking advantage of the geological bounty.

It’s pure energy, not theoretics. That’s significant because Steven Chu’s Energy Department is spending too many resources trying to figure out how to turn all the weird wind power and switchgrass schemes into viable energy resources.

His latest idea is to paint roofs white. None of this puts significant energy out to consumers. Nor does it come close to matching oil in energy value…

President Obama has reduced the number of US warships in the strategically important region of the Persian Gulf. There’s not a single US aircraft carrier in the region. Now Russian warships have arrived there, being serviced at Gulf ports they have never had the use of before; and Iran has sent its navy into the Gulf of Aden. These maneuvers are co-ordinated by Russia and Iran.  

Furthermore, Iran recently launched its long-range missile, and North Korea, which co-operates with Iran on missile development, has demonstrated that it now possesses nuclear warheads. North Korea is in the business of selling its nuclear technology. Not only Iran, but Syria, Hizbollah in Lebanon, and probably Venezuela are among its eager customers.

North Korea is threatening war on South Korea. The danger extends to Japan, and to all countries within the range of Iran’s and North Korea’s missiles, including Europe and the US.

But the US administration does nothing about it.

 From the Oneida Dispatch:

With tensions high on the Korean peninsula, Chinese fishing boats left the region, possibly to avoid any maritime skirmishes between the two Koreas. But U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said the situation was not a crisis and no additional U.S. troops would be sent to the region…

South Korean and U.S. troops facing North Korea raised their surveillance on Thursday to its highest level since 2006, when North Korea tested its first nuclear device. About 28,000 American troops are stationed across the South…

In Washington, the Army’s top officer, Gen. George Casey, expressed confidence that the U.S. could fight a conventional war against North Korea if necessary, despite continuing conflicts elsewhere.

But [Defense Secretary] Gates, en route to Singapore for regional defense talks, tried to lower the temperature.

“I don’t think that anybody in the (Obama) administration thinks there is a crisis,” Gates told reporters aboard his military jet early Friday…

The two Koreas technically remain at war because they signed a truce, not a peace treaty, in 1953…

 So despite what the pathetic Gates ‘thinks’ the US administration ‘thinks’, there is a crisis in the East, threatening the West and Western interests.

The US needs to act, but its Commander-in-Chief has no intention of doing anything effective, either because he doesn’t understand what’s going on, or because he sees no evil in it.

It is tempting to speculate imaginatively: If the US had a Churchill or Truman in command, what would he do now? Churchill bombed Dresden flat to hasten the end of the Second World War. Truman dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to achieve the same end. In the present crisis might not either of them decide that Pyongyang needs to be destroyed? Would they not launch ICBMs with nuclear warheads to do the job quickly and thoroughly? Not only would an evil nuisance be eliminated from the world, but the psychological shock-wave would most likely stop Iran in its tracks; dumbfound Hizbollah, Hamas, and the Saudis; freeze the global jihad; silence Russia and China; paralyze the Taliban; knock the breath out of Chavez and all the little dictators who had begun to think the US was finished as a super-power. After some mopping up operations  – taking out the enemy’s nuclear development sites – we reckon there would be a long period of peace.

But we don’t have a Churchill or Truman. We have Obama, so the international crisis will intensify and spread.