Filed under: Iran, Politics, Progressivism, United Kingdom | Tags: David Axelrod, Democrats, Eric Holder, Medvedev, Obama
Bill Whittle addresses this administration and all its works and finds them to be “Merchants of Despair.” Whether intentionally or unintentionally, they have brought Chicago style politics to the nation’s capitol. Actions have consequences, and they did not understand what the consequences of their actions would be.
They thought it was a game, a political game, in which they won, and so could take advantage of the financial crisis to do things that they well knew that the American people did not want. But they did them anyway, in a kind of thumbing of the nose to the public, who did not understand what was afoot.
They brought debt and unemployment, inflation and misery to millions of Americans, and thought it didn’t matter. They used the ‘government’s money’ to pay back those who supported them, and thus rewarded, they can expect support again, to do it all over. That’s not free market capitalism, and not a free country and not a free people. And we don’t do things that way.
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Filed under: Politics, Foreign Policy, The Constitution, Economy, Conservatism, Freedom, Capitalism, United Kingdom, National Security, The United States, Iran | Tags: Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Strategy and Tactics
This week on Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell discusses why the glacial pace of deliberations and decisions in the Senate is a feature, not a bug.
“Once it was clear the president was going to try to turn us into a Western European country as rapidly as he could, about the only strategy you have left when your opposition has a forty-seat majority in the House. . . . We knew we couldn’t stop the agenda. But we thought we had a chance of creating a national debate about whether all of this excess was appropriate. And the key to having a debate, frankly and candidly, was to deny the president, if possible, the opportunity to have any of these things be considered bipartisan.”
This interview will do a lot towards explaining American politics and American government— at least the Senate version. Why the Founders created the Senate the way they did.
Filed under: China, Europe, History, Iran, Iraq, Middle East, Russia | Tags: 1162—1227, Genghis Khan, He Created an Empire
I have mentioned that I never seem to read anything when it first comes out— partly because I usually have a stack of books that I have not yet read, but partly also because you have to be in the right frame of mind for some books. A good friend recommended Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World to me years ago. It was published in 2004, but I never got around to it until now. When I get excited about something I have read, I’m inclined to insist that everyone else read it right now. So consider yourselves warned.
I knew nothing about Genghis Khan except the”Mongol hordes,” Ulaanbaatar, the steppes, and the first stanza of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Xanadu” which I recalled word for word from Survey of English Literature quite a few years ago. Not promising. So I read the Introduction.
In 1937, the soul of Genghis Khan disappeared from the Buddhist monastery in central Mongolia along the River of the Moon below the black Shankh Mountains where the faithful lamas had protected and venerated it for centuries.
Well, who could resist that? Born in 1162, and his soul disappeared in 1937.
Year by year, he gradually defeated everyone more powerful that he was, until he had conquered every tribe on the Mongolian steppe. At the age of fifty, when most great conquerors had already put their fighting days behind them, Genghis Khan’s Spirit Banner beckoned him out of his remote homeland to confront the armies of the civilized people who had harassed and enslaved the nomadic tribes for centuries. …
In conquest after conquest, the Mongol army transformed warfare into an intercontinental affair fought on multiple fronts stretching across thousands of miles. Genghis Khan’s innovative fighting techniques made the heavily armored knights of medieval Europe obsolete, replacing them with disciplined cavalry moving in coordinated units. Rather than relying on defensive fortifications, he made brilliant use of speed and surprise on the battlefield, as well as perfecting siege warfare to such a degree that he ended the era of walled cities. Genghis Khan taught his people not only to fight across incredible distances but to sustain their campaign over years, decades, and, eventually, more than three generations of constant fighting.
Jack Weatherford is the Dewitt Wallace Professor of anthropology at Macalester College in Minnesota. He earned his PhD at the University of California, San Diego, and an honorary Doctorate of Humanities from Chinggis Khaan College in Mongolia. He certainly knows how to draw in a reader.
In American terms, the accomplishment of Genghis Khan might be understood if the United States, instead of being created by a group of educated merchants or wealthy planters, had been founded by one of its illiterate slaves, who, by the sheer force of personality, charisma and determination, liberated America from foreign rule, united the people, created an alphabet, wrote the constitution, established universal religious freedom, invented a new system of warfare, marched an army from Canada to Brazil, and opened roads of commerce in a free-trade zone that stretched across the continents. On every level and from any perspective, the scale and scope of Genghis Khan’s accomplishments challenge the limits of imagination and tax the resources of scholarly explanation.
That’s all the sampling I shall give you. Here’s the book at Amazon, though every bookstore should have copies. And here is a young Mongolian musician, Battulga, who plays “Jonon Kharin Yavdal” on a horse headed fiddle which has a skin covered box and horsehair strings (even the bow-string) as in an ancient traditional fiddle. Enjoy.
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Filed under: Election 2012, Iran, National Security, Politics, Terrorism, The United States | Tags: Economic Sanctions, Nuclear Terrorism, Terroriosm's Sponsor
In the current Washington climate, there was a rare bipartisan compromise last week, led by Senators Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Mark Kirk (R-IL) to impose economic sanctions on anyone who does business with the Central Bank of Iran. The Bank pays terrorists and funds the nuclear program. The sanctions passed the Senate 100–0. The Obama Administration claims that the economic sanctions will bring Iran’s nuclear program under control short of war.
The White House supported the sanctions in October after the FBI uncovered an Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in a Washington , D.C. restaurant. Then it changed its mind.
Administration officials now say that if the U.S. closes its financial system to foreign banks that do deals with Iran, then U.S. trading partners might stick with Iran and deprive Americans of their business. Senator Menendez responded: “So we say to financial institutions, do you want to deal with the $300 billion (Iranian)economy, or do you want to deal with a $14 trillion economy. I think that choice is pretty easy for them.” The Wall Street Journal adds:
The Treasury also claims that central-bank sanctions could destabilize Iran’s economy and thus disrupt world oil markets, making prices go up and creating a windfall for Iran, which exports oil. Anything’s possible, but if you fear an oil-price spike, wait until Israel bombs Tehran after it concludes the U.S. isn’t serious about stopping its nuclear plans.
The Senate passed the sanctions anyway, yet now the Administration is trying to water them down in a House-Senate conference on a defense bill. Treasury is asking the conferees to strike the Menendez-Kirk bill’s most important provision, which applies the sanctions to any foreign central bank trading in oil via the Central Bank of Iran. The Administration wants the leeway to choose whether to block such banks from the U.S. financial system, or merely to “impose strict conditions” on them.
The Senate gave the president waiver options in a failed attempt to earn his support. The Senate bill sanctions take effect after 60 days, so the President would have to issue three waivers before the 2012 election — having to answer to the public each time. Treasury would have the sanctions take effect after 180 days, so Mr. Obama would only have to issue one waiver before Election Day.
Goodness, if the sanctions disrupted Iran’s oil exports, it might increase oil prices which in turn might raise the cost of gas at the pump. And that might hurt Mr. Obama’s re-election chances. Americans are very sensitive to the cost of gasoline. Although not as sensitive as they are to a nuclear attack. A nuclear Iran just might hurt his chances of re-election as well.
Quite a demonstration of just what the President’s priorities are.
Filed under: Foreign Policy, Iran, National Security, Terrorism, The United States | Tags: Making Sense of the Inexplicable, Michael Ledeen, War Against the Mullahs
Michael Ledeen has written the most interesting commentary on the spate of explosions in or near an Iranian military installation — or nuclear research facility, or Revolutionary guards base, or missile base — the mullahs can’t make up their minds what to say.
The mullahcracy is so intensely divided that different ‘spokesmen’ from different ministries/ news outlets/ cults/ mafias put out different versions. There was an explosion, or at least ‘the sound of an explosion,’ it was just the sound of our fierce military training. Then again, yes, there was something, but not to worry, just go home and shut up. And so it goes in the Islamic Republic of Iran, as our president so loves to call his intended international partners.
I’ve been reporting for many months about the ongoing sabotage of pipelines, refineries, military sites, Revolutionary Guards’ aircraft and trains, and groups of regime thugs. and have received the usual cold shoulder from publications “of record,” which is to say silent sneers. But the tempo of attacks, most notably the monster blast a week ago that vaporized General Moghaddam and his foreign visitors (at least some of whom had taken the shuttle from Pyongyang to be with him on what they wrongly expected would be a happy day) led the Washington Post’s man in Tehran, Thomas Erdbrink, to note the phenomenon in a useful story entitled “Mysterious Explosions Pose Dilemma for Iranian leaders.” He gives us a pretty good rundown of the explosions, and, living as he does in Tehran, gives ample space to regime “explanations” such as bad welding, western sanctions, and so forth. Given the number of foreign journalists who have come to a bad end in Iran, you’d do the same.
Do read the whole thing. Most of the news we get about Iran is scary and confusing. Dr. Ledeen comes close to making sense of this strange, fanatical, conspiratorial, repressive, corrupt, rebellious society. I can’t say that he is comforting, but at least he isn’t fantasizing about the president’s non-existent foreign policy, nor assuming that we can just all be friends if we are nicer to them than George W. Bush was. It’s a pretty clear-eyed assessment.
ADDENDUM: Britain has closed its embassy in Iran and evacuated all its staff from that country following the attack on their embassy in Tehran on Tuesday. Britain has also ordered Iran to close its embassy in London immediately, and its staff has been given 48 hours to leave, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said today in a strongly worded statement to Parliament.
Filed under: Foreign Policy, Iran, National Security, United Kingdom | Tags: British Embassy in Tehran, Protesters Stormed Embassy, The Work of Sanctions
In Iran: protesters stormed two British diplomatic compounds in Tehran, smashing windows, throwing petrol bombs and burning the British flag in protest against the sanctions imposed by London.
Britain, Canada and the United States have imposed new unilateral sanctions on Iran this week, while the EU, France and Italy have all said financial measures against Tehran should be strengthened. London banned all British financial institutions from doing business with their Iranian counterparts — including the Central Bank of Iran.
Iran is the fifth biggest oil exporter in the world. The embassy storming is a clear sign of greater political infighting within Iran’s ruling hardline elites. The conservative controlled parliament is trying to force the hand of President Ahmadinejad and expel the British ambassador. The hardliners in Iran will use the crisis to unite people and to blame the crisis for the failures of their own economy.
Iran, of course, claims that it only wants nuclear plants to create electricity. That is why the mysterious explosions at known missile development sites is international news. And why they have sought help from North Korea, Pakistan, and Russia.
Several dozen protesters broke away from the crowd of a few hundred people outside the main British embassy compound in downtown Tehran, climbed over the gates, broke the locks and went inside. They pulled down the British flag and burned it, and raised an Iranian flag in its place. They smashed windows, took a framed picture of Queen Elizabeth, carried off the royal crest as police stood by, and set a car on fire.
Another group broke into a compound that was once the embassy’s summer quarters, and is now used to house diplomatic staff. Six embassy employees were held briefly. A German school next to the Qolhak compound was also damaged.
Britain is outraged. Nations are required to protect the embassies of other countries. Iran has clearly indicated that it has no intention of giving up its nuclear efforts. The question is whether sanctions can make a difference. The Iranian government has attempted to keep channels of negotiation open in an effort to limit the worst effects of sanctions, but shown no sign of backing down.
I wish I had more confidence in the understanding and capability of my government.
