The Enlightened Despot

Lisa Schiffren has the scoop:

If Mark Krikorian and the new conventional wisdom are right, and nominating one “Nuyorican” woman (who, as Jonah noted earlier, is not even properly the child of immigrants, as Puerto Ricans are citizens) is all it takes to allow the White House to delay indefinitely the messy, no-win issue of amnesty for 10 million illegal aliens, mostly of Hispanic origin, few of Princeton/Yale education — that is a strategy that should not be subjected to too much conservative scrutiny. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, as the saying goes. The less talented you think Sonia Sotomayor is, the easier a trade this should be.

If it works, the White House should consider other applications. Everyone suspects that President Obama has been fibbing about his sympathies in the gay-marriage debate (he supported it before he opposed it) because he understands the potential political fallout (not least among black voters) from advocating, or helping to advance, same-sex marriage. Gay activists are coming to suspect that they’ve been played, yet again, by a Democratic administration which they believed to be sympathetic. Can they be bought off with a SCOTUS appointment? Would the nominee have to be out? Perhaps a genuinely brilliant, prominent lesbian constitutional law scholar would be a reasonable sop. There is one on the short lists. For conservatives, of course, that is a dicier deal than the Sotomayor tradeoff — since a genuinely brilliant constitutional scholar might advance the left-wing agenda a little too effectively.

Did I say, “if it works”? We know this strategy works — at least with the rank and file. Case in point: President Obama regularly makes plain his disdain for Israel’s democratically elected leaders; his almost visceral desire to force Israel to bend to his vision of an accommodation with the Palestinians; and his clear indifference to Israel’s existential security from threats of nuclear annihilation. Yet large numbers of liberal American Jews, who in many respects are quite intelligent, continue to point to Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod — two high-level political advisor/enforcers lacking in tenure or the ability to make law or interpret the constitution (not yet a redundant statement) — and smile about how much they love the president and believe that he loves them back.

My kingdom for a horse? My huge, game-changing cultural issue for a seat on the court? The Obama version of “triangulation”? Whatever.

That’s how you crazy!

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu apparently hasn’t heard that this isn’t a great time to be building new housing. Also, if he’s going to get back into real estate development, he really needs to remember that it’s all about location, location, location:

Israel has moved ahead with a plan to build a new settlement in the northern West Bank for the first time in 26 years, pursuing a project the United States has already condemned as an obstacle to peace efforts.

…

David Elhayani, head of the Jordan Valley regional council that oversees Maskiot, confirmed to Reuters he had issued the tender last week for contractors to launch infrastructure work.

“It’s a process that will take months, to prepare infrastructure before we can build. We are proceeding in an orderly fashion,” Elhayani said.

Elhayani insisted that the construction is being carried out completely legally.

“There is full consensus among Zionist parties that the Jordan Valley must remain under Israeli control within the framework of any diplomatic deal,” he said. “The Jordan Valley is necessary for the sake of national security, and woe to the administration that strays from this path.”

Check out Marc Ambinder for a fuller account and analysis of the meeting between Netanyahu and Barack Obama, but it seems pretty clear that the U.S. position will be to assert, when pressed, that settlement building isn’t such a hot idea. But as far as actually pressuring Israel on policy, the administration is likely to focus on its ‘please don’t bomb Iran’ message. A worthy message, but not the only one that needs sending.

Avigdor Lieberman says the sadly true but massively counter-productive (and possibly self-falsifying?):

Believe me, America accepts all our decisions.

The truth hurts.

Few things in this life are less likely to deliver on their promise than an article entitled ‘The Rational Argument for an Israeli Attack on Iran’. And sure enough, the article in question does not contain any rational arguments for an Isreali attack on Iran, for roughly the same reason that it contains no round squares. But while the author, David Samuels, is wrong about a lot of things, this is the most worthwhile piece I’ve seen written about the Middle-East in quite a while, and I highly recommend it.

That said, there is no shortage of patent nonsense:

The idea of a mass public outcry [in the event of an Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear facilities] against Israel in the Muslim world is probably also a fiction—given the public backing of the Gulf states and Egypt for Israel’s wars against Hezbollah and Hamas. As the only army in the region able to take on Iran and its clients, Israel has effectively become the hired army of the Sunni Arab states tasked by Washington with the job of protecting America’s favorite Middle Eastern tipple—oil.

This is a non sequitur. Whatever private joy Arab leaders might derive from an Israeli bombing campaign, the fact remains that nothing unites Sunni and Shia like the Jewish state. Pleasing other governments is useless if there is no mechanism forcing them to show their gratitude, especially if domestic politics require that they continue to demonstrate that they hate you.

On the other hand, Samuels makes a number of points that, while not particularly profound, are greatly underappreciated in discussion of the Middle-East:

Critics of the American-Israeli relationship love to conflate American support for Israel before 1967 with America’s support since then by citing statistics for tens of billions of dollars in U.S. military credits and aid given to Israel “since 1948,” when the Jewish State was founded. In fact, Israel’s rise to becoming a regional superpower was accomplished without any significant help from United States. Israel’s surreptitious program to build nuclear weapons was accomplished with the aid of the British and the French, who joined with Israel to seize the Suez Canal from Egypt’s rabble-rousing President Gamal Abdel Nasser, and who were then forced to give it back by Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Israeli air force pilots who destroyed the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian air forces on the ground flew French-made Mystère jets—not American-made F-4 Phantoms. The U.S. Congress did not appropriate a single penny to help Israel accommodate an overwhelming influx of Holocaust survivors and poor Jewish refugees from Yemen, Iraq, Egypt, and other Arab countries until 1973—25 years after the founding of the state.

If anything, this understates how far apart Israeli and American interests were pre-1967. In 1954, Israel’s military intelligence outfit launched terrorist attacks on U.S. targets in Egypt, which is generally not the way close allies interact. Over the past few decades, Israel and America have had broadly similar interests in the region, but they certainly haven’t become identical, and it is foolish to rule out a priori the possibility that they might be in direct opposition in particular instances. Samuels is right to point out that the threat of a nuclear Iran means very different things for the two allies:

Many perfectly reasonable people chalk up the rhetorical excesses of both parties to the hot desert sun and assume that nothing particularly awful will happen whether Iran becomes a nuclear power or not. From a U.S. point of view, at least, there is little reason to doubt the analysis that a nuclear Iran with a few dozen bombs can be contained at relatively limited cost using the same strategies that successfully constrained an aggressive Soviet Empire armed with nearly 45,000 nuclear warheads at the height of the Cold War.

What the nuclear optimists miss is that it is not the United States that is directly threatened by the Iranian nuclear program but Israel—and the calculations that drive our Middle Eastern client state are very different from those that guide the behavior of its superpower patron.

…

The parallels between Israel’s rise to superpower client status after 1967 and Iran’s recent rise offer another strong reason for Israel to act—and act fast. The current bidding for Iran’s favor is alarming to Israel not only because of the unfriendly proclamations of Iranian leaders but because of what an American rapprochement with Iran signals for the future of Israel’s status as an American client. While America would probably benefit by playing Israel and Iran against each other for a while to extract the maximum benefit from both relationships, it is hard to see how America would manage to please both clients simultaneously and quite easy to imagine a world in which Iran—with its influence in Afghanistan and Iraq, its control over Hezbollah and Hamas, and easy access to leading members of al-Qaida—would be the partner worth pleasing.

Samuels is wrong, I think, to conclude that a strike would serve Israel’s interests (and just plain crazy to think that it will provide political cover for a solution to the Palestinian problem in a grand bargain that will make everyone but Iran happy). But these are very good points about the different calculations the two allies face in dealing with Iran. Obviously, a nuclear Iran is much worse news for Israel than for the United States. But more important - and less-widely discussed - is his second point: as important as it is for America to improve its relationship with Iran, it is far more important for Israel that those efforts fail.

If nothing is done to stop the Iranians from developing nuclear weapons, that will be very bad for Israel. If they bomb Iran, that will be even worse for Israel. And if they bomb Iran to American condemnation, that will be an absolute disaster for Israel. This is a very tough spot even for a country that is always in several tough spots at once, and I honestly don’t know what I would advocate if I were in their position. But America’s situation, fortunately, is much clearer. We should do what we can short of military action to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, understanding that we will probably fail, while doing everything we can, as publicly as possible, to restrain Israel. There’s nothing pleasant about this situation, but we’re in a different - and better - position than are the Israelis.

This, if the unnamed sources know what they’re talking about, is very bad news:

Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu has struck a secret deal with Yisrael Beiteinu leader Avigdor Lieberman for highly contentious construction on West Bank land known as E1, Army Radio reported Wednesday.

A source close to the negotiations between the pair told Army Radio that the plan had been agreed upon even though it did not appear in the official document detailing the coalition deal between Yisrael Beiteinu and Netanyahu’s Likud.

The plan is for the West Bank settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim to build 3000 new housing units on the territory, which stretches between it and Jerusalem, the source was quoted as saying.

Construction in the area is particularly sensitive because it would create contiguity between the settlement and the capital, which in turn would prevent Palestinian construction between East Jerusalem and Ramallah.

This immediately brought to mind a very foolish thing that Obama said in his press conference about the Arab-Israeli conflict: “the status quo is unsustainable.” I realize there is a trend towards using the word ’sustainble’ to mean ‘good’ in a fairly vague way, especially when the environment is involved. In this sense, the situation in the Middle-East is certainly completely unsustainable. But if by ’sustainable’ you mean ’something which can be sustained’ then this situation has been the most sustainable conflict of my lifetime, and it got going well before I was born, and I see no reason to think it’s on its last legs now. A much more honest comment on the situation was printed in the Onion during - if memory serves - the al-Aqsa Intifada: “Maybe we should stop thinking of this as the Middle-East crisis and start thinking of it as Middle-East culture.”

It’s a good joke, and a fair point, but, of course, it’s not good advice - we should certainly be doing everything we can to resolve this. But here’s a nasty thought: at any point in time, the odds are against a lasting peace being established within the next few years, but right now, with the recent fighting in Gaza, a prime minister who is opposed to the formation of a Palestinian state, and a foreign minister who just flat out hates Arabs and doesn’t care who knows it, it is just about inconceivable that any agreement will be reached in the near future. So perhaps it’s time to admit that. Not that we should say so out loud, of course, but I do think our policy for the region should be geared towards improving our position as a negotiator with the next Israeli government, rather than putting our all into improving the situation while this one is still in power. I don’t pretend to know all that that would entail, but, for a start, we don’t have to worry about staying on Bibi’s good side to assure our place at the negotiating table if we admit that nothing will get done at that table until he leaves it.

This sentence from the Haaretz article quoted above sticks out:

For this reason, the United States has strongly opposed this sort of Israeli construction for more than a decade.

I imagine a copy editor lost his job over this one, because no one would intentionally refer to our opposition to settlements over the past few decades as ’strong’. But there’s no time like the present.

Though, naturally, low on substance, I think this is pretty terrific PR work - though the line Kevin Drum highlights about a ‘contiguous’ Palestinian state had better be a slip, or our new president is a crazy person. There will no doubt be some shouting that he sounds soft on terror, and some snickering about pitching hope and change to the Arab world, but he didn’t say anything for critics here - or in Israel - to make a serious fuss about. Meanwhile, he pitched himself to Arabs in a way that we simply haven’t seen before, which, presumably, is the whole point of the exercise. In light of that, I think this from Ben Smith is worth paying attention to:

But perhaps some political arguments are universal, and Obama last night sought to appeal to global muslims in terms familiar from the campaign trail. One less-noticed element of his Al Arabiya interview, which I mentioned in passing, was a riff that seemed like it could have come right off the stump in Iowa:

Q How concerned are you and — because people sense that you have a different political discourse. And I think, judging by (inaudible) and Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden and all these, you know — a chorus –

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, I noticed this. They seem nervous.

Q They seem very nervous, exactly. Now, tell me why they should be more nervous?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think that when you look at the rhetoric that they’ve been using against me before I even took office –

Q I know, I know.

THE PRESIDENT: — what that tells me is that their ideas are bankrupt. There’s no actions that they’ve taken that say a child in the Muslim world is getting a better education because of them, or has better health care because of them.

Substitute “Clinton” for “Zawahiri” and it would be an interview with the Quad City Times, though Obama does go on to address Islamic militancy in more specific terms.

The implication is that this is a bizarre, tangential way to criticize Al Qaeda, which is wrong. Obama always needs to have his constituency in mind, of course, but he is addressing Arabs here, and terrorism targeted at Americans, Europeans, and Israelis is not likely to be high on most Arabs’ list of worries. If you are someone living in say, the Gaza Strip, the fact that you are living in abject poverty almost certainly is on that list. We are never going to convince these people that the U.S. and Israel have nothing to do with their troubles - among other reasons, because it isn’t true - but it’s certainly worth pointing out that Hamas has not done such a bang-up job of improving their living standard.

The situation is fairly comparable to the Anbar Awakening. Insurgent groups didn’t ally themselves with us because they thought it was wicked to kill Americans; they allied themselves with us because they didn’t like Al Qaeda indiscriminately killing Iraqis who got on their nerves. And there’s an obvious, but important lesson in that - Al Qaeda is a bunch of jerks. So are the Taliban and Hamas. As an invading horde of infidels, we’re unlikely to win much sympathy in the Muslim world, but to remain less popular than Islamic militants among people who actually live with them requires that we behave very stupidly - say, by torturing the natives, or trying to disrupt the opium trade. The undoing of that stupidity is what our efforts in the Middle East really need, but talking the right talk for once is a good start.

The tunnels between Gaza and Egypt are up and running again:

The Israeli military bombed hundreds of tunnels during the Gaza war — to shut down Hamas’ weapons-smuggling routes, and to put pressure on Egypt to the militants from getting more. But just days after the battle’s end, those tunnels are re-opening, with Hamas in charge.

“Hamas has seized control of all the smuggling tunnels under the Philadelphi Corridor in southern Gaza and has been moving additional arms into the Strip since Operation Cast Lead ended on Sunday morning,” the Jerusalem Post reports. Those passages, “are usually run by local Palestinian clans, and Hamas’s decision to take control is believed to be part of the group’s attempts to reestablish its regime in Gaza. Hamas can now decide what is smuggled into the Strip and give priority to weapons and explosives.”

Good to hear that Gaza’s crippling explosives shortage is finally being addressed.

From Mark Steyn:

Here’s another example of an odd phenomenon. A French Jew was stabbed Thursday night. That’s not the odd phenomenon, but merely par for the course in la république française these days. What’s odd is the way the Herald Tribune feels obliged to sign on to the French government’s wholly false equivalence:

Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie has condemned the “revolting attack” in the suburban town of Fontenay-sous-Bois and says authorities are working to find the perpetrators.

The ministry said in a statement Friday that the attackers shouted anti-Semitic threats at the man as they stabbed him four times with a knife in the Thursday evening attack…

Alliot-Marie has said France has experienced a clear increase in anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim attacks since Israel began an assault against Hamas in Gaza on Dec. 27.

As I wrote here, would it be too much for a French reporter to ask Mme Alliot-Marie to provide a single example of an “anti-Muslim attack” since December 27th?

Now, one gets the sneaking suspicion that Steyn is asking this question because he thinks that there are no such attacks. But this is a holiday weekend, so let’s be charitable and take his question at face value: would it have been hard for the French reporter to ask for an example? Obviously not. And, for extra-credit, a follow-up question: would it have been hard for Alliot-Marie to provide such an example? Nope, not if he had 30 seconds and access to google:

Paris prosecutors have opened an investigation into allegations of violence against three youths of north African origin by suspected members of a hardline pro-Israel group, officials said Tuesday.

The violence allegedly took place Thursday outside a Paris high school where suspected members of the Jewish Defence League were handing out leaflets.

The anti-racism group MRAP wants French authorities to punish those responsible and ban the “far-right” league that is “banned in Israel itself.”

Saying that there have been racially motivated attacks on both Jews and Arabs is not an equivalence at all, so it can’t be a false equivalence. It’s a fact.

Some Israeli’s called up to serve in the IDF are protesting instead:

What the hell was Olmert thinking?

In an unusually public rebuke, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel said Monday that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had been forced to abstain from a United Nations resolution on Gaza that she helped draft, after Mr. Olmert placed a phone call to President Bush.

“I said, ‘Get me President Bush on the phone,’ ” Mr. Olmert said in a speech in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, according to The Associated Press. “They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn’t care: ‘I need to talk to him now,’ ” Mr. Olmert continued. “He got off the podium and spoke to me.”

Israel opposed the resolution, which called for a halt to the fighting in Gaza, because the government said it did not provide for Israel’s security. It passed 14 to 0, with the United States abstaining.

Mr. Olmert claimed that once he made his case to Mr. Bush, the president called Ms. Rice and told her to abstain. “She was left pretty embarrassed,” Mr. Olmert said, according to The A.P.

I don’t see how this can fail to make taking a 100% pro-Israel stand a little harder for American politicians, or how that can fail to be a very bad thing for Israel. Is there an angle I’m missing, or was he just having a Biden moment?

This is a sad day for the Despot. We made it through the election with out once mentioning Joe the Plumber. (Well, either that, or our site search is broken, which is certainly possible.) In any case, I can’t think of three words that make me wince quite like ‘Joe the Plumber’. It’s not so much that I dislike him - though I do. I felt painful pangs of embarassment whenever he came up. I was embarassed for the jerk who thought he was worth discussing, embarassed for everyone who thought ‘Joe the Plumber’ was an acceptable way to refer to a grown-up with no secret identity, and embarassed for a democracy that could be held captive by this jackass. But as much as the media discussed him as if he mattered, nothing to do with him ever did end up mattering, so I didn’t have to confront this agony and talk about him.

It appears, however, that he is here to stay, at least for a little while. And, painful though it is, this really needs watching:

I’ll have more to say about this in a few days when I’m done weeping, but for now I’ll say that JtP’s career as a journalist is more evidence that the McCain campaign has done some lasting damage to the GOP. Letting the Palinites out of the bottle is all well and good as a hail mary effort to salvage a dying campaign, but they simply will not be able to compete nationally with these clowns front and center.

This is bad news:

Israel on Monday banned Arab political parties from running in next month’s parliamentary elections, drawing accusations of racism by an Arab lawmaker who said he would challenge the decision in the country’s Supreme Court.

…

Parliament spokesman Giora Pordes said the election committee voted overwhelmingly in favor of the motion, accusing the country’s Arab parties of incitement, supporting terrorist groups and refusing to recognize Israel’s right to exist. Arab lawmakers have traveled to some of Israel’s staunchest enemies, including Lebanon and Syria.

Obviously this is not good news about the relationship between Arab-Israelis and the rest of Israel, though, sadly, there’s nothing surprising there. It’s also just a bad thing in its own right. It’s worth remembering - and being thankful for - the fact that even after the Patriot Act and all the rest, we have some deeply rooted freedoms here that many other western-style democracies don’t. Spain and Germany, for instance, have banned political parties in the recent past for supporting ETA and and being Neo-Nazis, respectively. In about fifteen European countries it is illegal to condone, deny, or downplay the Holocaust. That would be a total non-starter here. If Bush tried to ban saying nice things about Al Qaeda, even if he’d tried it on September 12, 2001, not even John Kerrey could have lost an election against him. That sort of thing used to give me a warm feeling of superiority over our European allies - maybe, if we can go a few years without torturing or illegally wiretapping anyone, I’ll get that feeling back again.

Back in 2002, John Derbyshire wrote an article entitled “Why Don’t I Care about the Palestinians?”, and apparently he’s still very proud of it, as he linked to it in a post at The Corner today. It’s astonishing stuff. It’s not just wrong, it’s crazy. But, still, I can’t help but admire it in a way. Intellectual honesty - a core value of the Despot, just below correctness - is thin on the ground these days, especially where Derb works. This is a man who isn’t holding anything back:

Which leaves us with number 5: expulsion. I am starting to think that this might be the best option. I’m not the only one, either. Here is Dick Armey, Republican leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, talking to Chris Matthews on Hardball:

MATTHEWS: Well, just to repeat, you believe that the Palestinians who are now living on the West Bank should get out of there?

Rep. ARMEY: Yes.

When I say “the best option,” I don’t mean “best for the Palestinians”. I don’t think they have any good options. Being Arabs, they are incapable of constructing a rational polity, so their future is probably hopeless whatever happens. Their options are the ones I listed above: to be ruled by gangsters, or Israelis, or Jordanians, or welfare bureaucrats. Or to go live somewhere else, under the gentle rule of their brother Arabs. Would expulsion be hard on the Palestinians? I suppose it would. Would it be any harder than options 1 thru 4? I doubt it. Do I really give a flying falafel one way or the other? No, not really.

Taste the crazy. Savor it.

I’ve been mulling over a lengthy Gaza post for a long time now, which has served as an excuse not to post much about the situation at all. But I can’t not say something about this, from Jonathan Chait, because it expresses what seems to be a commonly held view that isn’t remotely defensible:

I wrote a couple of posts over the weekend that mostly dealt with the morality of Israel’s incursion into Gaza, which I think is beyond question. The wisdom, on the other hand, is very much open to doubt.

That is simply bonkers. I won’t get into what I actually think about the incursion, but the idea that this might be morally justifiable but strategically unsound strikes me as a non-starter. If the incursion is bad strategy, it is bad morally. It is not at all controversial that the incursion, and the bombing before it, have resulted in the deaths of many civilians, including some who are too young to have supported Hamas in any capacity:

Sadly, this sort of thing is an unavoidable byproduct of any serious warfare, given the technology that has been available for the past sixty years. And I’m not arguing that war is never justifiable. But the situation in Gaza is one in which civilian casualties are necessarily going to be extremely high. There are surely ends which would justify such means, but you can’t divorce the justifiability of those means from the likelihood that they will actually achieve those ends, which is what Chait is clearly doing. When you are causing this much suffering, it’s not enough to be aiming for a lovely outcome; you need to be pretty damn sure you can make it happen.

It has begun in the Gaza Strip:

Israeli tanks and troops have launched a ground invasion to reoccupy parts of the northern Gaza strip as the military escalated its assault on the Palestinian enclave in an attempt to curb Hamas rocket attacks on Israel.

With Israel’s chief military spokesman warning that the attack would take “many long days”, the Israeli Cabinet also authorised the call of thousands more reservists. As Israeli tanks and infantry crossed into northern Gaza reports began to emerge of fighting between Hamas and Israeli troops. The invasion comes after Hamas warned Israeli forces entering Gaza faced a “black destiny” and vowed that they would be defeated.

Pretty much what everyone expected, but depressing none the less.