Can Palestinians Pay War’s Price? By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Can Palestinians Pay War’s Price? By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, December 17, 2015.

Tobin:

More than two months into the so-called “stabbing intifada,” Palestinian violence against Israelis continues. But as the toll of casualties mounts, two things are becoming clear. One is that the decision of so many Palestinians to risk their lives in order to inflict violence on any Jew may be rooted in the failures of their own society and leadership that has little or nothing to do with Israeli policies. The other is that Palestinians are going to have to make a choice about whether they really want to pay the price for launching a new war that will hurt them more than Israel.

As Ben Caspit noted in Al Monitor, the questions of figuring who the individual terrorists are in this wave of violence and why they are doing it is puzzling Israeli authorities:

According to Israeli security experts, Israel is now “paying” for things that it is not even guilty of, such as Arab society restricting women and depriving them of equal rights. Also, the economies of the Arab states in general have long been weak, and the Palestinian economy in particular cannot give its youths any real hope of improvement to their standard of living, economic security and employment. 

The new Palestinian is unaware that compared to the other Arabs in the Middle East today, his situation is relatively better than theirs. The only Arab region in which electricity is available 24/7 is in Judea and Samaria. The same is true regarding infant mortality, the standard of medical care and many other statistical facts.

The fault for the Palestinians’ woes is widely attributed to Israel, but complaints about the “occupation” only go so far. It’s true the Palestinians want to be free of Israeli rule. But as Daniel Polisar wrote last month in Mosaic magazine in his study of Palestinian public opinion, their goal isn’t so much a two-state solution as it is the elimination of the Jewish state. Their dissatisfaction is wrongly attributed to the failure of the peace process. Their real problem is not so much with negotiations that always end with Palestinian refusals of Israeli statehood offers (as Arafat did in 2000 and 2001 and Mahmoud Abbas did in 2008) or an unwillingness to negotiate seriously (as Abbas has done for the last seven years despite U.S. support for his demands) but rather with the failure of the Palestinian Authority to wage an effective war against the Jews.

That’s why Abbas resorted to inciting violence over mythical Israeli plots to harm the Temple Mount mosques. Starting what amounts to a religious holy war wouldn’t seem to be in his interests, but since he needs to compete with his Hamas rivals, it was the best tactic he could come up with.

Of course, in the absence of a satisfying conflict, Abbas and the PA could have spent the last decade trying to improve the lives of Palestinians but that was never their priority. While we’ve been hearing predictions of the PA’s collapse for years, it remains to be seen how long a bankrupt kleptocracy that survives on a vast patronage scheme that runs on foreign cash will last.

In the meantime, the Palestinians complain about both Abbas and Israel. As the New York Times reports in an article today, many in East Jerusalem and the territories are unhappy about the efforts that Israel has made to clamp down on areas that are producing daily terror attacks. Some of it involves small measures like crackdowns on minor illegal activity that usually goes unnoticed in Arab neighborhoods of the capital. They are also setting up more checkpoints around the capital to make it more difficult for terrorists to move easily or freely around the country.

About this, we are hearing the usual litany of complaints about Israeli beastliness and about how such measures are fomenting more terrorism. But such arguments are risible.

Whatever one may think about Israeli settlements, this latest surge in terror has to prove again that the conflict has little or nothing to do with the presence of Israelis in the West Bank or the country’s negotiating positions. Palestinians are seeking to murder any Israeli they meet on the street, not because of some abstract argument about borders since even the supposedly incorrigible right-winger Netanyahu has offered to withdraw from almost all of the West Bank in exchange for peace. The Palestinians are raging about “stinking Jewish feet” polluting holy places sacred to both peoples, not a state alongside Israel they’ve shown no interest in building.

Or course, these facts are old news, but many on the left still refuse to accept the truth. Today the Times’ Roger Cohen recycled the same myths about Netanyahu killing peace today in a piece that was as out of touch with the reality of the Middle East as most things the paper has published. It is barely worth the effort to refute his argument that Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination was the turning point that ended hope in the region. That misunderstands Rabin’s own skepticism about the Palestinians as well as the fact that the collapse of Oslo was completely the work of Arafat and his belief in terror and refusal to make peace. It was Arafat who elected Netanyahu in 1996 after Rabin’s death. And it was Arafat who killed the peace movement as a viable political force in Israel with the second intifada. At this point, the vast majority of Israelis have no faith in peace because they know the political culture of the Palestinians make it impossible no matter what they might offer in return. The complete withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 that led to the creation of the current Hamas-ruled terrorist state in the strip stands as a warning to any Israeli politician that another such experiment in the West Bank would be madness. And no amount of foreign pressure from a world that is growing bored with Palestinian intransigence regardless of its antipathy for the Jewish state can make Israel make such a mistake. The fault with Cohen’s absurd writing isn’t so much his blindness as it is the way it shows how Western elites refuse to put the blame for the standoff where it belongs: on a Palestinian culture that won’t allow its people to end the conflict.

In the end, the choice remains with the Palestinians. If they don’t like the price of war as they suffer the ill effects of measures intended to prevent more terrorist attacks, they can stop killing Jews and condemn rather than honor — as Abbas and the PA does — those who engage in such wanton slaughter. If they don’t like being governed by Abbas and Hamas (and they shouldn’t), they can try their own Arab spring and try new leaders that might work to better their existence and seek peace rather than wasting their time in futile if atrocious attacks on Israelis.

But what they must understand is that its no good waiting for the world to pressure Israel into appeasing them or for their leaders to come up with a war plan against the Jews that might work after a century of failure. If they want peace, they can have it along with statehood provided they are prepared to be reconciled with the permanence of a Jewish state. But if they persist in wanting war and being satisfied with leaders that can offer them only suffering, then that is exactly what they’ll continue to get regardless of how much the rest of the world sympathizes with their plight.

“Winners Aren’t Losers”: The Donald Trump Children’s Book. As Read by Jimmy Kimmel.

The Donald Trump Children’s Book. Video. Jimmy Kimmel Live, December 17, 2015. YouTube. Also at The Blaze, Rolling Stone, Fortune, Business Insider.

Donald Trump Says Muslims Support His Plan. Video. Jimmy Kimmel Live, December 17, 2015. YouTube. Also at New York Daily News, Salon.

Rubio, Cruz, and U.S. Global Leadership. By Caroline B. Glick.

Rubio, Cruz, and U.S. global leadership. By Caroline B. Glick. Jerusalem Post, December 17, 2015. Also at Real Clear Politics.

Glick:

For the first time in a decade, Americans are beginning to think seriously about foreign policy; But are they too late?

At some point between 2006 and 2008, the American people decided to turn their backs on the world. Between the seeming futility of the war in Iraq and the financial collapse of 2008, Americans decided they’d had enough.

In Barack Obama, they found a leader who could channel their frustration. Obama’s foreign policy, based on denying the existence of radical Islam and projecting the responsibility for Islamic aggression on the US and its allies, suited their mood just fine. If America is responsible, then America can walk away. Once it is gone, so the thinking has gone, the Muslims will forget their anger and leave America alone.

Sadly, Obama’s foreign policy assumptions are utter nonsense. America’s abandonment of global leadership has not made things better. Over the past seven years, the legions of radical Islam have expanded and grown more powerful than ever before. And now in the aftermath of the jihadist massacres in Paris and San Bernadino, the threats have grown so abundant that even Obama cannot pretend them away.

As a consequence, for the first time in a decade, Americans are beginning to think seriously about foreign policy. But are they too late? Can the next president repair the damage Obama has caused? The Democrats give no cause for optimism. Led by former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential hopefuls stubbornly insist that there is nothing wrong with Obama’s foreign policy. If they are elected to succeed him, they pledge to follow in his footsteps.

On the Republican side, things are more encouraging, but also more complicated.

Republican presidential hopefuls are united in their rejection of Obama’s policy of ignoring the Islamic supremacist nature of the enemy. All reject the failed assumptions of Obama’s foreign policy.

All have pledged to abandon them on their first day in office. Yet for all their unity in rejecting Obama’s positions, Republicans are deeply divided over what alternative foreign policy they would adopt.

This divide has been seething under the surface throughout the Obama presidency. It burst into the open at the Republican presidential debate Wednesday night.

The importance of the dispute cannot be overstated.

Given the Democrats’ allegiance to Obama’s disastrous policies, the only hope for a restoration of American leadership is that a Republican wins the next election. But if Republicans nominate a candidate who fails to reconcile with the realities of the world as it is, then the chance for a reassertion of American leadership will diminish significantly.

To understand just how high the stakes are, you need to look no further than two events that occurred just before the Wednesday’s Republican presidential debate.

On Tuesday, the International Atomic Energy Agency voted to close its investigation of Iran’s nuclear program. As far as the UN’s nuclear watchdog is concerned, Iran is good to go.

The move is a scandal. Its consequences will be disastrous.

The IAEA acknowledges that Iran continued to advance its illicit military nuclear program at least until 2009. Tehran refuses to divulge its nuclear activities to IAEA investigators as it is required to do under binding UN Security Council resolutions.

Iran refuses to allow IAEA inspectors access to its illicit nuclear sites. As a consequence, the IAEA lacks a clear understanding of what Iran’s nuclear status is today and therefore has no capacity to prevent it from maintaining or expanding its nuclear capabilities. This means that the inspection regime Iran supposedly accepted under Obama’s nuclear deal is worthless.

The IAEA also accepts that since Iran concluded its nuclear accord with the world powers, it has conducted two tests of ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons, despite the fact that it is barred from doing so under binding Security Council resolutions.

But really, who cares? Certainly the Obama administration doesn’t. The sighs of relief emanating from the White House and the State Department after the IAEA decision were audible from Jerusalem to Tehran.

The IAEA’s decision has two direct consequences.

First, as Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Wednesday, it paves the way for the cancellation of the UN’s economic sanctions against Iran within the month.

Second, with the IAEA’s decision, the last obstacle impeding Iran’s completion of its nuclear weapons program has been removed. Inspections are a thing of the past. Iran is in the clear.

As Iran struts across the nuclear finish line, the Sunni jihadists are closing their ranks.

Hours after the IAEA vote, Turkey and Qatar announced that Turkey is setting up a permanent military base in the Persian Gulf emirate for the first time since the fall of the Ottoman Empire a century ago. Their announcement indicates that the informal partnership between Turkey and Qatar on the one side, and Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic State on the other hand, which first came to the fore last year during Operation Protective Edge, is now becoming a more formal alliance.

Just as the Obama administration has no problem with Iran going nuclear, so it has no problem with this new jihadist alliance.

During Operation Protective Edge, the administration supported this jihadist alliance against the Israeli-Egyptian partnership. Throughout Hamas’s war against Israel, Obama demanded that Israel and Egypt accept Hamas’s cease-fire terms, as they were presented by Turkey and Qatar.

Since Operation Protective Edge, the Americans have continued to insist that Israel and Egypt bow to Hamas’s demands and open Gaza’s international borders. The Americans have kept up their pressure on Israel and Egypt despite Hamas’s open alliance with ISIS in the Sinai Peninsula.

So, too, the Americans have kept Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi at arm’s length, and continue to insist that the Muslim Brotherhood is a legitimate political force despite Sisi’s war against ISIS. Washington continues to embrace Qatar as a “moderate” force despite the emirate’s open support for the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and ISIS.

As for Turkey, it appears there is nothing Ankara can do that will dispel the US notion that it is a credible partner in the war on terror. Since 2011, Turkey has served as Hamas’s chief state sponsor, and as ISIS’s chief sponsor. It is waging war against the Kurds – the US’s strongest ally in its campaign against ISIS.

In other words, with the US’s blessing, the forces of both Shi’ite and Sunni jihad are on the march.

And the next president will have no grace period for repairing the damage.

Although the Republican debate Wednesday night was focused mainly on the war in Syria, its significance is far greater than one specific battlefield.

And while there were nine candidates on the stage, there were only two participants in this critical discussion.

Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz faced off after weeks of rising contention between their campaigns.

In so doing, they brought the dispute that has been seething through their party since the Bush presidency into the open.

Rubio argued that in Syria, the US needs to both defeat ISIS and overthrow President Bashar Assad.

Cruz countered that the US should ignore Assad and concentrate on utterly destroying ISIS. America’s national interest, he said, is not advanced by overthrowing Assad, because in all likelihood, Assad will be replaced by ISIS.

Cruz added that America’s experience in overthrowing Middle Eastern leaders has shown that it is a mistake to overthrow dictators. Things only got worse after America overthrew Saddam Hussein and supported the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi and Hosni Mubarak.

For his part, Rubio explained that since Assad is Iran’s puppet, leaving him in power empowers Iran. The longer he remains in power, the more control Iran will wield over Syria and Lebanon.

The two candidates’ dispute is far greater than the question of who rules Syria. Their disagreement on Syria isn’t a tactical argument. It goes to the core question of what is the proper role of American foreign policy.

Rubio’s commitment to overthrowing Assad is one component of a wider strategic commitment to fostering democratic governance in Syria. By embracing the cause of democratization through regime change, Rubio has become the standard bearer of George W. Bush’s foreign policy.

Bush’s foreign policy had two seemingly contradictory anchors – a belief that liberal values are universal, and cultural meekness.

Bush’s belief that open elections would serve as a panacea for the pathologies of the Islamic world was not supported by empirical data. Survey after survey showed that if left to their own devices, the people of Muslim world would choose to be led by Islamic supremacists. But Bush rejected the data and embraced the fantasy that free elections lead a society to embrace liberal norms of peace and human rights.

As to cultural meekness, since the end of the Cold War and with the rise of political correctness, the notion that America could call for other people to adopt American values fell into disrepute. For American foreign policy practitioners, the idea that American values and norms are superior to Islamic supremacist values smacked of cultural chauvinism.

Consequently, rather than urge the Islamic world to abandon Islamic supremacism in favor of liberal democracy, in their public diplomacy efforts, Americans sufficed with vapid pronouncements of love and respect for Islam.

Islamic supremacists, for their part stepped into the ideological void without hesitation. In Iraq, the Iranian regime spent hundreds of millions of dollars training Iranian-controlled militias, building Iranian-controlled political parties and publishing pro-Iranian newspapers as the US did nothing to support pro-American Iraqis.

Although many Republicans opposed Bush’s policies, few dared make their disagreement with the head of their party public. As a result, for many, Wednesday’s debate was the first time the foundations of Bush’s foreign policy were coherently and forcefully rejected before a national audience.

If Rubio is the heir to Bush, Cruz is the spokesman for Bush’s until now silent opposition. In their longheld view, democratization is not a proper aim of American foreign policy. Defeating America’s enemies is the proper aim of American foreign policy.

Rubio’s people claim that carpet bombing ISIS is not a strategy. They are right. There are parts missing from in Cruz’s position on Syria.

But then again, although still not comprehensive, Cruz’s foreign policy trajectory has much to recommend it. First and foremost, it is based on the world as it is, rather than a vision of how the world should be. It makes a clear distinction between America’s allies and America’s enemies and calls for the US to side with the former and fight the latter.

It is far from clear which side will win this fight for the heart of the Republican Party. And it is impossible to know who the next US president will be.

But whatever happens, the fact that after their seven-year vacation, the Americans are returning the real world is a cause for cautious celebration.

Ted Cruz’s Foreign Policy Triumph. By Peter Ferrara.

Ted Cruz’s Foreign Policy Triumph. By Peter Ferrara. The American Spectator, December 17, 2015.

Ferrara:

At the CNN Las Vegas debate Tuesday night, an important distinction was reintroduced to Republican politics. During the debate, Texas Senator Ted Cruz presented a well-thought out, foreign and national defense policy based on the original, Reagan conservatism. One that focuses on advancing America’s security interests around the world, not on sacrificing American lives and treasure on replacing foreign dictators with human rights, birthing new democracies, or building jobs and prosperity in foreign lands.

The Cruz and Reagan doctrine goes all the way back to America’s Founding Fathers. They wanted America to stay out of endless European wars, and foreign “entangling alliances.” They wanted America to stand for human rights, democracy, and prosperity for all. But they envisioned America advancing those goals by its own example, not at the point of a gun.

At the debate last Tuesday, Florida Senator Marco Rubio took the lead in advancing a different, more recent policy — the neoconservatism of George Bush, which committed America to replacing Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein with a modern democracy and economy, based on a culture of Western civil rights. Ohio Governor John Kasich and South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham also appeared in supporting roles for Rubio’s vision. Cruz enjoyed the vocal, reasoned support of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul.

Cruz explained his foreign policy vision in his opening statement, saying, “We need a President who understands the first obligation of the Commander-in-Chief is to keep America safe. If I am elected President, we will hunt down and kill the terrorists. We will utterly destroy ISIS. We will stop the terrorist acts before they occur because we will not be prisoners to political correctness. Rather we will speak the truth. Border security is national security and we will not be admitting jihadists as refugees.”

When Wolf Blitzer asked Cruz whether his policy would be “to preserve dictatorships, rather than promoting democracy in the Middle East?” Cruz answered by explaining, “I believe in an America first foreign policy, that far too often President Obama and Hillary Clinton — and unfortunately more than a few Republicans — have gotten distracted from the central focus of keeping this country safe…. We need to focus on American interests, not on global aspirations.”

Cruz later added, in supporting Rand Paul’s well-articulated opposition to regime change, “The question of whether we should be toppling dictatorships is asking the wrong question. The focus should be on defeating our enemies. So, for example, a regime we should change is Iran because Iran has declared war on us. But we shouldn’t be toppling regimes that are fighting radical Islamic terrorists….”

Cruz explained the roots of his foreign and defense policies in Reagan, saying “We need a Commander in Chief who does what Ronald Reagan did with communism, which is he set out a global strategy to defeat Soviet communism. And he directed all of his forces to defeating communism.” Cruz added, “We need a President who stands up, number one, and says, we will defeat ISIS. And number two, says the greatest national security threat facing America is a nuclear Iran. And we need to be focused on defeating radical Islamic terrorists.”

Bush’s neoconservatism has become so ingrained in Republicans that Cruz’s opponents think his rejection of it offers an opportunity to attack Cruz as not a genuine conservative. Bret Stephens, the highly articulate neoconservative spokesman and Wall Street Journal columnist, actually recognized the shortcomings of neocon foreign policy in writing Tuesday, “[T]he purpose of U.S. foreign policy cannot be to redeem the world’s crippled societies through democracy-building exercises. Foreign policy is not in the business of making dreams come true—Arab-Israeli peace, Islamic liberalism, climate nirvana, a Russian reset, et cetera. It’s about keeping our nightmares at bay. Today those nightmares are Russian revanchism, Iranian nuclearization, the rise and reach of Islamic State and China’s quest to muscle the U.S. out of East Asia.”

But he fails to grasp Cruz’s distinction in criticizing Obama, “We’re looking at a President who’s engaged in this double speak where he doesn’t call radical Islamic terrorism by its name. Indeed, he gives a speech after the San Bernardino attack where his approach is to try to go after the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens rather than to keep us safe.” Cruz would keep us safe by enforcing the border, which is anathema to Stephens. So Stephens, a man who is rarely wrong, foolishly labels this Cruz position as reflecting lack of character.

Cruz’s ultimate intellectual coup in this last debate is a very positive turn for Republicans. Reagan’s wise, conservative, foreign policy was enormously popular. All his political life, Reagan was maligned by Democrats as a warmonger. But once he got his chance as President, he won the Cold War without firing a shot. Bush’s neoconservatism, however, was hugely unpopular, and paved the way to the Republicans’ fall from Reagan’s grace.

His performance Tuesday will only further fuel Cruz’s rapid rise to a now probable, smashing Iowa victory. That will launch the next question on the road to Republican 2016 redemption: Cruz-Rubio, or Cruz-Kasich, or Cruz-Carson, or Cruz-Fiorina?

Securing America’s Freedom: National Security Address at the Heritage Foundation. By Senator Ted Cruz.

Securing America’s Freedom: Protect, Defend, and Champion American Liberties through a Strong National Defense. By Senator Ted Cruz. Video. The Heritage Foundation, December 10, 2015. YouTube. Also at The Daily Signal, Legal Insurrection.

Cruz: Obama believes American people are the “bad guys.” Ted Cruz interviewed by Megyn Kelly. Video. The Kelly File. Fox News, December 10, 2015. Fox News Insider. YouTube.

The Cruz Imposture. By Bret Stephens.

The Cruz Imposture. By Bret Stephens. Wall Street Journal, December 14, 2015.

Ted Cruz’s Un-American “America First” Strategy. By David Milne. Foreign Policy, December 16, 2015.


Stephens:

Not everything in Ted Cruz’s foreign policy speech on Thursday at the Heritage Foundation was awful. There was enough intellectual heft in there to suggest that the senator from Texas is too smart to believe the ideological contrivances and strategic impostures by which he seeks to gain the GOP nomination.

The central foreign-policy challenge facing the next president is how to re-establish American credibility with friends who no longer trust us and enemies who no longer fear us. Mr. Cruz gets this, just as he gets that the purpose of U.S. foreign policy cannot be to redeem the world’s crippled societies through democracy-building exercises. Foreign policy is not in the business of making dreams come true—Arab-Israeli peace, Islamic liberalism, climate nirvana, a Russian reset, et cetera. It’s about keeping our nightmares at bay.

Today those nightmares are Russian revanchism, Iranian nuclearization, the rise and reach of Islamic State and China’s quest to muscle the U.S. out of East Asia. How to deal with them? Mr. Cruz has thoughts on these and other important matters, but first he wants you to know that he intends to finish the wall along the border with Mexico. And triple the border patrol. And quadruple the number of aircraft patrolling the border.

Why? Because “when terrorists can simply swim across the Rio Grande, we are daring them to make the journey.”

By now, illegal immigration is to the GOP what global warming is to the Democrats: the all-purpose bugaboo that is supposed to explain nearly every problem and whose redress must be part of every solution. But immigration policy is not foreign policy, much less a counterterrorism strategy. And there are probably larger pools of would-be jihadists in Montreal and Vancouver than in Monterrey or Veracruz. Shouldn’t Mr. Cruz call for a wall from Quebec to British Columbia?

Similarly depressing—because he surely knows better—are Mr. Cruz’s efforts to paint himself as a champion of civil liberties when it comes to his recent success in gutting the National Security Agency’s bulk telephony metadata collection program.

Mr. Cruz must feel politically vulnerable on this score, especially after the San Bernardino massacre and the sense that the pool of libertarian-leaning GOP voters is fast drying up. But he’s decided to double down on his objections to the (now lapsed) NSA program. “Hoarding tens of billion of records of ordinary citizens,” he said last week, “didn’t stop Fort Hood, it didn’t stop Boston, it didn’t stop Garland, and it failed to detect the San Bernardino plot.”

All true—nobody ever said intelligence is foolproof. But here’s another plot the NSA program failed to stop. “Telephony metadata,” wrote Judge  William H. Pauley III of New York’s Southern District in a 2013 ruling affirming the constitutionality of the program, “would have furnished the missing information and might have permitted the NSA to notify the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the fact that [9/11 hijacker  Khalid] al-Mihdhar was calling the Yemeni safe house from inside the United States.”

At this point, readers may sense that Mr. Cruz is closer to President Obama when it comes to fighting terrorism than he lets on. His views on metadata collection are identical to those of  James Clapper, the incompetent and dishonest Director of National Intelligence whom Mr. Cruz cites approvingly in his speech. He excoriates the Obama administration for hollowing out the military but fails to note that he was one of just two Republican votes (the other was  Rand Paul) against the latest National Defense Authorization Act, opposition he justifies on obscure civil-liberty grounds. He cites Libya as a case study in why not to intervene in a Middle Eastern civil war. But he may also have noted that his anti-interventionist instincts precisely track those of Mr. Obama, who was reluctantly dragged into a war he led from behind.

As for Syria, Mr. Cruz insists “we do not have a side in the Syrian civil war” and endorses Israeli Prime Minister  Benjamin Netanyahu’s view that nonintervention allows two evil sides to exhaust themselves in the fighting. But this is indistinguishable from Mr. Obama’s hands-off approach to the conflict, notwithstanding the administration’s flaccid efforts to arm a credible opposition and bomb ISIS.

If your aim is to bomb ISIS until the “sand glows in the dark,” you are taking a side in the conflict. Mr. Cruz knows this. If you want to destroy ISIS without strengthening the Assad regime and its backers in Tehran, you have to target the regime, too. The truth about Syria isn’t that we have no dog in the fight. It’s that we’ve got to fight two dogs. The alternative is the endless chaos in which ISIS incubates and desperate refugees come knocking on our doors.

Again, Mr. Cruz knows this. Again, he’s too smart not to. Intelligence is never in question when it comes to the junior senator from Texas. Character is.