Liberal Education in Authoritarian Places. By Jim Sleeper.

Liberal Education in Authoritarian Places. By Jim Sleeper. New York Times, August 31, 2013.

New York University’s campus in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, opened in 2010.

Obama’s Bread and Circuses. By Caroline Glick.

Obama’s Bread and Circuses. By Caroline Glick. Real Clear Politics, September 1, 2013. Also at the Jerusalem Post.

One Great Big War in the Middle East. By David Brooks.

One Great Big War. By David Brooks. New York Times, August 29, 2013.

Containing the Fire in Syria. By Ryan Crocker. YaleGlobal, July 23, 2013.

Syrian Update. By Lisa Daftari.

Syrian Update by Lisa Daftari. Video. America Live. Fox News, August 30, 2013. YouTube.

Is Potential U.S. Action in Syria About “Obama’s Image?”

Is Potential U.S. Action in Syria About “Obama’s Image?” Video. Ralph Peters, Tom Bevan, and Judith Miller. America Live. Fox News, August 30, 2013. YouTube. YouTube excerpt.

Ralph Peters: Most Phenomenally Stupid Misuse of Our Military I’ve Seen. Video. Real Clear Politics, August 30, 2013.

The American Dream Is Not Dead. By Rush Limbaugh.

The American Dream is Not Dead. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, August 29, 2013.

Minimum Wage: How Much is Too Much? By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, August 29, 2013.

What Camus Understood About the Middle East. By Paul Berman.

What Camus Understood About the Middle East. By Paul Berman. The New Republic, August 12, 2013.

The Colonist of Good Will: On Albert Camus. By Thomas Meaney. The Nation, August 27, 2013.

The Israeli Spring. By Victor Davis Hanson.

The Israeli Spring. By Victor Davis Hanson. National Review Online, August 29, 2013.

The unlikely winner of the Arab revolutions happens to be Israel. By Dominique Moisi. The Daily Star (Lebanon), August 26, 2013.


Hanson:

Israel could be forgiven for having a siege mentality — given that at any moment, old frontline enemies Syria and Egypt might spill their violence over common borders.

 

The Arab Spring has thrown Israel’s once-predictable adversaries into the chaotic state of a Sudan or Somalia. The old understandings between Jerusalem and the Assad and Mubarak kleptocracies seem in limbo.

 

Yet these tragic Arab revolutions swirling around Israel are paradoxically aiding it, both strategically and politically — well beyond just the erosion of conventional Arab military strength.

 

In terms of realpolitik, anti-Israeli authoritarians are fighting to the death against anti-Israeli insurgents and terrorists. Each is doing more damage to the other than Israel ever could — and in an unprecedented, grotesque fashion. Who now is gassing Arab innocents? Shooting Arab civilians in the streets? Rounding up and executing Arab civilians? Blowing up Arab houses? Answer: either Arab dictators or radical Islamists.

 

The old nexus of radical Islamic terror of the last three decades is unraveling. With a wink and a nod, Arab dictatorships routinely subsidized Islamic terrorists to divert popular anger away from their own failures to the West or Israel. In the deal, terrorists got money and sanctuary. The Arab Street blamed others for their own government-inflicted miseries. And thieving authoritarians posed as Islam’s popular champions.

 

But now, terrorists have turned on their dictator sponsors. And even the most ardent Middle East conspiracy theorists are having troubling blaming the United States and Israel.

 

Secretary of State John Kerry is still beating last century’s dead horse of a “comprehensive Middle East peace.” But does Kerry’s calcified diplomacy really assume that a peace agreement involving Israel would stop the ethnic cleansing of Egypt’s Coptic Christians? Does Israel have anything to do with Assad’s alleged gassing of his own people?

 

There are other losers as well. Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan wanted to turn a once-secular Turkish democracy into a neo-Ottoman Islamist sultanate, with grand dreams of eastern-Mediterranean hegemony. His selling point to former Ottoman Arab subjects was often a virulent anti-Semitism. Suddenly, Turkey became one of Israel’s worst enemies and the Obama administration’s best friends.

 

Yet if Erdogan has charmed President Obama, he has alienated almost everyone in the Middle East. Islamists such as former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi felt that Erdogan was a fickle and opportunistic conniver. The Gulf monarchies believed that he was a troublemaker who wanted to supplant their influence. Neither the Europeans nor the Russians trust him. The result is that Erdogan’s loud anti-Israeli foreign policy is increasingly irrelevant.

 

The oil-rich sheikhdoms of the Persian Gulf once funded terrorists on the West Bank, but they are now fueling the secular military in Egypt. In Syria they are searching to find some third alternative to Assad’s Alawite regime and its al-Qaeda enemies. For the moment, oddly, the Middle East foreign policy of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the other oil monarchies dovetails with Israel’s: Predictable Sunni-Arab nationalism is preferable to one-vote, one-time Islamist radicals.

 

Israel no doubt prefers that the Arab world liberalize and embrace constitutional government. Yet the current bloodletting lends credence to Israel’s ancient complaints that it never had a constitutional or lawful partner in peace negotiations.

 

In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak’s corrupt dictatorship is gone. His radical Muslim Brotherhood successors were worse and are also gone. The military dictatorship that followed both is no more legitimate than either. In these cycles of revolution, the one common denominator is an absence of constitutional government.

 

In Syria, there never was a moderate middle. Take your pick between the murderous Shiite-backed Assad dictatorship or radical Sunni Islamists. In Libya, the choice degenerated to Moammar Qaddafi’s unhinged dictatorship or the tribal militias that overthrew it. Let us hope that one day westernized moderate democracy might prevail. But that moment seems a long way off.

 

What do the Egyptian military, the French in Mali, Americans at home, the Russians, the Gulf monarchies, persecuted Middle Eastern Christians, and the reformers of the Arab Spring all have in common? Like Israel, they are all fighting Islamic-inspired fanaticism. And most of them, like Israel, are opposed to the idea of a nuclear Iran.

 

In comparison with the ruined economies of the Arab Spring — tourism shattered, exports nonexistent, and billions of dollars in infrastructure lost through unending violence — Israel is an atoll of prosperity and stability. Factor in its recent huge gas and oil finds in the eastern Mediterranean, and it may soon become another Kuwait or Qatar, but with a real economy beyond its booming petroleum exports.

 

Israel had nothing to do with either the Arab Spring or its failure. The irony is that surviving embarrassed Arab regimes now share the same concerns with the Israelis. In short, the more violent and chaotic the Middle East becomes, the more secure and exceptional Israel appears.


Moisi:

The war in Iraq – which led in 2003 to the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime – had one clear winner: Iran. The United States-led military intervention resulted in the weakening of the Middle East’s Sunni regimes, America’s traditional allies, and the strengthening of America’s principal foe in the region, the Islamic Republic. Ten years later, we may be witnessing yet another ironic outcome in the region: At least for the time being, Israel seems to be the only clear winner of the “Arab Spring” revolutions.

 

Most Israelis would strongly object to this interpretation. Their regional environment has become much more unstable and unpredictable. Only recently, Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system intercepted a rocket fired from Sinai that was aimed at the port of Eilat, while Thursday, several rockets were fired on northern Israel from Lebanon.

 

In contrast to the past, no Israeli border is now secure, especially the long frontier with Egypt. No implicit alliance can be taken for granted. All scenarios are open. Can Israel remain an oasis of stability, security, modernity, and economic growth in such a volatile environment?

 

The answer, of course, is no. Israel may be tempted to regard itself as some kind of latter-day Noah’s ark, but it is not. Tel Aviv has become a cross between San Francisco, Singapore, and Sao Paulo, but it is still less than 300 kilometers from Damascus. For the pessimists (or realists, depending on your perspective), Israel must remain on maximum alert to minimize the risks that it faces.

 

Above all, many Israelis (if not most) believe that this is no time to be imaginative and daring. The resumption of the peace process with the Palestinian Authority can be only a fig leaf. Israel simply cannot ignore the Americans in the way that the Egyptian army has as it has massacred its Islamist opponents.

 

But a very different reading of the current situation is possible. What started as a revolution, in the 18th-century meaning of the term, is becoming a reproduction of the religious wars that ravaged Europe from 1524 to 1648, pitting Catholics and Protestants against each other in the same way that Sunnis and Shiites are pitted against each other today. (In Egypt, however, we are seeing simply the return of a military police state.)

 

One may disagree with this Euro-centric interpretation, but what is clear is that the Muslim Middle East will be too preoccupied with internecine struggle to worry about the Palestinians or the existence of Israel. War with Jews or Christians has necessarily taken a back seat (except where, as in Egypt and Syria, Christian minorities are perceived to be allied with the regime).

 

In some cases, there is explicit cooperation with Israel. Because it is fighting for its own survival in a highly challenging environment, the Jordanian regime needs Israel’s security collaboration. Indeed, Israeli and Jordanian forces are now working together to secure their respective borders against infiltration by jihadists from Iraq or Syria, while Egypt and Israel now share the same objective in Sinai.

 

So the paradox of the Arab revolutions is that they have contributed to Israel’s integration as a strategic partner (for some countries) in the region. At this point, more Arab lives have been lost in Syria’s civil war than in all of the Arab-Israeli wars combined.

 

Of course, one should not draw the wrong conclusions from this. Israel may have become, more than ever, a key strategic partner for some Arab regimes, or a de facto ally against Iran (as it is for Saudi Arabia). But that does not imply that Israel’s neighbors have resigned themselves, in emotional terms, to its continued existence in their midst.

 

Nor does it mean that Israel can do whatever it wants, whenever and wherever it wants. On the contrary, the Israeli government should not use the region’s turmoil as justification for doing nothing to resolve the conflict with the Palestinians. Current conditions, though admittedly confusing, can be seen as opening a window of opportunity – a moment to consider making serious sacrifices for the sake of long-term survival.

 

Israel should be addressing the Arab world in the following terms: “You may not like me, and you may never like me, but I am not – and never should have been – your first concern. Now it is clear that you have other priorities to worry about.”

 

The Arab quagmire may not be creating conditions for peace and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. But it has turned the “strategic truce” favored by many Arab leaders into the only conceivable alternative. Arabs cannot be at war with themselves and with Israel at the same time.

 

The chaotic events unfolding in the Middle East will – and should – change the approach and perceptions of the protagonists. Short-term considerations will not suffice. Israeli leaders must adjust their long-term strategic thinking to the new Middle East that ultimately emerges from the current disarray.

 

That means not exploiting today’s opportunity to build more settlements on Palestinian land, or to expand existing ones, as Benjamin Netanyahu’s government appears determined to do. Israel may well be the current winner in the Arab Spring; but, if it is wise, it will leave the spoils of victory on the ground.

The Saudi-Egyptian Connection. By Dick Morris.

The Saudi-Egyptian Connection: The New Version of the Quadruple Alliance of 1815. By Dick Morris. DickMorris.com, August 28, 2013.

What Is Your Life’s Blueprint? By Martin Luther King, Jr.

What Is Your Life’s Blueprint? By Martin Luther King, Jr. Seattle Times. Originally delivered at Barratt Junior High School in Philadelphia, October 26, 1967.

The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life. By Martin Luther King, Jr. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. Originally delivered at New Covenant Baptist Church, Chicago, April 9, 1967.

Dr. King: “Be the Best of Whatever You Are.” By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, August 28, 2013.

The Street Sweeper. By Erick Erickson. RedState, August 27, 2013.


King:

I want to ask you a question, and that is: What is your life’s blueprint?

 

Whenever a building is constructed, you usually have an architect who draws a blueprint, and that blueprint serves as the pattern, as the guide, and a building is not well erected without a good, solid blueprint.

 

Now each of you is in the process of building the structure of your lives, and the question is whether you have a proper, a solid and a sound blueprint.

 

I want to suggest some of the things that should begin your life’s blueprint. Number one in your life’s blueprint, should be a deep belief in your own dignity, your worth and your own somebodiness. Don’t allow anybody to make you fell that you’re nobody. Always feel that you count. Always feel that you have worth, and always feel that your life has ultimate significance.

 

Secondly, in your life's blueprint you must have as the basic principle the determination to achieve excellence in your various fields of endeavor. You’re going to be deciding as the days, as the years unfold what you will do in life — what your life’s work will be. Set out to do it well.

 

And I say to you, my young friends, doors are opening to you--doors of opportunities that were not open to your mothers and your fathers — and the great challenge facing you is to be ready to face these doors as they open.

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great essayist, said in a lecture in 1871, “If a man can write a better book or preach a better sermon or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, even if he builds his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.”

 

This hasn't always been true — but it will become increasingly true, and so I would urge you to study hard, to burn the midnight oil; I would say to you, don't drop out of school. I understand all the sociological reasons, but I urge you that in spite of your economic plight, in spite of the situation that you’re forced to live in — stay in school.

 

And when you discover what you will be in your life, set out to do it as if God Almighty called you at this particular moment in history to do it. Don’t just set out to do a good job. Set out to do such a good job that the living, the dead or the unborn couldn’t do it any better.

 

If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well. If you can't be a pine at the top of the hill, be a shrub in the valley. Be the best little shrub on the side of the hill.

 

Be a bush if you can’t be a tree. If you can’t be a highway, just be a trail. If you can’t be a sun, be a star. For it isn’t by size that you win or fail. Be the best of whatever you are.

The Struggle for Middle East Mastery. By Joschka Fischer

The Struggle for Middle East Mastery. By Joschka Fischer. Project Syndicate, August 27, 2013.

Democracy’s Dog Days. By Victor Davis Hanson.

Democracy’s Dog Days. By Victor Davis Hanson. Works and Days. PJ Media, August 26, 2013.

Hanson:

We all want democracy to thrive and flourish, but can it?

 

The Obama administration was quite pleased that the anti-democratic Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood had come to power through a single plebiscite. That confidence required a great deal of moral blindness, both of the present and past. 

Like other once-elected authoritarians who believe that democracy is similar to a bus route — in the words of Mr. Erdogan of Turkey, once you get to your stop, you get off — Morsi had no intention of fostering the sort of consensual institutions so necessary for republican government. Almost immediately he gave a de facto green light to cleanse the government of his opponents, to Islamicize a once largely secular society, and to persecute religious minorities.

 

Like a Hitler, Mussolini, Mugabe, or Hugo Chavez, Morsi was counting on the legitimacy from a once-in-a-lifetime largely free election, and then the use of state power, if not terror, to institutionalize his authoritarian rule. Morsi’s legacy is that he was both a beneficiary of the Arab Spring in Egypt and almost singlehandedly ended it.

 

Unfortunately, there seem to be no signs of democracy’s revival elsewhere in the Arab world or, for that matter, all that many recent vibrant examples in the world at large these days.

 

In contrast, after the end of the Cold War there was a giddy “end of history” moment. By the new millennium, “democratic” government and free market capitalism were accepted as the natural — indeed, the foreordained — final stage in civilization’s evolution. And why not? The Soviet Union was in shambles. Eastern Europe was democratizing. Latin American democracies were starting to crowd out both communist and right-wing dictatorships. The European Union was ushering in the euro to self-congratulatory proclamations of a new social democratic heaven on Earth. The betting was when, not if, a newly capitalist China democratized. Bill Clinton, under duress, had moved America to the democratic center, and was helping to balance budgets.

 

Only the Islamic Middle East resisted the supposedly inevitable democratic urge. As the world’s regional holdout, the region was seen as well overdue for its turn at majority rule. Democratization, we Americans argued, might force the Muslim world to emulate those consensual systems with far better records of stable governance and widespread prosperity. With freedom and affluence, the age-old Middle East pathologies — misogyny, religious intolerance, tribalism, fundamentalism, anti-Semitism, and statism — would fade along with terrorist-driven violence. Or so it was thought.

 

Now, in the second decade of the new millennium, democracy is not just having a rough time, but failing in a way that its harsh critics so often predicted, from Plato to Nietzsche and Spengler.

 

Often the recent world confused plebiscites with democracy, as if the two were synonymous.

 

But does anyone think the once-elected Mr. Morsi in Egypt was a true democrat? Are the Iranian elections reflections of a free society? Were the austerity packages imposed on southern Europe part of a constitutional process? Is a Germany or Netherlands encouraged to hold elections about the fate of their participation in the EU? Does a Mr. Erdogan or Mr. Ortega — or did the late Hugo Chavez — operate within transparent and lawful protocols?

 

Instead, southern Europe is reeling, the result of the proverbial people voting themselves entitlements and perks that the state could not pay for. In the fashion of the fourth century Athenian dêmos, pensioners, the subsidized, and public employees blame almost everyone and everything else for their own self-inflicted miseries.

 

The European Union avoids national referenda in fear that democratic and open elections would lead the EU to unravel. Instead, the EU in large part is reduced to appealing to German war guilt, to German mercantile self-interest, and to German philanthropy to subsidize much of a failed Mediterranean Europe.

 

Westernized democratic societies — Europe in particular — are shrinking. The bounty of free market capitalism, the emancipation of women, technological advances, and the non-judgmentalism of egalitarian democracy have all emphasized enjoying the good life rather than the sacrifices of child-raising. The result is a demographic time bomb of a dwindling and aging population.

 

Here in the United States, we are engaged in a great struggle to save constitutional democracy as we once knew it. President Obama seems intent — by ignoring enforcement of existing statutes, by piling up record debt, by vastly enlarging the size of the federal government, by expanding the money supply, by enabling unprecedented numbers of Americans to enroll in food stamp, disability, unemployment, and various entitlement programs, and by politicizing federal institutions from the Justice Department to the IRS — on creating an “equality of result” society. The aim of making everyone about the same is seen as justifying the illiberal means necessary to achieve them.

 

“Liberty” is now a word that earns an IRS audit. “Fairness” is proof of one’s patriotism. It is as if the failed and violent French Revolution, not the successful American alternative, is now the inspirational model.

 

In short, democracy’s culture worldwide is in crisis. It cannot pay its bills. It chafes at constitutional protections of individual rights and expression. It seems to encourage rather than to mitigate racial and class tensions. It offers more entitlements to a growing aging cohort and less opportunity for a shrinking younger population to pay for them. It appears unable to offer non-democratic societies moral and ethical models.

 

Most cannot decide whether the democracies are plagued with a particularly poor generation of demagogic leaders, or whether we are suffering the inevitable wages of rule by plebiscite that eats away at constitutional law and prefers executive fiat. What Jefferson and Tocqueville thought might save us from the mob-rule of ancient Athens — the independent agrarian and small autonomous businessperson anchoring checks and balances to 51% majority rule and demagogues — is no longer our ideal.

 

I offer a modest suggestion amidst our current angst. Let us put a moratorium on the use of the word “democracy” altogether in our lectures about the Arab Spring and promoting Western values. Cease using it, given that the word has lost all currency and has regressed to its root Hellenic demagogic meaning of “people power.”

 

Most people simply do not appreciate the complex constitutional system that democracy’s modern incarnation is supposed to represent, and prefer to equate democracy with what on any given day the majority is said to want — which is almost always a state-mandated equality and a redistribution of wealth — or a way to implement authoritarianism. In the Middle East, an election without a ratified constitution and the rule of law is a prescription for tyranny.

 

Instead, let us speak of “consensual government” or “constitutional government,” and emphasize “republicanism.” Our goal, to the degree we wish to offer advice abroad to reformers abroad, would be to encourage illiberal states to form “representative” or “constitutional republics,” where the will of the people is expressed through representatives who themselves are subject to constitutional law.

 

Limited or consensual government should be our sloganeering overseas and at home. The great lesson of the Obama administration is that the abuses of democratic plebiscites abroad are not contrasted, but amplified by the increasingly lawless American model, when it uses the IRS and the Justice Department to go after political opponents, allows senior officials to lie under oath to the Congress, and fails to execute faithfully those laws passed by the legislative branch. If we are to offer America as a model, then there must be some honesty and transparency about the Benghazi, Associated Press, IRS, and NSA scandals.

 

In the latter 20th century, we got our wish and saw much of the world adopt Western democratic trajectories. It is now our challenge in the early 21st century to ensure that they were not given a bill of goods.

Stacey Dooley Confronts Muslim Extremism in Luton, UK.

British Girl Returns to Her Home Town Which Has Been Invaded by Aggressive Muslims. ClashDaily.com, August 27, 2013. YouTube.

My Hometown Fanatics: Stacey Dooley Investigates Muslim Extremists in Luton. Video. Marios A. Hajisavvas, May 22, 2013. YouTube. Originally shown on BBC Three, February 20, 2012.

My Horrifying Run-in with Korean People! (A Satire – Sort of). By Nick Taxia.

Terror! My Horrifying Run-in with Korean People! (A Satire – Sort of). By Nick Taxia. ClashDaily.com, August 27, 2013.

Miley Cyrus and the State of American Culture.

Mommy, what’s Miley Cyrus doing to that teddy bear? By Todd Starnes. FoxNews.com, August 26, 2013.

Miley Cyrus is sexual – get over it. By Pepper Schwartz. CNN, August 27, 2013.

An American Satyricon. By Victor Davis Hanson. National Review Online, August 27, 2013.

First-century Rome, 21st-century America. Our elites would be right at home in Petronius’s world of debauchery and bored melodrama.

Miley Cyrus Shocking VMA Performance: Sean Hannity, Fox News. Video. Hollywood Life, August 27, 2013. YouTube.




Dear Miley: Here’s What I Hope You Learned About Adulthood After The VMAs. By Lisa Belkin. The Huffington Post, August 26, 2013.

Miley Syphilis: Billy Ray Screwed Up Letting Miley Get Into Show Business. By Doug Giles. ClashDaily.com, August 27, 2013.

Miley Cyrus to Wreak Havoc in the Holy Land. By Lauren Izso. NJBR, November 12, 2013. With “We Can’t Stop” video and Robin Thicke “Blurred Lines” video.

Miley Cyrus Twerks, Gives Robin Thicke Some Tongue At VMAs. By Phillip Mlynar. MTV.com, August 25, 2013. Video. YouTube. Daily Motion.


Miley Cyrus & Robin Thicke Perform - VMA's by dm_521ac29c8cde5

The Shame of Syria. By Fouad Ajami.

The Shame of Syria. By Fouad Ajami. Hoover Institution, August 23, 2013.

U.S. Attack on Syria Will Achieve Nothing. By Shlomi Eldar. Al-Monitor, August 26, 2013.

Obama’s third war. By Ralph Peters. New York Post, August 26, 2013.

America Hanging in There Better Than Rivals. By Joel Kotkin.

America Hanging in There Better Than Rivals. By Joel Kotkin. New Geography, August 26, 2013. Also at JoelKotkin.com.

Resetting U.S. Foreign Policy. By Caroline Glick.

Resetting U.S. Foreign Policy. By Caroline Glick. Real Clear Politics, August 24, 2013. Also at the Jerusalem Post, CarolineGlick.com.

Israel’s New Adversary: Global Jihad. By Shlomi Eldar.

Israel’s New Adversary: Global Jihad. By Shlomi Eldar. Al-Monitor, August 23, 2013.

Eldar:

Regardless of what happens in the peace talks with the Palestinians, Israel’s security is not slated to improve. In fact, it is getting more complicated and dangerous by the day. The global jihad network has established “Jihad Land” in the Sinai along Israel’s southern border. With Syria still in a state of chaos, cells of armed Islamic extremists have also set up base along the country’s northern border and seem intent on subjecting towns there to a barrage of rocket fire and terrorist attacks.

 

Until now, Israel has stood out as an oasis of calm in the Middle East, especially given the bloody turbulence under way throughout the Arab world. Only now is it starting to feel the shrapnel from the civil wars and conflicts raging in neighboring countries. This is a new situation, which requires a completely new assessment and approach. We are no longer talking about a fight against groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, which have established addresses for an Israeli military response and discernible targets against which Israel could wage war. The new terror groups, collectively known as global jihad, are operating along the country’s borders as small autonomous cells without permanent addresses or a supreme leader.

 

Over the past few years, Israel, Hamas and Hezbollah have set very distinct rules for the game, among them red lines that are not to be crossed. The result is a balance of deterrence between the belligerent forces. The Second Lebanon War and Operations Cast Lead and Pillar of Defense against Gaza were milestones during which the limits of permissible (and impermissible) actions were determined. These events set clear boundaries for terrorist groups, which were quick to realize that traversing those boundaries would result in an Israeli response. The greatest deterrence that Israel has when confronting Hamas and Hezbollah is the threat of destroying the groups’ welfare and communal infrastructures, which moor them to their respective communities. Damage to Hamas’s welfare institutions or to the communal institutions of Hezbollah would hurt them much more than an assault on any military target or notable. The one thing that keeps these groups alive more than anything is their close tie to the local population.

Furthermore, both Hamas and Hezbollah have clear political interests that obligate them to maintain the peace along their borders with Israel. The political honey trap that they have created around themselves constantly forces their leaders to carefully consider their steps before they get entangled in a military encounter with Israel.

 

These two organizations operate militias, which are organized like an army in every conceivable way. In contrast, global jihad activists move from place to place and from region to region with considerable alacrity. It is not usually known who heads these groups or who gives the order to act, and in most cases, the members of a cell will vanish from the region within moments of having fulfilled their orders. Very little is known about the Salafist organizations operating in the Sinai, Syria and southern Lebanon. These are such small, decentralized groups that even if one were to be obliterated, there would be so many others left to take its place, they would in no way be impeded by an attack.

 

Three such organizations have taken responsibility for firing on Israel on Aug. 20. The first is the Ansar Beit al-Makdas Brigades, which has emerged over the past few years to become one of the largest cells in the Sinai. Within days, it was joined by two previously unknown organizations in southern Lebanon, the Abdullah Azzam Brigades and the Ziad Jarah Companies, which fired Katyusha rockets at the Galilee. Does anyone know anything about these brigades and companies that bear the names of martyrs? Does anyone know how many militants they have in their ranks? Where they train? Who funds them?

 

This week Israel received further evidence that it is entering a new era of terrorism against it, this one without borders or addresses. Lebanese Sunni Sheikh Siraj al-Din Zuriqat, considered to be the religious leader of the extreme Salafist groups, wrote on Twitter, “From now on, Hezbollah’s role of defending the Jews will be made difficult to impossible.” This absurd statement was intended to clarify that the Salafists who entered southern Lebanon from Syria are in no way committed to any understandings reached between Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah’s organization and Israel.

 

Hezbollah has an explicit interest in maintaining the peace in Lebanon and ensuring that the border with Israel does not heat up. Salafist global jihad activists have no such internal political interests or external commitments. If the groups gathering along Israel’s northern border believe Hezbollah is a movement devoted to protecting the Jews, then who knows. We might yet see Nasrallah and the Israel Defense Forces joining forces to fight a common enemy. Given the insane rush of events occurring in the Middle East, even the most delusional absurdity could become a reality in an instant.

Two Authors In Defense of Football.

In Defense of Football. By Max Boot. Wall Street Journal, August 17, 2013.

In defense of football. By Daniel Flynn. New York Post, August 17, 2013.

Plagiarism or coincidence? Writer, Wall Street Journal, square off. By Dylan Byers and Hadas Gold. Politico, August 23, 2013.

Stop Freeloading Off Freelancers. By Daniel J. Flynn. The American Spectator, August 23, 2013.

No, Thanks: Stop Saying “Support the Troops.” By Steven Salaita.

No, thanks: Stop saying “support the troops.” By Steven Salaita. Salon, August 25, 2013.

Foreign Policy by Whisper and Nudge. By Thomas L. Friedman.

Foreign Policy by Whisper and Nudge. By Thomas L. Friedman. New York Times, August 24, 2013.

Friedman:

If you follow the commentary on American foreign policy toward Egypt and the broader Middle East today, several themes stand out: People in the region argue: “Whatever went wrong, the United States is to blame.” Foreign policy experts argue: “Whatever President Obama did, he got it wrong.” And the American public is saying: “We’re totally fed up with that part of the world and can’t wait for the start of the N.F.L. season. How do you like those 49ers?”

 

There is actually a logic to all three positions.

 

It starts with the huge difference between cold-war and post-cold-war foreign policy. During the cold war, American foreign policy “was all about how we affect the external behavior of states,” said Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins University foreign affairs expert. We were ready to overlook the internal behavior of states, both because we needed them as allies in the cold war and because, with the Russians poised on the other side, any intervention could escalate into a superpower confrontation.

 

Post-cold-war foreign policy today is largely about “affecting the internal composition and governance of states,” added Mandelbaum, many of which in the Middle East are failing and threaten us more by their collapse into ungoverned regions — not by their strength or ability to project power.

 

But what we’ve learned in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Egypt and Syria is that it is very hard to change another country’s internal behavior — especially at a cost and in a time frame that the American public will tolerate — because it requires changing a country’s political culture and getting age-old adversaries to reconcile.

 

The primary foreign policy tools that served us so well in the cold war, said Mandelbaum, “guns, money, and rhetoric — simply don’t work for these new tasks. It is like trying to open a can with a sponge.”

 

To help another country change internally requires a mix of refereeing, policing, coaching, incentivizing, arm-twisting and modeling — but even all of that cannot accomplish the task and make a country’s transformation self-sustaining, unless the people themselves want to take charge of the process.

 

In Iraq, George W. Bush removed Saddam Hussein, who had been governing that country vertically, from the top-down, with an iron fist. Bush tried to create the conditions through which Iraqis could govern themselves horizontally, by having the different communities write their own social contract on how to live together. It worked, albeit imperfectly, as long as U.S. troops were there to referee. But once we left, no coterie of Iraqi leaders emerged to assume ownership of that process in an inclusive manner and thereby make it self-sustaining.

 

Ditto Libya, where President Obama removed Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s top-down, iron-fisted regime, but he declined to put U.S. troops on the ground to midwife a new social contract. The result: Libya today is no more stable, or self-sustainingly democratic, than Iraq. It just cost us less to fail there. In both cases, we created an opening for change, but the local peoples have not made it sustainable.

 

Hence the three reactions I cited above. People of the region often blame us, because they either will not or cannot accept their own responsibility for putting things right. Or, if they do, they don’t see a way to forge the necessary societal compromises, because their rival factions take the view either that “I am weak, how can I compromise?” or “I am strong, why should I compromise?”

 

As for blaming Obama — for leaving Iraq too soon or not going more deeply into Libya or Syria — it grows out of the same problem. Some liberals want to “do something” in places like Libya and Syria; they just don’t want to do what is necessary, which would be a long-term occupation to remake the culture and politics of both places. And conservative hawks who want to intervene just don’t understand how hard it is to remake the culture and politics in such places, where freedom, equality and justice for all are not universal priorities, because some people want to be “free” to be more Islamist or more sectarian.

 

“With the traditional tools of foreign policy, we can stop some bad things from happening, but we cannot make good things happen,” noted Mandelbaum.

 

For instance, if it is proved that Syria has used chemical weapons, American officials are rightly considering using cruise missiles to punish Syria. But we have no hope of making Syria united, democratic and inclusive without a much bigger involvement and without the will of a majority of Syrians.

 

And too often we forget that the people in these countries are not just objects. They are subjects; they have agency. South Africa had a moderate postapartheid experience because of Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk. Japan rebuilt itself as a modern nation in the late 19th century because its leaders recognized their country was lagging behind the West and asked themselves, “What’s wrong with us?” Outsiders can amplify such positive trends, but the local people have to want to own it.

 

As that reality has sunk in, so has another reality, which the American public intuits: Our rising energy efficiency, renewable energy, hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling are making us much less dependent on the Middle East for oil and gas. The Middle East has gone from an addiction to a distraction.

 

Imagine that five years ago someone had said to you: “In 2013, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen and Iraq will all be in varying states of political turmoil or outright civil war; what do you think the price of crude will be?” You’d surely have answered, “At least $200 a barrel.”

 

But it’s half that — for a reason: “We now use 60 percent less energy per unit of G.D.P. than we did in 1973,” explained the energy economist Philip Verleger. “If the trend continues, we will use half the energy per unit of G.D.P. in 2020 that we used in 2012. To make matters better, a large part of the energy used will be renewable. Then there is the increase in oil and gas production.” In 2006, the United States depended on foreign oil for 60 percent of its consumption. Today it’s about 36 percent. True, oil is a global market, so what happens in the Middle East can still impact us and our allies. But the urgency is gone. “The Middle East is China’s problem,” added Verleger.

 

Obama knows all of this. He just can’t say it. But it does explain why his foreign policy is mostly “nudging” and whispering. It is not very satisfying, not very much fun and won’t make much history, but it’s probably the best we can do or afford right now. And it’s certainly all that most Americans want.

Egypt: The Third Phase of the Arab Revolutions. By Gilles Kepel.

Egypt: The Third Phase of the Arab Revolutions. By Gilles Kepel. The Huffington Post, August 20, 2013.

Israel: Where Muslims Can Speak Freely in the Middle East. By Khaled Abu Toameh.

Where Muslims Can Speak Freely in the Middle East. By Khaled Abu Toameh. Real Clear World, August 24, 2013. Also at Gatestone Institute.

Face It: Democracy Isn’t for Everyone. By George Jonas.

Democracy — Your mileage may vary. By George Jonas. National Post, August 24, 2013.

Jonas:

Egypt is a sufficiently large and complex country to stymie not only friendly foreigners who try to rule it, but its own inhabitants. What seems evident is that ruling it requires the support of the military, and the support of the military cannot be taken for granted by anyone.

 

Egypt’s regime change this summer, though precipitated by huge popular demonstrations, is, for all intents and purposes, a military coup. Few dispute this, but let me go further and suggest that Egypt experienced two military coups in less than three years, disguised as popular revolts. The first coup toppled the long dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak; the second nipped the attempted dictatorship of Mohammed Morsi in the bud. It appeared both Mubarak and Morsi thought (or hoped) that Egypt’s military under General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi would side with him against Egypt’s rebels, whether Islamic fundamentalist or liberal secularists, but the general ended up siding simply with himself both times. Now he seems all set to hold the reins of power in his own hands until someone capable, and of whom he approves, agrees to hold them on his behalf.

 

The Egyptian military may be every bit as as loyal to its country as other militaries are to theirs, but it is loyal to its own concept of Egypt, not somebody else’s. They don’t like an ex-military man like Mubarak when he shows signs of trying to start a dynasty in his old age, and like an ex-Muslim Brotherhood activist like Morsi, who uses his electoral victory to build a theocracy in Gen. el-Sisi’s Egypt, even less. The Junker-class of the country may not be democrats, but they seem equally uninterested in becoming armed servants in King Mubarak’s court or soldiers in the pay of some bearded council of ayatollahs, like Muslim equivalents of the Pope’s Swiss Guard. They want to rule themselves, or even better, have someone rule on their behalf.

That’s what everybody thought Mubarak did for many years, as he may have, until he started working for himself. A long-time dictator can easily develop the delusion that he doesn’t work for the generals, the generals work for him. If so, it was a fatal error. It made Mubarak’s illusion of having the military “behind him” actually mean that he had his enemy at his back.

 

Every culture wages war its own way. In Egypt military coups are demilitarized. They are ostensibly civilian conflicts, instigated and carried out by civilians, at most involving the police. The soldiers don’t leave their barracks until the civilians are at each others’ throats, then show up with the big guns, do the real coup under the guise of restoring peace, and return to barracks with a renewed lease on power as their trophy. In a coup, Egyptian-style, the contestants box in the ring for the championship, and the referee gets to take home the belt.

 

The events that led to Gen. el-Sisi & Co. taking over Egypt had no single cause, but the Obama-administration kick-started the process with the President’s 2009 speech at Cairo University. “A New Beginning,” the title chosen for Obama’s address, was a performance worthy of the sorcerer’s apprentice and had roughly the same result.  The convolutions of the region haven’t subsided yet. On the whole, it is a good idea not to push buttons without knowing what they might activate, which in some parts of the world may mean not pushing any buttons, at least for a while.

 

Two years ago I wrote that toppling strongmen in the Middle East may or may not be good news for Western democracies, and may or may not be a good idea for the countries involved. It depends on who replaces the strongmen. Stronger men? Weaker men? Better men? Democrats?

 

What I didn’t write then, but will write now, is that if it’s democrats, it may not be good news for democracy. Democrats coming to a region before it’s ready for them, can have a deleterious effect on both the region and democracy.

 

Democracy is a superior system when it functions, but so far it hasn’t functioned consistently except in a handful of Western countries. Like an exotic car, it’s sensitive, and requires expert drivers and well-paved roads. On unimproved back roads a simpler, sturdier design performs more reliably. A stable, benevolent autocracy may offer more mileage and a safer drive than a volatile, sensitive democracy under some circumstances.

 

In February, 2011, I wrote that the great Western democracies were never above accepting help from tin-pot dictators, only above helping them when they got into trouble. Strongmen were well advised to remain strong, because they couldn’t count on the West even for refuge, let alone rescue. Now with Egypt’s new rulers, we have the choice of sitting on our democratic high horse and say to Gen. el-Sisi: You can’t be our friend unless you let our enemies rule your country. You won’t see a penny, unless you honour the election results.

 

Or President Obama can say, well, I won’t make any speeches in Cairo for a while. How is that for a new beginning?