Free Republic

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the Obama administration gave Middle East envoy George Mitchell a treat to bring to Syrian dictator Bashar Assad when Mitchell stopped off in Damascus on Sunday: a presidential fiat will ease sanctions on Syria. According to the Journal, “the U.S. decision targets spare aircraft parts, information-technology products and telecommunications equipment, sales of which have been restricted by U.S. sanctions on Syria enacted in 2004.” All of which is very nice for the Assad family and Alawite-minority business that runs that country, while it helps their ally Iran export terrorism via Hamas and Hezbollah...

Michael Totten draws attention to the apparent decision by Hamas to take a brief hiatus from active terror attacks in order to engage themselves in a “culture war,” which includes the production of at least one movie. Now it seems that over in the West Bank, the terrorists have started a culture war of their own. Their prime target: Bruno, aka the Jew and occasional Hebrew-speaker Sacha Baron Cohen. A few days ago, we learned that one of Bruno’s interviewees, a former operative for the Al-Aksa Martyr’s Brigade who spent seven years in an Israeli prison, was suing Baron Cohen...

This day was certain to come; what’s a bit surprising is how quickly it came. The Obama administration now has a “communication problem.” According to the Hill newspaper: The other misstep that has bogged down the administration on health care specifically is Obama’s inability to communicate effectively to the American people, [Professor Paul] Light said. While it is shocking to consider that Obama is anything less than one of the best communicators in modern political history, when it comes to health care, he simply has not been able to make the sell to people who do have health insurance. And...

In early 2006, shortly before the outbreak of the Second Lebanon War, an Israeli intelligence officer predicted the future. “Missile war will replace terrorist war,” he told me when I spoke with him at the Ministry of Defense. He was right. Just a few months later, Hizballah launched thousands of Katyusha rockets into Northern Israel and forced hundreds of thousands of civilians to flee south toward Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. South Lebanon was punished much more thoroughly than Northern Israel, but the Palestinians in Gaza nevertheless took Hizballah’s Baghdad Bob–style boasts of “divine victory” seriously.

In a New York Times op-ed, Haaretz editor Aluf Benn analyzes the reasons President Obama has lost the confidence of virtually all Israeli Jews (a recent poll indicated only 6 percent consider the administration pro-Israel): Mr. Obama’s quest for diplomacy has appeared to Israelis as dangerous American naïveté. The president offered a hand to the Iranians, and got nothing, merely giving them more time to advance their nuclear program. In Israeli eyes, he was humiliated by North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests. And he failed to move Arab governments to take steps to normalize relations with Israel. . . ....

In trying to pay for the Democrats’ grandiose health-care plan, President Obama has endorsed the concept of a “millionaires’ surtax.” Leave aside for a moment the consideration that not even this would raise the revenues necessary to pay for the Democrats’ designs; they will be forced to increase taxes on those earning considerably less than $1 million a year. Still, it’s clear why they’ve focused on milking millionaires as the way to fund their plans. Millionaires are seen as the symbols of excess — far removed from the “middle class” to which all politicians pay obeisance. Surely they can afford...

It has become fashionable once again to proclaim America’s decline. Books herald a “post-American world” and the “end of the American era.” The question is no longer whether America is Rome, but how best to manage our inevitable fall. Few of the international-relations pundits who prophesy the concomitant decline of America and the advancement of China, India, Russia, and regional bodies like the European Union, appear worried about the prospect. Indeed, many seem downright pleased by “the rise of the rest.”

Sunday morning, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did a full hour with David Gregory on Meet the Press. She is, above all else, a committed Obama team member, echoing the president’s line on everything from engagement to restarts and artfully smoothing over Joe Biden’s head-scratchers. One of the most depressing moments of the hour came with this:

Is this language befitting a wartime commander-in-chief? President Obama has put securing Afghanistan near the top of his foreign policy agenda, but “victory” in the war-torn country isn’t necessarily the United States’ goal, he said Thursday in a TV interview. “I’m always worried about using the word ‘victory,’ because, you know, it invokes this notion of Emperor Hirohito coming down and signing a surrender to MacArthur,” Obama told ABC News. The enemy facing U.S. and Afghan forces isn’t so clearly defined, he explained. “We’re not dealing with nation states at this point. We’re concerned with al Qaeda and the Taliban,...

Time magazine devotes a feature of more than 4,700 words to the dispute between George W. Bush and Dick Cheney over the former’s refusal to pardon Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice presidential aide convicted of obstructing an investigation into the leaking of a CIA officer’s identity

“I have to say I am surprised by the controversy surrounding my statement,” President Obama said in an interview with ABC News Thursday night, “because I think it was a pretty straightforward comment that you probably don’t need to handcuff a guy, a middle-aged man who uses a cane, who’s in his own home.”

If you’re an enemy, we’re sorry. If you’re a friend, you’re sorry. Two days after Hillary Clinton told India to take it easy on all that industry and economic dynamism stuff, Joe Biden tells Georgia, still occupied by Russian troops, to quit whining and accept impotence like a good U.S. ally.

The Obama administration’s Jewish apologists were working overtime last week to pretend there is nothing unusual or unsavory about the president’s penchant for conflict with Israel. Indeed, many on the Left have been talking as if Israel’s resistance to Obama’s demand that no Jews be allowed to build homes in Jerusalem is nothing more than a political ploy on the part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. According to this interpretation, Obama’s demand for halting housing projects in those city parts occupied by Jordan from 1948 to 1967 is nothing to get upset about and Netanyahu is merely playing to the...

Here’s an interesting epilogue on the Human Rights Watch funding scandal I mentioned earlier this week. Just a few weeks after it was first revealed that HRW has been raising funds from the Saudi regime and advertising itself as overtly anti-Israel, and just a few days after this burst into the public awareness, its biggest competitor, Amnesty International, has distanced itself from HRW by releasing a blistering 65-page report on the practice of torture and other severe human-rights abuses taking place in Saudi Arabia. According to Amnesty’s press release:

For anyone with Cold War–era naval experience, it’s déjà-vu all over again. Russia has announced its intention, long suspected by Western observers, to improve its forward naval base at Tartus, Syria, and increase its support capacity for warships. During the Soviet era, the base at Tartus was in constant use, but only a handful of brief warship visits have been made there since 1991. Soviet reconnaissance aircraft also used to fly regularly from a nearby airbase and coastal- and air-defense missiles were installed to protect the Soviet-navy assets. Now Russia’s remaining aircraft carrier, Admiral Kuznetsov, has visited twice in the...

When Barack Obama assumed office, his supporters viewed him as a man of preternatural talents: highly intelligent and unusually reasonable, disciplined and competent, open to different points of view, committed to bipartisanship and to achieving common ground, an agent of reform and comity, cool and graceful, trans-ideological and groundbreaking. Governing is never easy, especially when facing an economic crisis — but Obama was extraordinary, we were told, a once-in-a-lifetime figure, wise beyond his years, compared to Lincoln and to God, destined for greatness, The One. Or so the story went.

Speaking to reporters about Iran’s nuclear program, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton appeared to talk tough in the wake of Iran’s foot-dragging on American overtures:

Not that it’s important enough for mainstream media to highlight, but that elusive thing known as Iraqi political reconciliation (remember when its absence was a sign of the apocalypse?) may be upon us:

Last week, the New York Times published an article about “signs of hope” in the West Bank (and in the city of Nablus in particular) that refreshingly breaks with the standard narrative of Palestinian desperation and misery. The Israeli military recently closed down its checkpoint into the city, along with other checkpoints elsewhere in the territories. The economy is growing instead of contracting. Downtown is full of shoppers. Islamist scolds have backed off. Police make sure passengers have fastened their seat belts.

Good to hear that Secretary of Defense Bob Gates realizes the army is still too small. Despite a modest and belated increase in its forces’ size authorized by his predecessor, the army still has just 547,000 active-duty personnel — far below its strength of 710,000 at the end of the Cold War in 1991. Now Gates has said he will add another 22,000 troops “temporarily,” although it will take time to implement that increase. (The army still hasn’t finished adding all the Rumsfeld-authorized additions.) It’s a step in the right direction, but it’s still not enough. The army has more...