Are We Seeing History Repeat Itself?

By Alan Caruba

“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it” is the famed quote of George Santayana, a Spanish philosopher (1863-1952).  I am beginning to think that the world is making its way toward a future that repeats the horrors of the last century’s wars and earlier times when Europeans battled Islam to free Jerusalem, to protect their homelands in Europe, and to eject Muslims from Spain.

In his book, “Jihad in the West: Muslim Conquests from the 7^th to the 21^st Centuries” historian Paul Fregosi documented the history of Islam and its attacks on European nations, characterizing jihad as “essentially a permanent state of hostility that Islam maintains against the rest of the world.” It is a Muslim sacrament, a duty they must perform.

Occurring at the same time is the agenda of the global environmental movement and on February 4 Christina Figueres, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves; which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history."

"This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for the, at least, 150 years, since the industrial revolution.” (Italics added) 

Figueres was wrong. The objective of the 1917 Communist revolution that began in Russia and Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” (1958-1961) was the same that is now being openly embraced by the United Nations in 2015. The result of both was the death of millions.

Humanity is under attack from an Islam that intends to impose its barbaric seventh century Sharia law and from the environmental movement’s intention to end capitalism and replace it with the income distribution central to Communism.

Both spell a terrible future for the people of the world.

The President of the United States is devoted to pursuing both of these goals as the defender of Islam and the opponent of “income inequality.”  We have twenty-two months to survive Barack Obama’s remaining time in office.

Obama was first elected on the promise to end the U.S. engagement in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. After many years Americans welcomed the prospect of ceasing the loss of lives and billions those wars represented. With the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) they are now seeing the true price of that policy. Just because we don’t want to fight a war doesn’t mean our enemy will cease to pursue it.

We are at a critical moment in time because it is evident that Obama wants to provide Iran the opportunity to build its own nuclear weapons arsenal. It is a time as well when the military capability of the U.S. has been diminished to what existed before the beginning of World War II. All of Europe and much of Asia would have fallen under the control of Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan if the U.S. had not stepped up to the task of defeating them.

Relentlessly, Obama has done everything he can to reduce the size of our military fighting force and the ships, planes and other weapons needed to protect our security or support that of our allies. He has withdrawn the U.S. from its position of global leadership and left behind allies that no longer trust us and enemies who no longer fear us.

Raymond Ibrahim of the Middle East Forum wrote on February 5 that “approximately 100 million Christians around the world are experiencing the persecution by Muslims of all races, nationalities, and socio-political circumstances.”  

At the same time, we are witnessing a new exodus of Jews from Europe, mindful of the Holocaust in the 1940s.  According to the Pew Research Center, as of 2013 the Jewish population worldwide was approximately 14 million. Just over 6 million reside in Israel, another 6 million are U.S. citizens, and the rest are in Europe and elsewhere around the world. What has not changed from the last century, however, is the level of anti-Semitism and it appears to be on the rise.

What we are witnessing is a full-scale attack on the West—Christianity and Judaism—and upon Western values of morality, democracy, and freedom.

Whether it will erupt in a new world war is unknown, but if history is a guide, we are moving in that direction.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

Cartoon Round Up

 

 

 

 

 

The Worst U.S. President Ever!

President's Day - February 16, 2015

By Alan Caruba

I won’t be around to see it, but I have little doubt that future historians and others will conclude that President Barack Hussein Obama was the worst President ever to serve in that office.

The reason is simple enough. His decisions on domestic and foreign affairs have already demonstrated his astonishing incompetence. His major contribution may in fact be to ensure that the voters elect conservatives in the next two or more elections to come. If he is remembered for anything it well may be the emergence of the Tea Party movement whose influence has been seen over the course of two midterm elections.

One cannot help but think of such things as President’s Day, February 16, reminds us of Washington and Lincoln, both of whom were born during this month. For most it is just a day on which there are a variety of sales pegged to it. For all of us, however, it acknowledges the two Presidents without whom there would not be a United States of America.

Presidents Washington, Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt are routinely ranked at the top of the lists of those judged to have been of greatest service to the nation and, not incidentally, all three presided over wars that led to and maintained America’s sovereignty.

When I have read about Washington’s life, I am always impressed by the man and, not surprisingly, so were his contemporaries, the men he commanded over the long course of the Revolutionary War. The Americans of his time had the highest regard for him. It was Washington who set the pattern of only serving two terms. When the American artist, Benjamin West, told England’s King George III of Washington’s decision, the king said, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”

In his 1796 farewell address, Washington said, “Of all the dispositions and habits, which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity.”

Imagine a modern politician talking of religion and morality as the basis of political prosperity—least of all Obama who has disparaged Christianity and protects Islam.

America was particularly blessed and fortunate in its earliest years to have a succession of men who demonstrated extraordinary intelligence, courage, and moral integrity. Following Washington there was John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams. Few nations have been so blessed as ours.

One can only examine Lincoln’s life with a sense of wonder as he rose from humble beginnings to the role of keeping the Union intact in the face of the secession of southern states and the horrendous war that followed. Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865 and on April 14 Lincoln was assassinated by an actor, John Wilkes Booth. His death was the occasion of the first American national funeral as cities and towns did their best to out-do one another to honor him. It took his death for people to realize the magnitude of what he had achieved.

The advice Lincoln offered in his time is just as important, if not more so, in ours:

“You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down.
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence.
You cannot help men permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt and, earlier, Theodore Roosevelt, are also highly ranked among the Presidents. Both men shared a zest for the job, enjoying it. Teddy regretted announcing that he would not run for a third term (which he did with the Bull Moose Party) and FDR ran and won four times! He did so during the Great Depression and World War II.

Two other families played a role in the presidency, the Adams and, in the modern era, George H.W. Bush was the 41^st President and George W. Bush was the 43^rd. It is popular to disparage both men, but history may come to another judgment.

 

President Obama has brought nothing to the presidency except his Marxist theology. He was the least prepared in terms of experience in the workplace and his elections have been more about the manipulation of public opinion and his two terms have been an endless succession of lies.

His signature legislation, ObamaCare, has undermined the nation’s healthcare system. His solution to the Great Recession added more debt in his six years in office than the combined debt of every previous President up to Clinton and did not stimulate the economy as promised.

His ignorance of history and of current events is vast. Google "what does Obama know?" and you will find many articles that document this.

 

He has been protected by a liberal mainstream media, but the voters have seen through that and have turned political power in Congress over to the Republican Party.

One thing is for sure. On future President’s Days, Obama will barely be noticed when Americans look back on those who did much to address the great issues and challenges of their times.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

Obama's Dangerous Iran Nuke Deal

By Alan Caruba

The Feb 10 Wall Street Journal editorial asked “Has the U.S. already conceded a new era of nuclear proliferation?” and concluded that “Mr. Obama is so bent on an Iran deal that he will make any concession to get one.”

As we should know by now, President Obama has no negotiating skills and even less understanding of the world the U.S. used to lead by virtue of its military power and democratic values.

If he succeeds in getting a deal, absent Congress doing anything about it, the Wall Street Journal says it will result in “a very different world than the one we have been living in since the dawn of the nuclear age. A world with multiple nuclear states, including some with revolutionary religious impulses or hegemonic ambitions, is a very dangerous place.”

Yes, but. We already live in such a world and the real question is whether, absent their “revolutionary” rhetoric, shouting “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!” do those at the top levels of the Iranian ruling structure want to risk having their nation destroyed if they were ever to use nuclear weapons?

No nation on Earth has done so since the U.S. ended the war with the Japanese Empire with two atom bombs rather than put at risk the lives of our troops in an invasion. Why do we think Iran would use their nukes if they acquired them?

The short answer is that the United Nations has passed six resolutions to deny Iran the capability of developing a military nuclear program and the current negotiations, the P5+1, while led by the U.S., are joined by Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom and Germany.

Nations in the Middle East and around the world are inclined to think the Iranian leadership would use such weapons. Obama is intent on ignoring their judgment.

If you want to know why Iran continues to be involved in negotiations to restrict its nuclear weapons agenda, you need to know that the U.S. will release $11.9 billion to Iran by the time the talks are concluded in June. That’s the figure cited by our own State Department.

On January 21, the U.S. released $490 million, the third such payment since December 10. For sitting at the negotiations table, Iran will secure $4.9 billion in unfrozen cash assets via ten separate payments by the U.S. It had received $4.2 billion in similar payments under the 2013 interim agreement with the U.S. and was given another $2.9 billion by the Obama administration last year in an absurd effort to get them to agree to end their effort to become a nuclear power.

In a sense there are several Iran’s. There is the Iran of the Supreme Leader and the Revolutionary Guard, both committed to the Islamic revolution that brought the present day Iran into being in 1979. They value having a nuclear weapons capability no less than the U.S. or other nations do.

Then there are the Iranian realists who would far prefer a detente between the U.S. and Iran because they believe it would be in both our interests. These are the voters who elected Hassan Rouhani in 2013 to replace Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who has served in office from 2005. They represent some 70% of its citizens would want peace, trade and normal relations with the U.S. Their leaders, however, have thoughts of hegemonic power in the Middle East to advance Shiite Islam.

The problem is that many of the Iranian leadership do not speak in terms other than an utter contempt for the U.S. and with an outspoken enmity for any nation that opposes the expansion of Islam. In late January, one of its newspapers, Kayhan, reported that “Professors, students and employees at the Imam Sadeq University, condemning the insults against the prophet of Islam by Charlie Hebdo…demand closure of the French embassy in Tehran.”

The demonstrators carried placards read, “I am not Charlie, I am the innocent child of Gaza”, “Death to America”, “Death to Israel”, “Death to Britain”, “Death to France”, ‘Death to Wahabism” and comparable signs all indicative of Iran’s hostility to any response to the terrorism it has sponsored for decades since the Islamic Revolution was initiated there in 1979.

On January 23, Iran’s Foreign Minister, Mohammad-Javad Zarif, addressed the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, saying “I do not believe that ten years of confrontation will have had any benefits for anyone. Ten years of sanctions has yielded 19,800 contrifuges, exactly that which the sanctions wanted to halt.” 

There is no question that sanctions and the long negotiations have reduced Iran’s capacity to create nuclear weapons agenda. The current negotiations, however, are signaling an abandonment of that policy.

At Friday prayers in late January, Hojjat al-Eslam Zazem Sediqi told those in attendance “Our statesmen should know the enemy, should know with whom they are dealing and negotiating with…You are speaking with wild beasts which do not show mercy to (anyone) young or old, and who insult the Prophet, the most sacred of sacred.”

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDC) maintains a constant monitoring of Iranian news media and government outlets. The reported news out of Iran paints a picture of fire-breathing zealots against a moderate political class and population. The question is whether the zealots will have the final word.

On January 28, Ali Alfoneh, a FDC senior fellow, authored a policy brief that concluded that “Even in the unlikely event that Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and his negotiating team reach a nuclear agreement with international negotiators, its implementation may well fall to the Islamic Revolutionary Corps…The IRGC’s vociferous opposition to nuclear concessions and improving ties with the West raises serious questions over whether future Iranian governments will uphold any nuclear deal that the current one signs.”

There are two major power centers in Iran, the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, and the IRGC. Rouhani is routinely referred to as “a moderate.” As Alfoneh noted, “Meanwhile, Rouhani’s cabinet is torn between public demands for jobs and human rights, the creeping infiltration of the IRGC, and the Supreme Leader’s dogged attempts to maintain the status quo at all costs.”

In late January, the Democrats on Capitol Hill, led by Robert Menendez (D-NJ) gave Obama another two months to reach a deal before they vote for new sanctions. In the House, progressives are urging their colleagues to hold off moving any legislation that would tighten economic penalties on Iran. At this point, the only thing that has worked has been sanctions and the return of frozen funds, a form of bribery.

Meanwhile, Iran has taken credit for the training and arming of Shiite rebels who overthrew the leadership in Yemen. Iran also supports the Hezbollah in Lebanon that is threatening Israel from the area of the Golan. In reprisal for a recent attack, Israel responded with an air strike that killed an Iranian general. None of this helps position Iran as a potential peaceful partner.

This is why John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, has invited Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to address a joint session of Congress. He did so without consulting the White House, but we should keep in mind that Obama released five Taliban generals from Gitmo without consulting Congress.

Netanyahu will spell out what he has said in the past. A nuclear Iran is an existential and a potentially catastrophic threat to Israel. He will likely point out that it is a threat to Saudi Arabia and all the other nations in the Middle East and worldwide.

The question is whether we are dealing with rational people leading Iran or not. In the end, we are asked to assume that even the Supreme Leader and the Revolutionary Guards want to live, want their children and grandchildren to live, and want their nation to continue. That is what Obama is betting on. The problem with that is that Islam puts a high value on martyrdom.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

President Christie?

By Alan Caruba

I was born, raised and have lived in New Jersey most of my life. That does not, however, make me an expert on Chris Christie, our Governor and currently one of the contenders for the Republican nomination to run for President in 2016.
 

His major claim to fame is that he has been twice elected in a very Democratic state and has had to deal with a very Democratic legislature. What is rarely mentioned is that the way he has done this is to issue several hundred vetoes to a point where, if the Democrats want anything passed, they have to make sure he likes it. This is also not to say that they haven’t worked with him to rein in the public service unions and address pension reform. To his credit he has vetoed countless liberal measures from gay marriage to a ban on hog gestation crates.
 

That said, New Jersey still has lots of taxes, lots of regulations, and lots of people who retire and move to Florida. It also, so I am told, has an “attitude.” Texans may say “Don’t mess with Texas”, but in New Jersey we don’t even have to issue such a warning. It is, after all, the home of the fictional Tony Soprano of HBO fame. In truth, it is a place filled with friendly, happy people, so long as you mind your manners.
 

In a curious fashion, Chris Christie embodies that attitude. He is a skilled orator when he wants to be. As a former U.S. Attorney he “made his bones” by putting a lot of Mafia guys in jail and doing the same for some high ranked Garden State politicians. That was so refreshing the voters decided to elect him Governor. In 2013 he was re-elected with 60% of the vote.
 

In the wake of 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, Christie’s embrace of President Obama when he came to New Jersey for a photo op caused a lot of Republicans to criticize him, but Christie was being a political pragmatist, knowing that the state was going to need a lot of federal funding to help rebuild from the devastation that had incurred. Even so, he has not been forgiven for it.
 

The Democrats have been desperate to find something that would reduce his popularity and “Bridgegate” became the vehicle when one of his staff stupidly messed with the traffic to the George Washington Bridge, presumably for political reasons. He called a press conference and for more than an hour answered every question he was asked, denying any personal knowledge and participation. The staffer was fired.
 

Despite that, the non-event was engineered to fester through lengthy legislative investigations that proved he was telling the truth. In addition, Christie has faced a largely hostile state press, led by the largest daily, the Star-Ledger that pathetically derides him in some fashion in every issue, usually on page one.
 

Beyond New Jersey I suspect that few voters really have any idea who he is despite his efforts to fashion the national recognition he will need to have a shot at the GOP nomination. Unlike Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker whose reputation is based on his solid conservative values in a largely liberal state, Christie is mostly known for his public personality; entertaining, but combative.
 

For hardcore conservatives, Christie is not conservative enough even though he is pro-life, against assisted suicide, and opposed to equal-pay laws, et cetera. He did secure a property-tax cap, but was unable to get the Democratic legislature to cut income tax rates. He has been criticized on Second Amendment issues favoring a ban on concealed carry and limits on ammunition magazines from 15 to ten bullets. Significantly, he vetoed a state exchange to implement ObamaCare.
 

Christie is now a national political celebrity and proceeding with a campaign to be the Party’s nominee. We shall see his name among the polls as his rankings rise or fall. That doesn’t mean voters have any real idea who he is or what he stands for.
 

That was the theme of Wall Street Journal columnist, Kimberly A. Strassel’s “What’s the Big Idea, Christie?” on February 5. She opined that “His best shot is therefore to look forward and wow conservatives with a full-throated economic and tax-reform agenda—especially since nobody has much of an idea what a Christie agenda would encompass.”
 

“Conservatives are vaguely aware that he has done useful things in the Garden State. Some like his style. But they also know he’s from, well, New Jersey, and that’s made them open to rumors they’ve heard about his positions on climate change, gun control, and social issues. Some wonder if he’s a big-business, Northeast Republican.”
 

Politically I think the nation has been moving more into the conservative political zone and we can thank President Obama for that, but Strassel is right when she says Christie has to select a few major issues and hammer them to gain the kind of support he will need to secure the nomination.
 

As Strassel notes “The measure of a Christie run won’t be whether he can outtalk or outglitter his putative Republican primary competitors. It will come entirely down to whether he can outmatch them on substance.”
 

I like him, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

It's Not Just Brian Williams

By Alan Caruba

“When reporters forfeit their credibility by making up stories, sources, or quotes, we are right to mock them. When their violations are significant or repeated, they should be fired,” says Charles Lipson, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. “Demanding honest reporting has nothing to do with the reporter’s politics, personality, or personal life. It is about professional standards and our reasonable expectations.”

Writing at Real Clear Politics.com, Prof. Lipson concluded by saying, “It’s essential for our news organizations, and it matters for our democracy.”

Are we seeing a trend here? Dan Rather at CBS and now Brian Williams at NBC? Well, two news anchors are not a trend, but biased and bad reporting is. It’s not new, but it does seem to be gathering momentum and nowhere has it been more apparent than the millions of words written and spoken about “global warming” and now “climate change.”

It would be easy and convenient to lay the blame on America’s Liar-in-Chief, President Barack Obama, but the “global warming” hoax began well before he came on the scene. It was the invention of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) dating back to its creation in 1988 when it was established by the UN Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization.

The IPCC came to world attention with the creation of the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty that committed the nations that signed it to reduce “greenhouse gas emissions” based on the premise that global warming—a dramatic increase—was real and that it was man-made. The Protocol was adopted in Kyoto, Japan, on December 11, 1997. The United States Senate rejected it and our neighbor, Canada, later withdrew from it. Both China and India were exempted, free to continue building numerous coal-fired plants to generate the energy they need for development.

Today, though, the President is an unrelenting voice about the dangers of “climate change” which he and John Kerry, our Secretary of State, have rated the “greatest threat” to the world. Obama’s national security strategy document was released just a day before he equated the history of Christianity with the barbarism of today’s Islamic State.

The national security document included terrorism to which it devoted one out of its 29 pages.  Essentially Obama sees all the problems of the world, real and imagined, as challenges that require “strategic patience and persistence.” This is his way of justifying doing nothing or as little as possible.

Still, according to Obama, the climate is such a threat, his new budget would allocate $4 billion to the Environmental Protection Agency for a new “Clean Power State Incentive Fund” to bribe more states to close even more power plants around the nation. He wants to increase the EPA’s overall budget by 6% to $8.6 billion. The Republican Congress is not likely to allocate such funding.

As for the environment, there have been so many lies put forth by the government and by a panoply of environmental organizations of every description, buoyed by legions of “scientists” and academics lining their pockets with billions in grants, that it is understandable that many Americans still think that “global warming” is real despite the fact that the Earth is now 19 years into a well-documented cooling cycle.

 

Not only are all the children in our schools still being taught utter garbage about it, but none who have graduated in recent years ever lived a day during the non-existent “global warming.”

On February 7, Christopher Booker, writing in The Telegraph, a British daily newspaper, wrote an article, “The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever.”  You are not likely to find any comparable reporting in a U.S. daily newspaper.

Citing research comparing the official temperature graphs from three weather stations in Paraguay against what had originally been reported by them, it turned out that their cooling trend had been reversed by the U.S. government’s Global Historical Climate Network and then amplified by “two of the main official surface records, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) and the National Climate Data Center.” 

Why should we be surprised that the national media continues to report on “global warming” when our government has been engaged in the deliberate distortion of the actual data? It is, however, the same national media that has provided virtually no investigative journalism to reveal what has been going on for decades.

What fate befalls Brian Williams is a mere blip on the screen of events. At this writing, I cannot see how NBC could ever keep him as the managing editor and news anchor.

What matters regarding much of the product of the mainstream media is the continuing torrent of “news” about “global warming” and “climate change”; the former is a complete hoax and the latter a factor of life on planet Earth over which humans have no control, nor contribute to in any fashion.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

The Arab Armies

By Alan Caruba

The ongoing Syrian conflict, the fall of the Yemeni government, the burning of the Jordanian pilot, and other events make one wonder why even those Arab nations with significant military capabilities tend not to use them against a common enemy.

The attacks on ISIS by the Jordanian air force have been a dramatic example of what could be done to eliminate this threat to the entire region if the other military forces would join in a united effort.

This raises the question of why the armies of various Middle Eastern nations do not seem to be engaged in destroying the Islamic State (ISIS). The answer may be found in a casual look at recent history; these armies have not been successful on the field of battle. Most recently what passed for the Iraqi army fled when ISIS took over much of northern Iraq.

Since 1948 the Arab nations that attacked Israel were repeatedly defeated. The Iraq-Iran war conducted by Saddam Hussein finally stalemated after eight years. Later it took the leadership of the U.S. to drive Saddam’s Iraq out of Kuwait.

Israeli fighter jets

In October 2014, the Business Insider published a useful ranking of Middle Eastern militaries put together by Armin Rosen, Jeremy Bender, and Amanda Macias. Ranked number one should surprise no one. It was Israel which has a $15 billion defense budget, 176,000 active frontline personnel, 680 aircraft, and 3,870 tanks.

Unlike previous administrations dating back to Truman, while the U.S. is technically still an ally of Israel, in reality the Obama administration has demonstrated animosity toward the only democratic nation in the region. Indeed, the U.S. has been engaged in lengthy negotiations with Iran that would ultimately permit it to become a nuclear power. There isn’t a single Middle Eastern nation that wants this to occur and it has greatly harmed U.S. relations with them.

Ranked second militarily is the Turkish Armed Forces with an $18.1 billion defense budget, 410,000 active frontline personnel, 3,675 tanks and 989 aircraft. This nation has shifted heavily toward being an Islamist state as opposed to the secular one it had been since the end of the Ottoman Empire in the last century. Its military hasn’t been involved in a conflict since the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974. It is a NATO-allied military but that doesn’t mean it will support NATO in a future conflict. It was used against the Kurdish separatist movement in the 1980s, but these days the Kurdish Peshmerga, between 80,000 and 100,000 strong is now ranked as “one of the most formidable fighting forces in the Middle East” and it is likely the Kurds will carve their own nation out of an Iraq which barely exists these days.

Number three among the Middle East militaries is Saudi Arabia with a $56.7 billion defense budget, 233,500 active frontline personnel, 1,095 tanks, and 652 aircraft. It has been closely allied with the U.S. for decades, but the Obama Iranian nuclear negotiations have negatively affected that relationship. One can assume the same from its other allies, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates. Saudi Arabia has also provided “substantial assistance” to post-coup Egypt.

The rankings put the United Arab Emirates a #4, Iran at #5, Egypt at #6, Syria at #7, Jordan at #8, Oman at #9, Kuwait at #10, Qatar at #11, Bahrain at #12, Iraq at #13, Lebanon at #14, and Yemen at #15.   The Business Insider article noted that “The balance of power in the Middle East is in disarray” and that’s putting it mildly.

Debka File, an Israeli news agency, reported on February 5 that “The group of nations U.S. President Barack Obama assembled last September for an air offence against ISIS inroads in Iraq and Syria is fraying.”

It deemed the participation of the UAE, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Bahrain as “more symbolic than active” noting that Iraq has no air force to speak of and an army in name only while the Saudis “allotted a trifling number of planes to the effort” and Bahrain has no air force at all. The UAE has the biggest and most modern air force and it has reportedly joined with Jordan to attack ISIS strongholds. 

Debka reported that the coalition is “adamantly opposed to Obama’s policy…and loath to lend their air strength for its support” and that is very good news for ISIS, but not for the rest of the Middle East.

In October, Commentary magazine published an analysis by Ofir Haivry, vice president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem, about the “Shifting Alliances in the Middle East.”  It began with the observation that “The old Middle Eastern order has collapsed” as “the ongoing Arab uprisings that begin in late 2010 have unseated or threaten to unseat every Muslim government in the region.”

Postulating ‘five broad, cross-regional, and loosely ideological confederations”, Haivry concluded that “Perhaps our biggest challenge is not a new Middle East, but a new United States in paralysis. Under the Obama administration, America’s historic aspiration to shape events in the region has given way to confusion and drift.”

It should not come as that much of a surprise that Israel has been developing intelligence and security relations with several Arab nations, including what the Middle East Monitor described as “growing secret cooperation between Israel and Saudi Arabia.”  That sounds like very bad news for Iran and very good news for the rest of us.

© Alan Caruba, 2015