Flirting with the Great Depression 2.0

By Alan Caruba

POLITICO Breaking News:
August 5, 2011

“Credit rating agency S&P has downgraded U.S. debt from AAA, the first debt downgrade in U.S. history, the Associated Press reported.”

When a nation’s debt equals its entire annual gross domestic product, it is bankrupt. It can still produce goods and services, but it will likely encounter fewer customers worldwide as they too are drawn deeper into their own debt crises.

When it must borrow billions daily just to meet its obligations to other nations and individuals who have purchased its treasury notes, it is has reached a point of “moral hazard” that threatens the wealth of every single citizen.

When it raises its “debt ceiling” to $14.58 trillion, the amount its Congress permits, and one day later its Treasury Department announces that its debt reached 100% of its GDP, it is in serious financial difficulty. Not since 1947 when the U.S. was recovering from the cost of World War II have we reached this point.

The nasty “debate” in Washington over the debt ceiling included the Republican demands that we reduce our spending and Democrat demands that we raise taxes. Those advocating sanity were called “terrorists” and “extremists.” The shallow reductions agreed to were stretched over ten years and barely begin to address the immediate financial crisis. Harder decisions were pushed off on a "super committee" that no one expects to agree on anything.

This news is bad enough for the United States of America, but it affects many other nations around the world in exactly the same way the Crash of 1929 did, leading to the Great Depression of the 1930s and putting in motion the events that led to World War II.

Does history repeat itself? Apparently so.

What is happening in America is happening around the world. Greece, a nation of 11 million people, had by 2009 managed to run up its debt to more than $500 billion. Its fellow members of the European Union took notice even though Greece accounted for only two percent of the EU’s economy. A year earlier, the tiny nation of Iceland, population 300,000, had literally bankrupted itself when its debt went from $8 billion in 2001 to more than $48 billion in 2007.

On September 29, 2008, the Irish cabinet held an emergency session by phone because the implosion of its housing market threatened to bring down its financial system. To avoid a bank run, it guaranteed all deposits and, not long after, England did the same thing.

Many people find history boring, but it does provide lessons and what America and its lenders all face is the potential for The Great Depression 2.0. The gyrations on Wall Street and worldwide are evidence of global fears.

In America, the Congress merely applied a band-aid to a gaping wound, the result of the “solutions” instituted during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the entitlement program of Social Security and, in the 1960s, the addition of Medicare. In the 1930s, the federal government guaranteed mortgages by creating Fannie Mae and later Freddie Mac.

When the financial crisis arrived in 2008, they owned half of all the mortgages issued by the nation’s banks. The government was forced to step in and seize both “government sponsored entities” to avoid bringing down the nation’s financial system. At the same time, it agreed to buy up the “toxic assets” owned by a number of banking firms and by the insurance giant, AIG. Billions in public funds were allocated to this.

There probably was no alternative.

In the same way the government in the 1930s initiated all manner of programs to put Americans back to work, the Obama administration created a “stimulus” program while, at the same time, taking ownership of Chrysler and General Motors. The Federal Reserve reduced interest rates close to zero, lending banks and nations billions. By contrast, during the Great Depression the government had allowed hundreds of banks to fail which, in hindsight, contributed the nation's ills.

Franklin D. Roosevelt had been elected to end the Depression, but after nearly eight years of the New Deal has passed, FDR’s Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., addressed the House Ways and Means Committee on May 9, 1939, to say, “We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.” Unemployment remained high and would remain high until World War II intervened in 1941.

Much has changed since the 1930s, but much has not.

In 2010, power in the House of Representatives was returned to the Republican Party, but the debate over the debt ceiling revealed the difficulty it had marshalling support for raising it. Many new Tea Party caucus Representatives opposed it. Others argued that only massive spending cuts could remedy the growth of the nation’s debt. In the Senate, controlled by the Democrat Party, any deal that did not include raising taxes was dead on arrival.

Other than the so-called “stimulus” programs, the President devoted all of 2009 to legislation dubbed Obamacare that would have created a government takeover of twenty percent of the nation’s economy. By May 2010, a million people marched in Washington, D.C. to protest it. It has since been repealed in the House and has 26 States allied against it in the courts.

In the 1930s, efforts to keep the world’s economy from imploding found little political support for the measures needed to sustain an integrated world economy. In the modern era of globalization, the same problems have been encountered and, sadly, the United States has shown little taste for reducing its spending as it continues to borrow until, at some point, other nations decide to put their money elsewhere. So far that has not happened.

The United States’ financial future is in peril without a significant downsizing of the federal government and the international economy faces similar challenges as nations share similar debt levels that exceed their ability to meet their obligations.

It will take a minimum of a decade to meet the USA’s present need to reduce spending and reduce the burden of its borrowed debt. Let us hope the voters in 2012 take the first steps toward the political resolve needed by returning power to the Republican Party in the Senate and the White House. Then let us hope they show real political courage.

Let us hope it doesn’t take another world war to focus our attention on survival of a different kind.

Editor’s Note: This commentary was greatly aided by data in the “Lost Decades” by Menzie D. Chinn and Jeffry A. Frieden, recently published by W.W. Norton & Company.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Bush's Fault

The Open-Ended War

By Alan Caruba

As I listened to the President address the nation from West Point, I was reminded of how well he can deliver a speech. It’s like watching a slight-of-hand magician. You marvel at his dexterity, but you know he’s still skillfully fooling you.

The speech, given in the Eisenhower auditorium at West Point, reminded me of President Eisenhower, the former general who led allied forces to victory in Europe in World War Two, the man called back to serve his nation, and a man who was hard on the ears when it came to delivering a speech. It made him more human. We forgave him his blunt manner. After all, he had spent his whole adult life in the U.S. Army, taking and giving orders.

Similarly President Bush never seemed all that comfortable giving a set speech, but you knew he meant what he said. You knew he hated the evil of al Qaeda and the Taliban. You knew he despised Saddam Hussein and other enemies of America, of freedom, and human dignity. He was not smooth, not articulate, but he was genuine.

Barack Hussein Obama never spent a day in uniform and something in the area of two years out of six of his first term in the Senate before being launched on the nation as its savior, its messiah. I always found the references to spiritual powers jarring though, like most, amusing in their over-reach. Obama did nothing to discourage the image.

His West Point speech was primarily political. The military elements revealed a get-in and get-out strategy in what has already been a long engagement of the U.S. military in the Middle East. It was filled with talk of NATO partners, Afghani partners, and Pakistani partners, but it also told the enemy that, if they were just patient enough, the U.S. would leave.

Wars, the generals tell us, have to be fought in terms of what the enemy does, not by any timetable we devise. Obama handed us, al Qaeda, and the Taliban a timetable.

When we leave, the Afghan government will still be as corrupt as ever. When we leave the Pakistan government will be as shaky as ever, though perhaps a bit bolder in its desire to resist the Taliban.

Obama made a powerful argument for the need to stamp out the Taliban and kill al Qaeda. He also said that both had “defiled” Islam “one of the world’s great religions.”

Islam is also the world’s single most violent and destabilizing ideology, causing death and spreading terror recently in the Philippines, destroying Somalia, and with a list of atrocities from Mumbai, India, to Madrid, Spain, to London, England. And, of course, on 9/11.

Islam struck again at Fort Hood, Texas.

The one undeniable fact of our times is that the U.S. and the civilized world are in an open-ended war with Islam.

Ironically, one of the expressed aims of al Qaeda is the overthrow of the monarchs, despots or elected leaders of Middle Eastern Islamic nations.

Neither al Qaeda’s soldiers, nor the Taliban, wear uniforms. They are classic guerrilla fighters, fading away like fog into the indigenous population. Not since the day of the Kamikaze, has the world witnessed suicide as an act of war.

While listening to our young President, I was reminded, too, of John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech, possibly one of the greatest ever delivered in America since Lincoln’s Gettysburg address.

On that cold January day in1961, Kennedy said, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

While Obama’s speech was delivered well and met with polite applause from the cadets and others at West Point, its real message was that America will not shoulder the burdens of an open-ended war by itself or with the desultory support of NATO allies.

I thought, too, of the long Cold War America fought with the former Soviet Union.

For a little while, Afghanistan will be Obama’s war. And then we will leave.

We have some big problems here at home, a recession and joblessness, but we have always been able to work our way out of these cyclical financial difficulties.

This time it’s different. We have a White House and Congress hell-bent on initiatives such as Obamacare and Cap-and-Trade that will utterly destroy the economy and the nation. And they know it. And they don’t care.

One wonders, at this time and place, which is the worse enemy?

The Democracy Next Door to Iran

By Alan Caruba

There are ample reasons why the predominantly young population of Iran has risen up to denounce “the Dictator” otherwise known as the “Supreme Leader”, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and his thuggish, incompetent regime.

The one, though, that the Obama administration and the whole of the nation’s mainstream media have overlooked or ignored is the fact that Iran’s neighbor, Iraq, is a functioning democratic state that has held elections safely and without strife for some time now.

Iraq’s citizens, who suffered grievously for three decades under the rule of Saddam Hussein, have now joined much of the rest of the world by virtue of George W. Bush’s conscious decision to transform that nation and, by extension, the Middle East by force of arms.

President Obama campaigned successfully by attacking the Iraq War and promising to remove U.S. troops as quickly as possible. By some strange contortion of foreign policy, he announced that Afghanistan was “the new front” in a war on global Islamic terrorism whose name he will not speak. Most people understand that the real front is now in Pakistan, long a place of refuge for al Qaeda and the Taliban that are threatening its fragile government.

President Obama has finally articulated a more vigorous response to the Iranian effort to cast off the rule of the mullahs, but his first tepid instinct failed not only the courageous Iranians in the streets, but the history of our nation that has always supported freedom in the face of tyranny.

It is the democratic example of Iraq that is transforming the Middle East in ways we cannot begin to predict, but surely the revolution taking place in Iran is a sign of its success.

The era of the Middle East’s oppressive regimes, of ayatollahs and monarchies, of juntas, and of Palestinian militias armed by the Iranian regime, is on shaky ground in this new century.

The world has made impressive strides toward freedom since the cataclysm of World War Two. Two major nations, Russia and China, are being forced by globalization to extend greater freedom to their people. Africa, however, is likely to remain mired in oppression and poverty for the foreseeable future.

Europe has expanded its membership of free nations since the fall of the Soviet Union. With the exception of Cuba and Venezuela, Central and South America remains free.

It is not too soon to examine President Obama’s Middle East policy.

President Obama has virtually surrendered America’s traditional role of opposing tyranny. At a time when Islamo-fascism is the greatest threat to Western civilization, Obama went to Turkey and to Cairo to apologize for America’s effort to spread and support democracy, claiming an Islamic heritage in America that never existed.

His first six months in office have been a succession of criticisms of America.

His initial response to the Iranian street protests of a rigged election was a promise that America would not “meddle” in Iran’s affairs. It took him a few days to offer a carefully-worded criticism of the mullah’s brutal efforts to suppress the will of the people.

Obama is seeking to set free the worst enemies of the nation and the world from Guantanamo. Few other nations want to participate in this effort. He has halted military tribunals. He ordered overseas interrogation centers be closed. He withdrew charges against the mastermind of the attack on the USS Cole.

On June 21, H.R. 1388 was passed in the House of Representatives; an Obama administration plan to allocate $20.3 million in “migration assistance” to Hamas “refugees”, Palestinians who would be assisted to resettle in the United States!

He has facilitated this with an earlier executive order, opening the doors to Gaza’s “conflict victims.” And he has publicly rebuked Israel for building settlements to house its own growing population.

The Palestinians are not “conflict victims.” For sixty years they have been the initiators of conflict with Israel. Do we really want Hamas in the United States? This legislation must be defeated in the Senate.

While Americans are distracted by our economic troubles, we cannot give President Obama a free pass to ignore the freedom movement in Iran, to ease restrictions on Cuba, or to do nothing to stop the flow of illegal aliens across our southern border.

There are things he could be doing if he wanted to support freedom in Iran. He could authorize a clandestine program to assist the dissidents. He could lead a coalition of nations in demanding that the mullahs step aside, and to support a call that Iran’s constitution be re-written to rid it of its seventh century chokehold on democracy. He could offer leadership, but he has not and he will not.

He is shaming America while insisting on a new “crisis” every week for which he insists only the borrowing, taxing, and spending of untold trillions is the answer. He is doing everything in his power to impoverish Americans for decades to come.

Obama can no longer blame George W. Bush because the history unfolding before our eyes demonstrates that our former President was right.

Welcome to 2008...Again

By Alan Caruba

Americans, famed now for their short attention span and memory, as well as their general lack of knowledge of their own history, would benefit if they just looked back a year to the beginning of 2008 to recall what we were thinking and what we were anticipating.

Writing in The Economist, a British magazine, the eponymous “Lexington”, a columnist, noted that, “Americans have traditionally been much more optimistic than Europeans, and happier, too. They believe that people determine their own fate. They also believe that their children will have a better life than they do.”

“But the past five years have produced a dramatic souring in the country’s mood. Three quarters of Americans now think that the country is ‘on the wrong track’…Trust in government is half what it was in 2001.” But Lexington then began to innumerate all the reasons Americans were doing so much better than his British and European counterparts, not the least of which was a range of social problems that Americans were addressing much better.

“Americans have the highest fertility rate of any rich country. That is a long-term vote of confidence in the country’s future,” concluded Lexington and, indeed, the first bit of news on January 1st was that of the first babies born in 2009.

The Economist is a weekly comprehensive look at the world in terms of events, but mainly in terms of, well, economic trends. Its reporters in the first week of 2008 were contemplating a Cuba without Fidel Castro; a Mexican economy dependent on its oil exports; writing about slum conditions in Mumbai, India; Thailand’s upcoming elections; the oppression in Myanmar, formerly Burma; and the slow economy recovery in Germany.

What that first issue of 2008 reveals is a world—as always—in transition, but to what? For all the showy meetings and conferences, it remains an ironclad truism that nations pursue what they regard as their own best interests. Alliances may be long or short, but always subject to events that change perceptions.

Americans who had barely elected George W. Bush in 2000 welcomed his “with us or against us” attitude following 9/11, the biggest game-changer of the decade, but as events in Iraq dragged on his popularity continued to plummet. By 2008, more than 35 million Republicans stayed home rather than vote for John McCain.

The incoming President-elect, Barack Obama, will arrive at the White House with the highest popularity rating in recent history. Keep that in mind a year from now.

As 2008 began, The Economist opined that, “A credit crunch, a liquidity squeeze, a sub-prime meltdown—the shape-shifting menace that has vexed the world in 2007 has been all these things. But now it looks like becoming a banking crisis as well.”

By the fall of 2008 a panicked Congress authorized a multi-billion bailout of Wall Street, banks, insurance companies, and even Detroit auto manufacturers that, as 2009 begins, has metamorphosed into a bailout of every industry and State that has a full panoply of lobbyists in Washington, D.C.

If by 2010 some trust, some confidence has not been restored in both the economy and the politics of the nation, and if the Democrat controlled Congress has passed every insane, liberal program possible, we will likely see a significant shift back to Republican control, not unlike that of 1994. If the GOP can avoid committing political suicide by running Gov. Palin for President in four years, it may retain and gain power.

Meanwhile, 2009 looks to be a grim year for a lot of people and for the future of the nation. When economies falter, it brings out the worst in nations and people.

"What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate" Why You Should Ignore Rumors & Conspiracy Theories

By Alan Caruba

In one of the movies that made the late Paul Newman famous, “Cool Hand Luke”, one of the characters, a prison warden, utters the line, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” His point being that he is in charge, not the prisoners.

The various members of the U.S. government, our elected legislators and the President, have failed to communicate—some have said misled—Americans regarding the reasons we are trying to cope with a financial crisis based largely on an issue of trust. We do not trust our government and we do not trust our banking and investment community, and they don't appear to trust each other.

It is at times like this that conspiracy theories and rumors abound.

Take, for example, one put forth by Wayne Madsen, a former naval officer who was assigned to the National Security Agency as well as being a former executive at a Fortune 500 company. Wayne now fashions himself a citizen journalist at WayneMadsenReport.com. That pretty much constitutes all that I know about Madsen other than he does some radio with something called the Republic Broadcasting Network.

On October 9, Madsen reported that he had learned from “knowledgeable Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) sources that the Bush administration is putting the final touches on a plan that would see martial law declared in the United States with various scenarios anticipated as triggers.”

Were that the case, President Bush would become the nation’s warden. The triggers, according to Madsen, would include “massive social unrest, bank closures resulting in violence against financial institutions, and another fraudulent presidential election that would result in rioting in major cities and campuses around the country.”

At this point, let it be said that talk of rioting and martial law always circulates in times like these. It’s worth taking careful note of who is doing the talking.

There have been times when rioting occurred, but it has usually involved racial discord. One has to reach back to the days of the Hoover administration for protests regarding the economy, but in that case it was a government riot in which WWI veterans who had descended on Washington, D.C., to demand promised payments for their service were forced from their improvised “Hooverville” shacks by the U.S. Army.

Speculation that the present government and whichever one takes over in January would be dusting off plans in the event of such discord is predictable as well. It is not unlikely that the geniuses who created this financial mess, Congress in particular, are looking at contingency plans in the event the U.S. was to default on its loans and other debts. The fact that the current crisis is international in scope would portend military conflicts if not brought under control.

It is extremely doubtful events would come to that.

All one needs to do is recall the calm with which Americans waited out the Florida vote count and the result of the Bush-Gore election. No riots. Just a giant collective shrug.

What is happening is likely some kind of restructuring of how the international financial system operates in a new age in which a depositor can transfer funds with the click of a computer key. This new crisis is based on very old human error; spending too much, promising too much, pretending a problem does not exist until it can no longer be ignored.

The government has to ramp up its communication skills and programs to reassure Americans and others that, indeed, a rescue plan is in place and will begin to function soon. That’s really what people want to hear.

So far the public has been treated first to a rather panicky Secretary of the Treasury, followed by a droning, boring Secretary of the Treasury, in both cases doing a poor job of explaining anything. Let’s begin by keeping Hank Paulson way from microphones and television cameras. For that matter, President Bush has proven to be a very poor cheerleader.

If John McCain continues to “name names”, i.e., Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Nancy Pelosi, et cetera, he might just get elected. He was once famous for “straight talk” and Americans are hungry to hear more of it.

Apparently We Have Won the Iraq War

By Alan Caruba

I had an odd thought the other day. Apparently we have won the Iraq war.

The president of Iraq thinks so and he wants us to leave. That's good enough for me, but apparently not for George W. Bush or John McCain. Neither of these gentlemen seems inclined to be leave. Meanwhile, Barack Obama is still trying to make up his mind when to leave. If elected, my bet is that he will find an excuse to stay.

There's all this talk of departure "horizons" versus "timetables." The good news is that we not engaged in shoot-outs every day and that the Iraqi army and police force now numbers over 500,000 men.

As matters stand now, Rasmussen Reports has posted notice that 63% of those surveyed as of July 22 want the troops to return home. That is a virtual mandate.

This war has been marked by endless absurdities starting with the USS Abraham Lincoln where President Bush announced that combat had ended and reconstruction would begin. That was in 2003. The war had been pursued on the grounds that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Turns out he didn't by the time we invaded, but—surprise—he did have tons of "yellowcake", the stuff you need to make nuclear weapons.

Was there ever a more political round of absurd nonsense than the fuss over The New York Times opinion piece by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, followed by the revelation his wife worked for the CIA? A massive and needless investigation of White House aides ensued, led by a prosecutor who knew exactly who leaked the facts about her. Wilson had written that he had found no evidence that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy yellowcake. He has been proclaiming his indignation ever since. Nobody likes a crybaby.

The Iraq War will likely qualify as one of the most curious in our very long history of military interventions in the Middle East. The troops, bless'm, were in Baghdad within in a week or so, but once there the Iraqis began looting everything that wasn't nailed down and burning a great deal of their own infrastructure including schools, libraries and universities.

Having gone in with too few troops, nothing could be done to secure the city and, after the looting, the nation became a killing ground as various internal and external factions made war on each other and on us. In the process we lost some 4,000 troops. Eventually, the level of Iraqis killing Iraqis reached a point where even they found it nauseating.

The result? Peace, glorious peace!

Americans tend to forget that, in the Middle East, most political disagreements are settled with assassinations such as the murder of Egypt's Anwar Sadat and, more recently, the killing of Benezir Bhutto in Pakistan. In Lebanon, the Syrians assassinated a whole raft of politicians whom they found irksome. Several efforts have been made to kill Hamid Karzi of Afghanistan. In Gaza, Fatah was forced out by Hamas at gunpoint. Having achieved zero cooperation for decades, world leaders keep insisting that the Israelis negotiate with Fatah, giving them land and lollypops.

In the midst of the speculation about a possible war with Iran, people forget that, under Saddam's leadership, Iraqis fought Iranians for eight years in the 1980s. The result was a million casualties and a total stalemate. Then Saddam invaded Kuwait, occasioning our first visit there. And people still wonder why Bush43 concluded that it was cheaper in the short run to just invade and kill Saddam.

The history of conflict in the Middle East suggests that Arabs are not very good at fighting wars. If Lebanon's Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy, decides to attack Israel again, the only thing left of Beirut and the rest of the nation will be its wall-to-wall smoldering ruins. It's always a bad idea to attack Israel, particularly for a second time.

Listening to presidential candidates arguing back and forth about withdrawing from Iraq is a tad surreal. Realistically it will take at least a year or more to get out of Iraq because we have a ton of hardware there. Most of it will be warehoused in Kuwait and Qatar.

Tucked away in desert wadis, encampments of American troops will likely be pulling duty in Iraq for a very long time to come. Once we invade a nation we never really leave.

The Middle East is what it has always been; a festering cesspool of oppression, corruption, backwardness, and despair. What else is new?

In truth, the United States has been sending troops to the Middle East since Thomas Jefferson commissioned our first Marines to kill Barbary pirates. We built the first U.S. Navy precisely for that purpose.

No doubt there will be some kind of big international confab to conclude the recent unpleasantness in Iraq and everyone will toast each other with champagne and toss back some really good caviar.

Saddam Hussein is dead. We won. It's time to redeploy to some other nation foolish enough to get our attention.

Bush Puts Alaskan Oil Out of Reach!

By Alan Caruba

While President Bush is meeting with his Saudi masters to discuss oil prices, you can be sure that one of the things he will tell them is that he met their demand to insure that the potentially vast oil and natural gas reserves off the coast of Alaska, the realm of the polar bear, have now successfully been put off limits to any exploration, extraction, and delivery to the citizens of the United States.

The announcement Wednesday, May 14, by Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne that the department has decided to list the polar bear as “threatened” was yet another way of insuring that America must remain dependent on Saudi oil, along with the oil we purchase from other nations who are sucking U.S. dollars out of U.S. pockets at rates never seen before in history.

The three page justification issued by the Department of the Interior simply shouts how utterly debased this decision is. It claims it was based “on the best available science which shows that loss of sea ice threatens and will likely continue to threaten polar bear habitat.” This government whose meteorological service cannot accurately predict what next week’s weather will be now wants us to believe it can predict the amount of sea ice off Alaska ten, twenty, thirty or more years from now.

That’s how stupid they think you are!

To add to the absurdity of this decision, Secretary Kempthorne says, “this listing will not stop global climate change or prevent any sea ice from melting.” Notice he does not say global warming! He uses the new Green terminology of climate change, something that has been going on now for 4.5 billion years!

Bluntly put, the President and his administration has betrayed every American at a time when the need for access to our national reserves of oil and natural gas is uppermost in the minds of Americans concerned about our increasing dependence on foreign nations, some of which are unfriendly to our national interests and policies, while others are regarded as unstable providers of oil.

To put it another way, they just broke open the champagne bottles in Russia, in Venezuela, in Nigeria, and, in Islamic nations they are toasting each other with whatever they drink to celebrate victory over the infidels.

The administration’s claim that the Endangered Species Act—one of the worst, failed pieces of legislation ever imposed on Americans—had to be enforced because polar bears are imperiled by global warming ranks as obscene, an immoral offense to the truth.

James M. Taylor, a Senior Fellow for Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute, responded to the announcement saying, “The only plausible basis for ruling polar bears as threatened is blind faith in alarmist computer models that have been no more accurate than Chicken Little’s claim that the sky is falling.”

There is no global warming and the administration knows this. The federal government’s own meteorological services are on record that the natural warming that had occurred since 1850 ended in 1998 when satellite data and other temperature measurements clearly indicate a cooling trend has begun.

Writing in November 2007, I noted the following:

The environmentalists seeking to put the polar bears on the Endangered Species list conveniently overlook a report by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) noting there are some 22,000 polar bears in 20 distinct populations worldwide. H. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis, noted in a 2006 commentary published by The Washington Times that, “Only two bear populations—accounting for about 16.4 percent of the total—are decreasing, and they are in areas where air temperatures have actually fallen, such as the Baffin Bay region.

“By contrast, another two populations—about 13.6 percent of the total number—are growing and they are living in areas where air temperatures have risen, near the Bering Strait and Chukchi Sea”, i.e., just off the coast of Alaska!

The World Wildlife Fund study found the ten populations—comprising about 45.4 percent of the total—are stable, and the status of the remaining six is unknown. As Burnett points out, “These bears have survived for thousands of years, during both colder and warmer periods, and their populations are by and large in good shape. Polar bears may face many threats, but global warming is not primary among them.

As you watch the cost of gasoline, heating oil, food and just about everything else that depends on oil for production or transportation continue to rise and impact your life, remember that it was environmentalists that started this ball rolling and the Bush administration that put it in motion.

President Urges Mid-East Peace. Forgetaboutit!

By Alan Caruba

“President Pushes for Mid-East Peace” was the lead story in the Monday edition of my local daily and I suspect others around the nation.

You could have opened a newspaper on any day since the 1919 Versailles Treaty and found a similar headline. The real question is why.

The first reason is that the culture of the Middle East is Arab and Arabs do not trust one another. They have a saying among themselves, “I against my brother. My brother and I against our cousins,” and so on. Arabs are raised in a family context that pits one family against another and in a tribal context that pits one tribe and sect against another. They are hard-wired for conflict, but mostly for an inability to collaborate and cooperate.

This mindset is so foreign to Americans who create new organizations at the drop of a hat to address common issues and concerns that it is literally incomprehensible.

When you layer in the contempt that the majority Sunni sect of Muslims have for the Shia sect, you have the reason why blowing up each other’s mosques is perfectly acceptable to them and, by extension, burning Christian churches is as well. The Middle East is a sinkhole of intolerance and one in which violence in the name of Islam is sanctioned.

The President was in Israel to attend the ceremonies to celebrate the 60 years that nation has been in existence. It has suffered seven wars and a long standing Intifada or resistance movement. When not fighting the Israelis, the late Yassir Arafat’s Fatah finds itself under attack from Hamas.

Those called Palestinians have been in existence since the founding of Israel. Many have failed to peacefully integrate into the many Arab nations that surround Israel. Often they were not permitted to do so. An exception to this is Jordan which is composed primarily of Arabs who either lived in the former disputed territories or who were members of the Hashemite tribe led by the monarchal family of the Husseins.

In 1917 the British Balfour Declaration announced its approval of a Jewish homeland.

After World War I when the Middle East was carved up between England and France from the dead body of the Ottoman Empire, the British were given a mandate to help establish a Jewish National Home in an area designated as Palestine. The land allocated to the Jews—early Zionists—those already there or expected to migrate was considerably larger than the 1967 borders Arabs keep insisting the Israelis “return” to.

In fact, in 1920-21 Winston Churchill was instrumental in giving away three-quarters of the British mandate over the area to create Trans-Jordan for the Hashemites, an Arab tribe who had fought with them to expel the Turks (Ottomans) that had controlled much of the Middle East for centuries. That’s how Lawrence of Arabia gained fame as the British emissary. The Hashemites had lost out to the Saudis for control of that vast peninsula.

The British turned a blind eye to the Arab terrorism aimed at the early Zionist migration to their holy land. Later, those Jews seeking escape from Europe as the Nazis gained power often had few other places to go.

At no time did a Palestinian nation or state exist. Those Arabs living in the area considered themselves as residing in southern Syria and, after Jordan was created, as Jordanians.

Even after the Holocaust, the British tried to thwart the influx of Jewish survivors. The movie, “Exodus”, tells the story of efforts to force their departure so that progress toward the establishment of a Jewish state could progress. The Israelis would endure to date seven wars to destroy them.

The notion that there has been peace in the area is simply wrong.

No American president from the days of Woodrow Wilson to the present has ever been able to bring peace or enforce it in the Middle East. Today, our troops are in Iraq to defend the new state emerging from the former dictatorship as well as protecting the Gulf States against any aggression from Iran. Without our presence, it is likely that the entire Middle East would be in flames.

Pan-Arabism, advocated by Egypt’s Nasser, lies in the ruins of comparable attempts to unite the Middle East. Lebanon is again in turmoil, threatened with yet another civil war. The Turks keep an eye on northern Iraq’s Kurds, positioning troops on its border. Kuwait only exists due to an earlier U.S. military intervention.

So President George W. Bush can urge peace all he wants and whoever the next president will be can do the same. It’s not going to happen.

Two Weeks Away from a Revolution

By Alan Caruba

A history professor of mine once said that, “No nation is more than two weeks away from a revolution if it cannot provide food to its citizens.”

During the mini-ice age between 1300 and 1850, the weather was so awful that it killed off food crops and, in particular, wheat, a staple of the diet of the poor in France and elsewhere. Lack of bread was enough to trigger the French Revolution and the end of the monarchy. Ironically, it put Napoleon in power and it was the same mini-ice age that decimated his troops when he invaded Russia. Most froze to death on the trek back to La Belle France.

The word in America these days is that food prices are soaring with increases at double-digit rates. There are two places where people notice a rise in costs. One is food. The other is at the gas pump. The average household spends three times as much for food as for gasoline. It accounts for 13 percent of household spending as compared with about 4 percent for gas.

Pay no attention to the folks telling you that Big Oil is making unconscionable profits. ExxonMobil’s profits, despite its earnings, have remained around 10 percent for years. It’s a very expensive business, finding, extracting, refining, and transporting oil and gas.

The price of oil is being bid up beyond all reason by the speculators in the commodities markets. It has nothing to do with the availability of oil. The oil producing countries that control over 70 percent of the known reserves are telling you the truth when they say there’s enough. If you were them, would you go out of your way to drive the price down? I didn’t think so.

The other component of high food prices is also related to the pain at the pump. It’s ethanol, a gasoline additive made primarily from corn and soy. The government passed a law that it must be part of every gallon of gas you buy in order to reduce so-called greenhouse gas emissions in order to save the Earth from global warming.

Only there isn’t any global warming except for the one degree Fahrenheit the Earth has warmed since the end of the last mini-ice age. No dramatically rising ocean levels. No massive melting of glaciers and ice shelves. In fact, if you’ve been paying any attention to the news lately, the United States and the rest of the world have been encountering some horrendous blizzards. There’s been more snow in more places than in the memory of many people.

When the government creates a subsidized market, farmers take note. Even wheat farmers decide to plant corn instead. That means less wheat and that increases the cost of bread and other wheat products. Since the corn is being burned for fuel instead of used as food, that drives of the cost of some 3,000 uses that are derived from corn.

Oil has hit $107 per barrel. Food prices have jumped from 25 to 40 percent. All of this is the result of artificial actions that have nothing to do with supply and demand, and everything to do with greedy Wall Street behavior (now there’s a surprise) and astonishingly stupid legislative policies based on bad and false science.

Americans are being screwed by their own government. It’s being led by a President who insists we are “addicted” to oil and a Congress that will not permit the exploration or extraction of the oil we have, so we have to import most of it.

It is a Congress whose leadership such as Rep. Pelosi, Sen. Reid, Sen. Lieberman, and others keep lying about global warming. Sen. Hillary Clinton wants to seize oil company profits and spend it in some fashion, presumably not to find any new oil. Sen. McCain is a global warming believer, too. All of these people are a danger to the future of this nation and there doesn’t appear to be a damn thing we can do about it.

Thanks to them, life for Americans is going to get more expensive.

One wonders when the revolution will begin?

The State of Bush's Mind

By Alan Caruba

“He shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient…Article II, Section 3, U.S. Constitution.

I don’t know when I concluded that the annual State of the Union speech was some kind of sad, bad political theater, but it was a very long time ago. When George W. Bush delivers his last such speech Monday evening, I will watch with the same interest I have for a documentary on venomous reptiles. Something he says might jump up to bite me.

This speech has, over the years, devolved into a laundry list of things any President says he wants Congress to do which, in practice, never get done. We have been witness, since the Democrats took control of Congress in 2004, to a legislative body that was incapable of agreeing on anything other than the insertion of “earmarks” in various bills designed to keep the wheels of government from falling off.

Its major accomplishment has been a so-called “Energy Bill” that, among other very bad ideas, intends to ban the incandescent light bulb starting in 2012. It is a disaster of inaction regarding the nation’s vast untapped potential oil and natural gas reserves. It mandates ethanol use otherwise known as "moonshine" and the burning of perfectly good corn for no good reason.

Only a financial crisis such as the current one affecting the value of the dollar has managed to galvanize both Congress and the White House to action and that action was to borrow still more money in order to give it away in such small amounts as to be laughable.

The idea behind this largess was to “stimulate the economy”, but it is merely the political equivalent of a psychological boost. It is a “feel good” effort designed to hide the mess brought upon themselves by the greedy mental midgets who passed as financial geniuses trading mortgage debt.

It is highly unlikely that George W. Bush is going to tell us anything other than his view that the economy is essentially sound. It is not. The nation owes so much money that even a thirteen trillion dollar economy is not sufficient. The government borrows millions every day just to function.

The many “entitlement” programs conjured up since the days of FDR are finally coming due and there isn’t enough money to cover their promissory notes. Even with Social Security a few years from bankruptcy, President Bush still managed to sign legislation that added billions to the Medicare entitlement in the form of prescription benefits. Before that, he never saw a spending bill he would not sign.

Fiscal prudence arrived at the White House after 2006 when the Democrats gained control of Congress, but they are the ones who came up with all these entitlement programs in the first place and they are the ones trying to foist still more such programs on us in an effort to take over the nation’s health system.

Failing to deal with the flood of illegal immigrants into the nation is costing us billions and, by “us”, I mean the taxpayers who must cover the costs of their children’s education, their unpaid medical costs when they show up for free care at our hospitals, and the cost of the judicial system that must catch, process, and incarcerate them when they commit crimes. We don’t even deport them when they complete their sentence. Then there are the billions they siphon out of the economy and send home. Without it, the Mexican economy would collapse.

I would not even hazard to guess how much the endless regulation of every aspect of life and business in America costs, but it’s a fair guess to suggest that any reductions in this area of governmental activity would be a major savings.

I predict that George W. Bush will examine the State of the Union and find a very rosy scenario. If he points to any problems they will be ones with “Democrat” stamped on them, but the truth is that a lot of Republicans are just sick over the way he and others have laid waste to the principles of fiscal prudence and a strong defense that, among others, define the conservative approach to governance.

Americans are looking for one important and essential factor in whoever gets elected their next President, competence. Bush and those he appointed to offices of power and responsibility have, more often than not, proven to be astonishingly incompetent.

The United States of America is at peril of being “nibbled to death by little duckies” if it can’t face up to the real State of the Union. Lord knows, we have enough real enemies.

Yankee Go Home!

By Alan Caruba

President Bush continues his Middle East trip, having been to Israel where he spent three days pretending that the Palestinians can actually agree to peace after sixty years of rejecting every effort towards that rational goal.

He is currently visiting a number of oil-producing Gulf States and will visit Egypt, no doubt to see the pyramids. While the official welcomes will be cordial, the press of the Middle East, according to Gulf Times, published in Qatar, is offering a different point of view.

Syria, no friend to the United States, despite having sent a representative to the Annapolis conference to revive the moribund “peace process” with Israel, said that, “All that comes from the White House are hollow words,” said the official Ath-Thawra newspaper. A dictatorship now into its second generation, the views of Syrians should be taken with a grain of salt.

In Egypt, Al Wafd, regarded as a “liberal opposition newspaper”, described the President as “the most hateful visitor” to the region and a “war criminal.” Egypt has received billions in foreign aid over the years from the U.S. In order to regain the Sinai desert, lost to Israel after Egypt attacked in the 1967 war, Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel. Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian President, was rewarded for this act of statesmanship by being assassinated.

“You are lying as you have lied before to the people of the Middle East and to your own people,” said Al Wafd. Actually, President Bush repeatedly warned Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to obey the many United Nations resolutions at the risk of being deposed. One thing’s for sure, Bush wasn’t lying.

In Jordan, though not among those nations visited, political analyst Rami Khouri said that Washington’s refusal to accept the verdict when groups like the Islamist Palestinian group, Hamas, was elected to power, left Bush open to accusations of hypocrisy. “If you preach majority rule and the rule of law as a desirable global norm, but refuse to respect it when Israel’s interests are concerned, you come across as a hypocrite, at best, and a deceitful cheat, at worst.”

All the Palestinian election demonstrated was that sixty years of brainwashing voters to want nothing less than Israel’s destruction was reflected in the outcome. People have famously voted for bad political parties, from the Nazi Party in Germany to the Venezuelans who elected Hugo Chavez, a friend and admirer of Fidel Castro, to office. In the case of Hamas, it killed a few Fatah (PLO) party functionaries and drove Mahmoud Abba into the safety of the West Bank where Israel could protect him. Its main function in Gaza is to fire rockets into Israel.

In Dubai, busily trying to buy up as many American assets as possible, the Gulf News published a front-page letter to President Bush concerning his Administration’s policies in the Middle East, focusing of course on U.S. support for Israel which it maintains exists solely for the “oppression” of Palestinians. It said the President had “no moral right to lecture others.” One might argue that Saddam Hussein had no moral right to invade Iran and conduct a war for eight years, only to later invade Kuwait.

The leaders of these nations know that the only thing between them and permanent residence in Switzerland or Monaco is the protection of the United States.

The fixation on Israel and the Palestinians reflects the difficulties of any diplomatic effort to get Middle Eastern nations to embrace any kind of democracy for their own people. All that oil revenue insulates the local sheiks from having to share power.

Bearing in mind that these newspaper clearly have an impact on the opinions of millions of Middle Easterners, their less than generous “welcome” cannot be discounted as a factor in what will be a long-term resistance to any common sense resolution to the region’s most pressing need, its connection to the rest of the world in terms of human rights, the rule of law, democracy, and other standards pioneered by the West and practiced—you guessed it—in Israel.

Ultimately, the President’s trip seems to be directed at mobilizing these nations to the threat posed by Iran. If it succeeds in that, it will have been worth the effort.

Prelude to a Palestinian Bloodbath

By Alan Caruba

One of the most astonishing aspects of President Bush’s visit to Israel is the demand for a Palestinian “State.” Such a state exists. It is called Jordan.

In 1922-23, the League of Nations gave the British a formal mandate to govern Palestine, making them responsible for “putting into effect the declaration…in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” The British set aside land, more than three times the size apportioned to Jews, which was then called Trans-Jordan.

Arab attacks on the Jews who emigrated were a constant factor in the pre-Israel decades, including riots in Jerusalem and Hebron. In Europe, as WWII raged, the Nazis set about the deliberate extermination of the continent’s Jews, resulting in the deaths of six million.

When on November 29, 1947 the United Nations ended the British Protectorate of “Palestine” it created a partition. When Israelis established themselves as a sovereign nation, the immediate Arab response by Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Trans-Jordan, and Iraq, was to attack its Jewish population.

There has never been any peace between the enemies of Israel and the so-called Palestinians, nor by extension the entire Muslim world.

Here then is the dilemma of a Palestinian state. A friend and fellow blogger who goes by the name of Longstreet who is not Jewish postulates that, “Once there is a state of Palestine, Israel will no longer be fighting a bunch of terrorists and thugs; she’ll be defending herself against a nation/state…a nation/state backed by the United Nations. For all intents and purposes, to create a Palestinian state is to create another terrorist state!”

Like many American Christians, Longstreet is not sympathetic to “a people who openly rejoiced by dancing, and singing, in the streets when their fellow Muslims slammed those airliners into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York and killed 3,000 of my countrymen.” He decries having “U.S. dollars being poured into that rat hole to be used to arm terrorists who kill Jews…”

While one can argue that Jordan is the “Palestinian state”, there has never been one recognized as such. Jordan is ruled by a monarchy descended from Arab bedouins.

Amidst the calls by the President and others for a Palestinian state, Rachel Newuirth, writing about “The Arab ‘Right of Return’ to Israel”, noted that, “First and foremost, the Palestinian Arabs were primarily the aggressors in the 1948 war, not innocent victims of the ‘Zionists’ as their spokesmen and advocates claim.” Then, citing numerous sources, she documents the actual events.

Most damning are the words of Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), Yassir Arafat’s closest advisor and now the present head of what is left of the Palestinian Authority, who in March 1976 wrote that, “The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny, but instead they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, imposed upon them a political and ideological blockade and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live in Eastern Europe.”

A former Syrian Prime Minister, Khaled al-Azm, writing in his memoirs, published in 1973, confirmed that, “Since 1948, it is we who demanded the return of the refugees, while it is we who made them leave. We brought disaster upon a million Arab refugees by inviting them and bringing pressure on them to leave. We have accustomed them to begging…all this in the service of political purposes.”

The role of the United Nations in all this has been a crime against humanity. Through UNWRA, an agency that exists solely for the maintenance of the Palestinian’s refugee status, the claims of a “right of return” have been kept alive while leaving Palestinians locked into an impossible limbo that denies Israel’s right to exist.

This has been accomplished for sixty years by pouring in millions to underwrite “all or most of their housing, food, education through college and graduate school, medical care and social services, provided to them for free by UNWRA.” Ms. Newuith notes that, “No Americans or Europeans have benefited from such a generous and all-encompassing welfare state.”

It gets worse. “On top of UNWRA assistance, the Palestinian Arabs also receive a total of a billion dollars a year in aid from other United Nations agencies, the United States, the European Community, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States, and Iran.”

Nowhere in the discussion of the Arab “right of return” is any mention of “The more than 850,000 Jews who have either been expelled or fled from Arab and other Muslim countries since the Arab world initiated hostilities against the Jews of Israel-Palestine in 1947.”

The present-day Palestinians Arabs are now further divided between the PLO and Hamas, the militant jihadist party that recently staged a coup d’etat in Gaza, effectively seizing control of the area from which Israel unilaterally withdrew, perhaps in the hope that ceding more land would dampen their desire to destroy the Jewish nation.

A Palestinian state is one of the truly horrid political solutions to a situation created by Arab aggression against the state of Israel. These so-called Palestinians should be absorbed into Arab nations that border Israel. The fact that they did not represents the intention and hope of destroying Israel, an aspiration expressed by Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to “wipe them from the map.”

To achieve this goal, the Iranians and others would have to initiate an Armageddon. To create a Palestinian state would be a prelude to the destruction of Arabs, denied citizenship in Arab nations, for political and religious reasons set forth in the Koran.

The United Nations keeps them alive as pawns in the war against Israel. Ironically, the United Nations has been forced to patrol southern Lebanon to keep Palestinians, backed by Syria and Iran, from attacking Israel once again.

The United Nations, along with the genocidal aspirations of the Arabs, is the problem, not the solution.

That problem is now being exacerbated by the policies of the Bush Administration. It reverses America’s long support for Israel by appearing to seek an end to a problem that will continue until the myth of a separate and distinct Palestinian people is put to rest.

Mr. Bush Goes to the Middle East

By Alan Caruba

“Peace in the Middle East” is the banner on the top of the page on White House.gov devoted to that part of the world. I went there to get some information on where the President will be visiting next week. Peace? It's not going to happen any time soon.

He will visit Israel, the “West Bank” (conquered by Israel after it was attacked during one of the many wars intended to “drive the Jews into the sea”), Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.

The United States has troops in Iraq and in Afghanistan. (I’m guessing Bush will put Iraq on the itinerary as a “surprise” visit to the troops.) Peace would be especially nice in both these places, but we aren’t going to be conducting military operations or be a military presence in both nations for a very long time. Those who think otherwise just don’t understand the nature of the region.

Following Bush41’s Iraq invasion to liberate Kuwait, we had to wait through eight feckless years of the Clinton administration before going back to remove Saddam. Put simply, the man was a threat to everyone. Saddam had previously fought to a stalemate with Iran for eight years.

People wonder why the Iranians want a nuclear bomb. They tend to forget that most of Iran’s “neighbors” have nukes, i.e., India, Pakistan, China, and Russia. That’s a neighborhood where it’s probably a good idea to have one.

Much will be made of the President’s visit to Israel and there will be a lot of talk about getting the Israelis to sit down with the Palestinians. At present, the only Palestinians who will talk to them are those nominally governed by the PLO’s Abbas. By contrast, in Gaza all Hamas wants to do is fire more rockets into Israel. When Israel’s PM,Olmert, let it be known that some areas of Israel in which Palestinians live might be put under PLO governance, the locals were horrified at the thought of losing Israeli citizenship and privileges.

The fact is that the Israelis have been sitting down with the Palestinians for decades and have nothing to show for it. In the so-called Palestinian territories, it’s a civil war accompanied by poverty and the distinction of being the world’s oldest group of hapless refugees.

Bush will bring the Israelis and Palestinians no closer together to peace than all of his predecessors. If the leaders in the Middle East were to lose Israel as a way to distract their people from their own excesses and oppression, they might actually have to improve the local economy (assuming it was not entirely dependent on oil.)

There are some places in the Middle East that Bush will not be visiting. Turkey won’t get a visit, nor will Syria. Lebanon, which Syria still covets, is a governmental basket case. Yemen and Oman will get a pass. Jordan, which is practically a U.S. protectorate, will not get a visit either.

It is instructive, therefore, that the nations being visited, with the exception of Israel, are all oil producers. Even Egypt is trying to develop its oil reserves. So maybe this trip has more to do with the price of a barrel of oil than “Peace in the Middle East.”

And maybe the topic of security—the kind only the United States can provide—will be discussed as well. By removing Saddam from the scene, the U.S. has done the whole of the Middle East a very big favor and it would be very nice if they would show some appreciation.

Here’s my advice. Any candidate for President who says he will pull out U.S. troops and leave the region to its own devices is a moron. From the days of President Thomas Jefferson when the Barbary pirates were attacking American merchant ships to 9-11, Arabs have forced the United States to use its military power to get some measure of peace. In both WWI and WWII, they backed the bad guys.

Our dependence on oil, shared by the rest of the industrialized and developing world, will ensure that we will be there unto your grandchildren’s generation. Ignore the nonsense that will pass for policy chatter, oaths of eternal friendship, and anything else aired during and after the President’s trip.

1. Keep your eye on the price of a barrel of oil.

2. Pay attention to the official chatter coming out of Iran, Syria, and Turkey.

3. If I were a holy warrior employed by al Qaeda right now, I’d find another line of work.

The CIA Screws Bush...Again!

By Alan Caruba

If you want to understand what's going on with the latest National Intelligence Estimate, first read "Sabotage: America's Enemies Within the CIA" by Rowan Scarborough (Regnery Publishing).

"The intelligence community, sometimes anonymously, sometimes not, would make allegations of Bush Administration wrongdoing. The charges were leaked to the press. Months later, the Senate Intelligence Committee or another body would find no evidence to back up the leaks. But by then, the damage to the public's perception of the war had been done."(P. 95)

Who damaged the CIA? Under President Clinton, "He shrank the CIA's analytical and operations branches by at least 30 percent. Stations in Latin America and Asia closed or downsized. Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country, had only three CIA officers by the mid-1990s. The entire roster of case officers was reduced from 1,600 to 1,200, and there were only 400 collection management officers at American embassies to turn reports from case officers into cables back to Langley." (P. 114)

Is Iran a nuclear threat? "A nuclear-armed Iran, with its long-range ballistic missiles and fanatical leaders, could lead to a Middle East Armageddon. If the Iranian regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was true to its word and tried to eliminate Israel, it would mean nuclear war. Classified DIA documents I obtained showed that Israel maintained an arsenal of eighty-two nuclear warheads." (P. 177)

So, excuse me, but it seems, given the CIA's record of trying to undermine the credibility of the Bush Administration since it took office, that the release of the latest ESTIMATE looks suspiciously like yet another CIA end-run to embarrass Bush.

Since the public will never be permitted to see the facts on which the estimate is based, there is no way to determine if the analysis is valid or not. One thing we know, they were out to lunch when 9/11 occurred. Meanwhile, the Israelis, whose intelligence capabilities are among the world's most highly regarded, are convinced the Iranians are working toward building nuclear weapons.

The CIA's track record to date appears to be alarmingly poor when it comes to fundamental tasks such as finding out where Osama bin Laden is. Around CIA headquarters the joke was "Osama Been Forgotten."

"By the winter of 2003, the CIA's PR war on Bush had broadened. A group of current and former intelligence officers formed an anti-Bush organization called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity." (P. 100)

An effort by Bush to put the place right by appointing Porter Goss as its director failed when a gaggle of CIA insiders made life for him and his aides so miserable he resigned within a fairly short time.

So I'm thinking this whole affair, giddily reported by a mainstream media that delights in making Bush look like a liar, a fool, or both, smells of dirty politics CIA-style.

Thinking Long Term in the Middle East

By Alan Caruba

Guess who’s going to be in Iraq for a very long time? If you said the United States, you are right. One doesn’t invade a nation without taking on long term obligations.

Thanks to a Clinton Administration initiative we are, after all, still in Kosovo. Whether there will be a unified Iraq in the years to come is up to the people who currently constitute that nation, but it’s worth noting that what was Yugoslavia is now Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, so don’t be surprised if Kurds decide to declare independence, followed by the Sunnis and the Shiites.

Thanks to the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, Iraq was literally an invented nation, put together without any attention to the wishes of those who lived there.

On November 26, President Bush signed a deal that set in motion the draw down of most of the U.S. troops currently in Iraq. By July—well before the national elections—the troop total will be around 50,000 and they will be billeted outside the major cities. Add Iraq to the list of nations where the presence of American troops is actually welcome. The policeman of the world is everywhere because trouble is everywhere.

For everyone who keeps saying that Bush is a moron, he has just engineered a deal that completely eviscerates Democrat claims that the war is “lost” and who keep demanding we leave Iraq to the tender mercies of the insane Islamic jihadists. Since Iraq and Iran share a very long common border, the fact that there will be 50,000 battle-ready American forces next door is not likely to be lost on the Iranians.

The presence of U.S. troops in Europe since the end of World War II gave the former Soviets cause for caution and concern. History proves that strategically putting our guns and tanks in place actually works. Expecting the United Nations to achieve peace does not.

In the meantime, we can equip and train the new Iraqi military to become some of the toughest fighters in the region. As the Iraqis sort out their issues over oil revenue, they will need a strong army for national defense. Meanwhile, the Kurds are already putting out contracts (with American firms) for exploration to determine just how much more oil they have in their part of Iraq.

By the time this all plays out, the dynamics of the Middle East will begin to rather dramatically shift because Iraq will be a functioning democracy and an example to others that self-government can work as opposed to the top-down sheikdoms and dictatorships of the region. Arabs everywhere will take notice.

In essence, America will have quite literally “connected” the Middle East to the rest of the world, albeit at the point of a gun. I would remind you we did this in World War II by decimating both Germany and Japan, and then guiding them toward becoming thriving democracies and economies.

As Iraqi oil begins to flow, watch the price of a barrel begin to fall to more realistic rates. It sits atop the second largest known reserves in the world.

The “unknown” in this scenario is Iran, but if the remaining Bush neocons can just resist bombing Iranian nuclear facilities, we may yet achieve a long-term goal of undermining its regime and seeing a democratic Iran emerge.

And this is what it is all about, thinking long term. The crybabies in Congress who want to leave are thinking about November 2008. The realists are thinking about 2028.

Where's Bush? Where's Paris?

By Alan Caruba

It isn't exactly a blinding insight, but it occurred to me that, other than watching President Bush "pardon" two turkeys prior to Thanksgiving, I have seen very little of him on TV news and he hasn't exactly been page one news of late.

That will change when an Annapolis conference to do what no conference or international body has ever been able to do--bring peace to Israel and the Palestinians--will be the short, pointless focus of attention on November 28th.

Some pundits think this is some sort of major effort, but I think it is mostly window-dressing and further "making nice" with nations in the Middle East to demonstrate how "even handed" the U.S. is with regard to the poor Palestinians.

Nevermind that Mr. Abbas of the Fatah group created by Yasser Arafat cannot go anywhere these days without Hamas trying to kill him. Their last clash chased him out of Gaza and he is now somewhere on the West Bank. He is described as "timid" by most. Hamas is described by everyone as "crazy sons-of-bitches."

I suspect we may see little of President Bush in 2008 simply because he is not running for office again (Thank you, U.S. Constitution, Amendment XXII) and because it will be up to whoever the Republican candidate is to either distance himself from the Bush policies or defend them, possibly both at the same time.

It has occurred to me as well that I have not seen much of Paris Hilton. In time, someone is going to figure out that she was (a) smart enough to disappear long enough for her prison time to be forgotten and (b) smart enough to have built a fortune of her own by branding herself as the party girl of the decade.

The True Cost of Wars

By Alan Caruba

I read a column by Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne today. This man has a reputation as a deep thinker and, one presumes, is influential inside the Beltway.

“It’s time that we subject the Iraq war to the same cost-benefit analysis that we are called upon to impose on other government endeavors,” wrote Dionne. And, immediately, I thought to myself that this was a fairly idiotic idea. What if, halfway through World War II, it was determined that it was costing the United States too much and that we should cease our efforts to defeat the Axis powers? What if we had decided that the Korean conflict was too costly and the whole of the peninsula should be abandoned to the Communists of the North?

The United States has engaged in any number of military endeavors, large and small, and I cannot remember anyone saying, “Hey, this is costing too much money. Let’s quit.”

Wars are expensive. Modern wars are especially expensive. And wars yet to be fought will be even more expensive. But defeat is costly, too. Just ask the Soviet Union, rumored for decades to be a great superpower equal to the United States. Then Ronald Reagan rebuilt our military and made it clear he would outspend any Soviet effort to threaten Western Europe or anywhere else in the world. Then, one day, after being defeated in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

It took some 45 years of a very expensive Cold War, but today it can be argued that it was worth every penny for that fleet of bombers that ceaselessly flew to guard against the prospect of a sneak attack or the Navy that guarded the waters of the world. All the protective actions the United States took, spending billions, in retrospect seem worth it now.

How many times do you think the U.S. should have had to invade Iraq? The first time under Bush 41 was deemed a success in that it restored Kuwait’s sovereignty and denied Saddam Hussein access to its oil reserves. Saddam had previously waged war on Iran for eight years for the same purpose. But Saddam had been permitted to remain in power and the result was the necessity for a second invasion to remove his threat to the region.

Costly? Yes. However, the result is that Saddam’s evil regime is gone. The Shiites and the Sunnis appear to have begun to sort out their differences. And al Qaeda, drawn like moths to a flame, has suffered greatly in Iraq. Initially driven from Afghanistan after 9/11, all the reports out of Iraq suggest how unpopular it is there. Even the Saudis have issued warnings against any more of their young men, the backbone of al Qaeda, leaving to engage in jihad.

So, despite the enormous costs of the Iraq war perhaps history will look back at George W. Bush and the neocons, and conclude it was all worth it.

By way of contrast, more than 40,000 Americans lost their lives on the streets and highways of America last year. That is carnage on a scale that humbles our military casualties in Iraq.

Meanwhile, the United States has continued to undergo a wholesale invasion across our southern border of millions of illegal aliens and, with it, growing and ever more dangerous Mexican drug cartels. Americans spend an estimated $40 billion on illegal drugs every year. Between the illegal aliens and the illegal drugs, the costs to America are in the billions, and we are hard-pressed to read any influential columnist address this “war.”

And, finally, since 9/11 when U.S. troops were sent to Afghanistan to drive out the Taliban and to remain there to protect a nascent democracy, and since they invaded Iraq and destroyed the evil Saddam dictatorship, there has not been a single major attack on the United States homeland. You know what I would call that?
Victory.