Cartoon Round Up

The Middle East's Peace of the Grave

By Alan Caruba

After both great wars of the last century nations got together to create organizations that would ensure that large conflicts would not occur again.

After World War I, it was the League of Nations. When Woodrow Wilson (who was reelected in 1916 after promising to keep the U.S. out of the war in Europe) tried to get the U.S. to sign on, membership in the League was rejected by Congress in the interest of retaining our national sovereignty. The Versailles Treaty that followed the defeat of Germany also set in motion all the elements of that led to World War II and the creation of colonies, new nation-states, in the Middle East by the French and British after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Even as World War II was winding down, Franklin D. Roosevelt had work begun on the creation of the United Nations.

In 2007, in response to a question from New York Times’ editors, then Senator Barack Obama explained how he would resolve the problems in Syria. “I would meet directly with Syrian leaders. We would engage in a level of aggressive personal diplomacy in which a whole host of issues are on the table…Iran and Syria would start changing their behavior if they started seeing that they had some incentives to do so, but right now the only incentive that exists is our president (Bush) suggesting that if you do what we tell you, we may not blow you up.” 

“My belief about the regional powers in the Middle East is that they don’t respond well to that kind of bluster. They haven’t in the past, there’s no reason to think they will in the future.”

So, naturally, the President is currently threatening Syria’s Bashar al-Assad with military action and, having decided to let Congress determine whether he should be granted permission to proceed, may be deterred if it votes to deny it.

George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 after putting together a “coalition of the willing” and going to the United Nations to secure a resolution permitting that action. His Secretary of State, Colin Powell, made a presentation to the Security Council in which he presented proof that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Obama’s Secretary of State has argued forcefully for U.S. intervention in Syria to rid the nation of Assad, but America currently has no international support, including longtime ally Great Britain.

Bush’s intervention in Iraq, March 2003 to April 2009, led to casualties whose estimates range from 110,600 by the Associated Press to more than a million by the Opinion Research Business Survey. The intervention in Libya in 2011 had estimates of casualties of protesters, armed belligerents, and civilians ranging from 2,000 to 30,000.

Even a “limited” military action in Syria would inflict more casualties, adding to the 100,000 that Assad has already slaughtered and is likely to expand the war into Lebanon, home to Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, as well as Jordan and possibly Turkey. Americans are telling their representatives in Congress not to engage our military.

Writing in The Weekly Standard on September 6, Reuel Marc Gherecht, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and a contributing editor, dissected the problems posed by Syria and Iran, along with al Qaeda. “When it comes to the Middle East, Obama’s presidency has largely been predicated on two ideas: A hegemonic America is a bad thing, and the second Iraq war was a serious mistake.”

“Time has been unkind to Obama,” said Gherecht. “The withdrawal from Iraq has not left that country better off…al Qaeda now boasts, along with Iran and its militant Iraqi allies, that it drove the Americans out of the country.” Hardly a week has gone by since American military forces left that bombs by Sunni militants have not killed Shiite Iraqis.

In Syria, as Assad’s forces have been unable to quell the rebellion, he has turned to the use of poison gas.

In Egypt, Obama originally backed the Muslim Brotherhood’s overthrow of Hosni Mubarak and in Syria in August 2011 he had told Assad he had to go. It took action by the Egyptian military to remove the government led by the Muslim Brotherhood. Libya remains in a chaotic state between its tribal factions. The civil war in Syria rages on.

“Barack Obama,” says Gherecht, “is now the American everyone in the region loves to hate.”

Worse than that, warning of the need to intercede in Syria, he said “That so many in the West don’t see this, and are unwilling to go to war to stop such an atrocity—to send a clear signal to tyrants elsewhere—only shows how far we’ve come since 9/11. The Middle East’s power politics have again, hit us head on. We are, perhaps, too ‘fatigued’ this time round for the challenge.”

The only peace in the Middle East is the peace of the grave and the region threatens to erupt into a wider conflagration in much the same way World War II followed in the wake of the World War I.

International organizations, the United Nations, the European Union, NATO, the Arab League, and others have proven themselves incapable of a diplomatic resolution to the self-interest of Middle East dictators and monarchies, and the growing tide of Islamic fanaticism.

Barack Obama, with his pathological narcissism, believed that his Muslim upbringing and his Marxist ideology held the key to bringing peace to the Middle East. He has been proven wrong in the same way his domestic policies are bankrupting America and his foreign policies are dragging it into a war he desperately wanted to avoid and now feels compelled to pursue.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

Will Australians Vote to End the Carbon Tax?

By Alan Caruba

There’s an election in Australia on Saturday, September 7, and while the economy is of the greatest concern, it is a carbon tax that has driven up costs and put businesses into closure that is the issue that will determine the outcome. Meanwhile, in the U.S., imposing a carbon tax remains a top priority of the Obama administration.

A carbon tax is really a tax on the use of energy. Diehard environmentalists oppose any form of energy use. The code words are “greenhouse gas emissions”, meaning carbon dioxide (CO2) that the Greens constantly tell us will cause the Earth’s temperature to rise, but the Earth is not cooperating, having been in a natural cooling cycle going on 17 years now. Nor are the apocalyptic predictions about CO2 anything more than lies given the fact that it is a minimal element of the Earth’s atmosphere. That said, without it, all life on Earth would die because all vegetation depends on it.

In “Taxing Air: Facts and Fallacies About Climate Change”, Bob Carter and colleagues dismember green claims and, addressing Australia’s carbon tax, note that “price increases will cascade through the economy, and for most of them no compensation will be proposed. At the bottom of the pile, to whom the accrued costs will be passed, lies the squashed citizen and consumer.”  Those citizens will be voting on Saturday.

As an article in The Guardian, a British daily, noted, a conservative coalition led by Tony Abbott is likely to win, ending six years of Labor (socialist) rule that included a battle within the Labor party for its leadership, the result of its having passed a carbon tax after the then-Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, had promised not to impose it. Kevin Rudd challenged and replaced her. Now he and the Labor party are expected to be defeated.

“Having built his standing as opposition leader on the contention that Labor’s carbon tax would destroy jobs and hurt households,” the Guardian article noted, “Abbott has promised his first legislative act as prime minister will be to repeal it.”

What has occurred in Australia is a case history example of what happens when greens get their way. They always manage to destroy the economy. A recent study of Australia’s carbon tax by the Institute for Energy Research yielded the following findings:

# In the year after Australia’s carbon tax was introduced, household electricity prices rose 15%, including the biggest quarterly increase on record. 

# Currently 19% of the typical household’s electricity bill is due to Australia’s carbon tax and other "green" programs such as a renewable energy mandate.

# The job market had previously been stable, but after Australia’s carbon tax, the number of unemployed workers has risen by more than 10%.

# Because Australia's exports are relatively emissions intensive, the practical result of the Australian carbon tax serves as a tax on exports and import-competing industries.

# Australia’s carbon tax was accompanied by income tax increases for 2.2 million taxpayers.

# Due to fiscal gaps that exist between carbon tax revenues and increased government spending that accompanied the scheme, Australia's budget bottom line will worsen as higher deficits and greater public debt increase.

# Carbon dioxide emissions have actually increased, and will not fall below current levels until 2043, according to the Australian government. 

Viv Forbes, chairman of the Carbon Sense coalition in Australia, an opponent of the carbon tax and other green proposals, says “The growing failure of green energy in Europe should warn Australia to abandon bi-partisan policies dictating targets, mandates and subsidies for ‘green’ energy.”

This mirrors the same problems here in America where billions in loans to so-called green energy companies can be added to the list of Obama administration scandals as one after another went out of business. Solar and wind power is proving to be as great a hoax as “global warming” and a very costly one at that. How long has it being going on? Jimmy Carter had solar panels placed on the roof of the White House. Ronald Reagan had them removed. Barack Obama has had them installed.

Fifteen million registered voters in Australia will go to the polls and render their judgment on September 7. It is a vote that should be reported upon in the United States, but it more likely to be ignored or buried.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

Why Syria?

By Alan Caruba

Conservatives are asking themselves why liberals, so opposed to Bush’s war against Iraq and its dictator, Saddam Hussein, are so hell bent to get into a war in Syria and its dictator, Bashar al-Assad?

The President’s assertion of a short attack has been called “the Goldilocks” approach to war, offered as a measured, limited response to the use of poison gas that killed over a thousand men, women and children in late August. Wars, however, do not lend themselves to such measures. They have a way of getting out of control, drawing in nations that have no wish to engage in them.

Moreover, there is ample reason not to rush into any military operation until we know whether, in fact, the poison gas was used by Assad or by rebel forces seeking to draw the U.S. and other nations into the conflict. Logically, there was no reason for Assad to use poison gas. All observers were of the view that he was winning the civil war at the cost of slaughtering 100,000 Syrians and turning millions into refugees.

This is not the first time the world has stood aside while such slaughters have taken place. It is an ugly truth, but it is the truth.

Who is rushing to resolve the horror that is Syria? Not the United Nations. Not NATO. Not Great Britain. Not Saudi Arabia. Not the Arab League. Nor has the United States to the point where Obama had to reverse course and ask for permission from Congress.

When you also consider the failure of the U.S. to arm “moderate” rebel forces as promised, it raises still more questions regarding who to arm and why the proposal has proven so resistant to fulfillment.

An element of the Benghazi scandal is the widespread belief that Libya was being used for the covert transfer of weapons, but that does not explain why the Obama administration blatantly lied about those who perpetrated the attack that killed an American ambassador and three security personnel, nor why there was no effort to come to their aid.

It is absurd to say that Assad’s Syria represents a threat to American national security and the hearings on Capitol Hill made it clear that the Joint Chiefs are very reluctant to initiate an attack that, militarily, is not likely to do much to degrade Assad’s ability to wage war. The Syrian operation comes at a time when the nation’s military capacities have been worn down by more than a decade of fighting in the Middle East. Congress would have to make a special appropriation to cover the cost of the use and replacement of missiles.

 

Americans have been forced to witness a theatre of the absurd as Democratic Party spokespersons from Obama to Kerry, Pelosi to Wasserman-Schultz, defend the attack while supported by RINOs John McCain and Lindsay Graham. Even Republican leaders such as John Boehner and Eric Cantor have had to make the calculation to support Obama in order to avoid having the nation look weak in the wake of his “red line” statements.

The problem, however, is that the U.S. does look weak after its involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. Adding Syria to the list will only enforce that perception.

It is more than a perception. It is a reality. A nation tottering on bankruptcy and default is, by definition, weak. A nation that has degraded its military power is, by definition, weak. A nation led by a vacillating, incompetent President is, by definition, weak.

It has taken barely five years for Obama to “fundamentally transform” America into a liberal cesspool of debt, widespread unemployment, and now a debate over whether to use military power to help him “save face” in a world where the fate of Syria is way down on the list of priorities, led by the increasingly desperate need to save America.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

The Arabs are the New Jews

By Alan Caruba

The debate about whether or when to inflict some “punishment” on Syria’s Bashar al-Assad put me in mind of the run-up to World War II when the U.S. State Department was reluctant to admit German Jews seeking sanctuary and, after the D-Day invasion, the discovery of the Nazi death camps where six million Jews from around Europe perished.

So long as it was Jews doing the dying, the world just didn’t care that much and now, so long as it is Arabs—over 100,000 Syrians—the world still doesn’t care.

Moreover, the Arabs of the Middle East have given the West little reason to be concerned for their lives. Who has killed more Arabs than any other group? Arabs. The jihadists have bombed and murdered their fellow Muslims with abandon and continue to do so.

Poison gas was used by Saddam Hussein and is being likely used by both Assad and the rebels seeking to overthrow him.

 

It is the poison gas the West fears, not the fate of the Syrians or other Arabs.

The nightmare that the West refuses to confront is a nuclear-armed Iran. If and when the Israelis—Jews—take action to disable the Iranian nuclear operations, they will have saved themselves and the West.

Congress will likely approve some kind of authorization for the President to take some action. The draft that the White House sent was deemed too broadly written so the lawyers in Congress will fret it about with limits. That’s a good thing because whatever Obama does will be an act of war and a rather futile one at that.

An article in the September 2 World Tribune reported that “President Barack Obama has encountered vigorous resistance from the military to his plans to attack Syria.”

Assad will have plenty of time to continue waging war on the Syrian rebels. He’s too busy killing Syrians who, true to the tribal nature of the region, will remain busy killing Alawites, Christians, Druze, and others. Neither the Russians, nor the Iranians want a bigger war. They want a seaport and a pipeline respectively.

Congress will also have to find a billion dollars with which to pay for the missiles we use and to replace them. A nation that is $17 trillion in debt doesn’t have the money to wage a war. A short, symbolic slap will have to suffice.

There will be no “boots on the ground.” Our army is worn out by more than a decade of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. Our air force is flying a lot of old planes. Our navy has been reduced to less vessels than are needed in a dangerous world. Mostly, though, Americans are understandably just tired of fighting in the Middle East and achieving nothing.

If we could find and kill Osama bin Laden, there is no reason why we could not have done the same with Saddam Hussein and now Bashar al-Assad. It’s cheaper and just as effective.

For a while, Bashar was the darling of the liberals in Congress. Nancy Pelosi visited him. In 2007, despite White House objections, she traveled to Damascus to meet with Assad. At the time she said she had “expressed our concern about Syria’s connections to Hezbollah and Hamas” and raised the issue of the sanctuary that Syria was providing those fighting U.S. troops in neighboring Iraq. Then-President Bush said, “A lot of people have gone to see President Assad…and yet we haven’t seen action. He hasn’t responded.”

Ironically, it is now Pelosi who is urging Obama to take military action against Assad.

In 2011 on Face the Nation then-Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, was asked why the U.S. was not intervening in Syria as it had in Libya. When CBS newsman Bob Schieffer remarked that Assad’s father had killed 25,000 Syrians in Hama in 1982, Clinton replied that Syria had a different leader and one that recent visitors regarded as “a reformer.”

Among those who had visited Assad was then-Sen. John Kerry, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, who had been there at least six times; most recently in November 2010. He pushed hard to re-engage the Assad regime and notably without any success.

Assuming Congress lets President Obama wipe the egg from his face over his “red line” comment, Assad will respond with the usual threats and go back to killing Syrians. Having seen the U.S. response to the use of poison gas, it will likely be removed and transported to Iran. It is likely that it originated in Iraq.

So long as it is Arabs dying, the West and the rest of the world is unlikely to intervene. The U.S. tried that. It did not work out well.

© Alan Caruba

The Three-Decade Delay of a Nuclear Waste Repository

By Alan Caruba

There was a time when the United States was a can-do nation that built canals, bridges, railroads, and highways. Now we are a nation whose civil engineers annually report the dangers of decaying infrastructure. A perfect example of how incompetent our government has become is the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.

In 1982 the U.S. Congress established a national policy to solve the problem of nuclear waste disposal. As far back as 1957, the National Academy of Sciences had recommended that the best way to address the problem was to dispose of it in deep underground rock. In 1987, Yucca Mountain in Nevada was designated as the site. It was immediately opposed by both environmentalists and others. Congress approved the site in 2002.

An Associated Press article on August 13 reported on a recent decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruling that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had to complete the licensing progress and approve or reject the Energy Department’s application for the site.

“The court’s decision was hailed by supporters of the Yucca site, which has been the focus of a dispute that stretches back more than three decades,” reported the AP. “The government has spent an estimated $15 billion on the site but never completed it. No waste is stored there.”

The failure to open the Yucca Mountain repository is an obscenity. Instead of storing nuclear waste in the most studied piece of U.S. geography in the history of the nation, it is stored at more than seventy (70) sites around the nation. The Yucca Mountain site was supposed to begin accepting spent fuel by January 31, 1998, fifteen years ago.

The Appeals Court delivered a serious rebuke to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission which has essentially been treated as a political instrument of the Obama administration. The Court said the NRC was “simply flouting the law” when it allowed the Obama administration to continue plans to close site. This is especially egregious insofar as federal law designates the site as the nation’s nuclear waste repository.

“The President may not decline to follow a statutory mandate or prohibition simply because of policy objections,” said Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh who wrote the majority (2 to 1) opinion. “It is no overstatement to say that our constitutional system of separation of powers would be significantly altered if we were to allow executive and independent agencies to disregard federal law in the manner asserted in this case by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.”

It is not just the President and the NRC that will not uphold the law that Congress passed. It is has been the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, Democrat from Nevada. Kim Strassel noted in an August 15 commentary that “Mr. Reid has for years single-handedly thwarted Congress’s will to create a deep storage facility…Such has been one senator’s ability to render the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, 30 years of work, and $15 billion of federal funds moot.”

The arrogance of Sen. Reid, with the support of the President, is that of imperial kings and other monarchs for whom their personal agenda outweighs the welfare of the rest of the nation. The project was abandoned in the President’s first term; in 2011 the NRC, a supposedly independent agency, allowed the shutdown to stand. 

The present claim is that there is no money to move forward with the completion of Yucca Mountain and it is true that opponents in Congress, led by Sen. Reid, have cut nearly all funding in the last three years, but the court said that the NRC has about $11 million remaining for the purpose of funding a review of its safety. Congressional staffers who have seen a redacted draft of the review to date say that is safe.

Nuclear waste, the by-product of electric power generation at commercial nuclear plants and of high-level radioactive waste from reprocessed spent fuel, must be stored somewhere. Congress addressed that in 1982, more than three decades ago. We are still waiting for a rational, practical solution because of politics, not science, nor common sense.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

The Incredible Shrinking President

By Alan Caruba

In 1981 Lily Tomlin starred in a film, “The Incredible Shrinking Woman”, and it seems to me that Barack Obama is starring in the 2013 sequel, “The Incredible Shrinking President.”

A half hour late to his Rose Garden announcement on Saturday, President Obama put the best possible spin he could on his badly timed threat to lob a half-billion dollars’ worth of Tomahawk missiles into Syria as retaliation for the gas attack; one whose perpetrator is not as yet known with any certainty.

This is a President who could not put together a coalition of nations to support his proposed action. His predecessor (“It’s all Bush’s fault”) had some forty nations on board for his attack on Iraq. Obama could not get a United Nations’ resolution. His predecessor had some sixteen UN resolutions. He has been told that Congress would have to authorize covering the cost of the action and of replacing the missiles because his administration has cut the Defense Department budget to the bone.

There’s a word to describe someone who would get himself into such a fix: JERK.

Obama will fly off to a G-20 conference where the other world leaders will no doubt treat him like the witless fool he has proved himself to be time after time. What other president would announce a surge into Afghanistan in 2011 at the same time he announces when the troops would be leaving? What other president has managed in increase Russia’s influence in the Middle East while diminishing our own?

France has offered to hold his coat while he engages the U.S. in an utterly futile military attack on Syria, but the British concluded that they wanted no part of it. The whole of the NATO pact nations have made that plain as well. Obama couldn’t organize a weekend camping trip for a pack of Boy Scouts.

While he makes himself look weak, he is also making the U.S. look weak and that is because we have been weakened…by him. When Clinton did this after U.S. embassies were bombed, we ended up with 9/11. Obama’s reaction to last year’s Benghazi attack was to lie about it.

Looming over everything is a massive $17 trillion debt that is largely the result of incredibly inept decisions Obama made since taking office. The “stimulus” that pour billions into non-existent “shovel ready jobs”, the billions wasted on “renewable energy” companies that promptly went bankrupt, the takeover of General Motors that stiffed its creditors, and, of course, Obamacare.

The damage Obama has done to the U.S. will take the effort of several presidents to repair, assuming that the nation doesn’t implode from its debt and the declining value of the dollar. Obama’s solution is to raise taxes. Kennedy’s and Reagan’s was to lower them and thus speed recovery. Obama is a JERK.

In the process of shrinking, it is interesting to watch the way his incessant speech-making has rendered his audience deaf to what he is saying. Not only was he late to the podium on Saturday, but the only thing anyone really heard was that he was calling off the missile attack.

Asking for a vote in Congress was his only option despite his assertion that he could take the nation into war on his own authority. He may well discover that he has united Congress against him despite top secret briefings and other theatrics. By now the members of Congress have learned to be wary of the “intelligence” being provided.

By now the members of Congress are unhappy with a President who has demonstrated he would prefer to govern without them. By now even members of his own party know that Obamacare is a disaster that can cost them their seats. As the midterm elections loom in 2014, it will be every Democrat for himself or herself. It sets him up for a historic rebuke.

In terms of real power, one can see it seeping away and Obama has likely already begun his lame duck presidency earlier than is the customary two years before the next national election. The midterm elections in 2014 could cost the Democrats control of the Senate and the House. At that point, Obama will have plenty of time to play golf.

I have, over the course of his first term, written on this same theme and it has taken some time for me to grasp just how powerful the support of the mainstream media has been in protecting Obama from gaffs and bad policies. I have taken note of the disaffection expressed by some in the liberal media, thinking that it was larger than just a particular columnist or editorial.

I think, however, that Obama has reached a genuine tipping point. Even if Congress were to authorize a missile attack on Syria despite what he admits is a “war weary nation”, it will be discounted as too little, too late.

At that point, like all second term presidents, Obama will feel his power to influence events slip away. No doubt he already has.

© Alan Caruba, 2013