Category Archives: Foreign Affairs

credit where credit is due…

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Jim Geraghty hits the ball out of the park.  The irony here is… well… its ironic:

I can hear the liberal cries of outrage, so to recap: The interrogations of KSM (which included waterboarding) and the interrogation of Hassan Ghul (held in “black site” prisons) were key to identifying the courier; the president then authorized military action in a foreign country without going to the United Nations or informing the host government; the military action was unilateral, and we did not consult with our allies; Congress was not informed of the military action; and it increasingly appears that no serious effort was made to treat Osama bin Laden as a criminal (reading him his rights, etc.). The monitoring of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti’s phone call was a result of an extensive global wiretapping system. Furthermore, as Charles Krauthammer notes, the helicopters used in the raid came from Bagram and Jalalabad; if we had withdrawn from Afghanistan on the antiwar Left’s timetable, we would have had no bases from which to launch this operation.

Well done to one president for enacting all of these policy changes, and well done to his successor for keeping them in place.

via The Campaign Spot – National Review Online.

Sarkozy’s France…

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French President Nicolas Sarkozy isn’t in the diplomatic mood.  I must say, I liked Sarcozy when he spoke to Congress a few years back and this is all good stuff he’s saying now:

PARIS (AFP) – French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared Thursday that multiculturalism had failed, joining a growing number of world leaders or ex-leaders who have condemned it.

“My answer is clearly yes, it is a failure,” he said in a television interview…

“If you come to France, you accept to melt into a single community, which is the national community, and if you do not want to accept that, you cannot be welcome in France,”

“We have been too concerned about the identity of the person who was arriving and not enough about the identity of the country that was receiving him”

I think that last quote really sums up what Europe is realizing: pluralism can be a good thing… but not if it undermines ones own culture or creates distinct, incompatible social norms.

via Multiculturalism has failed, says French president – Yahoo! News.

wikileaks just keeps getting more interesting…

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Yet another of the Obama administration’s WTF moments:

Information about every Trident missile the US supplies to Britain will be given to Russia as part of an arms control deal signed by President Barack Obama next week.

We’re not going to win any favors stabbing our allies in the back.

via WikiLeaks cables: US agrees to tell Russia Britain’s nuclear secrets – Telegraph.

projecting prejudice

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Obama must really have a distain for the average Israeli citizen.  In a recent interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, when asked why he thought so many Israeli’s felt anxiety toward him, he responded, “some of it may just be the fact that my middle name is Hussein, and that creates suspicion.”

Now, what does this tell us about Obama?  Well, it tells us that his impressions of concerned Israeli citizens are of a bunch of people who’s entire impression of him extends no farther than some loose association his middle name has with Israel’s enemies.  To put it slightly differently, Obama supposes Israeli’s negative impressions of him are born out of some underlying Israeli racism or prejudice towards Muslim Middle-Easterners.  This rather simplistic conclusion shouldn’t at all be surprising to those of us who have been following Obama regularly;  in fact, this it is quite reminicent of when Obama posited that Americans might not support him because he “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”  In other words, Obama’s practice of projecting prejudice on those who oppose him is ingrained in Obama’s logic… its how he views those who disagree with him.

Never does it occur to Obama that Israelis might feel anxious because of his own policies toward israel and his failures to support their sovereignty and security.   Maybe it was Obama’s strong criticism of their settlement policy that caused Israeli concern. Maybe it was candidate Obama’s delusional insistence to negotiate with Iran without any preconditions that made Israelis anxious… Or his weak efforts to prevent Iran from developing Nuclear weapons after insisting during his campaign that a nuclear iran would be “unacceptable”.  Maybe it was the way he humiliated Israeli President Netanyahu at their most recent meeting in the White House.  Any of these reasons would be sufficient for a typical Israeli citizen to feel some anxiety towards Obama… but somehow Obama remains oblivious.

Maybe Obama should try looking beyond his own prejudices in order to understand those who oppose him instead of fabricating the prejudices of his opponents.


on european economics

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Some Europeans are finally starting to realize that cradle-to-grave social programs and high debt are unsustainable:

“We can’t finance our social model anymore — with 1 percent structural growth we can’t play a role in the world,” European Council President Herman Van Rompuy said Monday in remarks at the World Economic Forum in Brussels, just hours after European Union finance ministers approved the new program. European growth rates are lagging behind those in the United States and the rest of the world as the recovery takes shape, with Spain and Greece still in recession.

…Greece, for example, is considered by the IMF to be one of the most inefficient economies in Europe because of the patchwork of rules governing its labor markets — including the public sector’s “employment for life” practices; the syndicates that keep control over pharmacies, law offices and other professions; and the array of early-retirement rules that drive up pension costs.

via Europe rewrites its rule book in creating fund to contain financial crisis.