During his first term in office, President Bill Clinton echoed Lincoln, saying, “My policy is to have no policy.”
To have no policy is to have no firm political principles, no moral convictions, hence, no sense of honor. This obviously does not represent Lincoln who, as one scholar has written, meant that he, Lincoln, “would take matters one step at a time, make each decision as it came up, and base the new decision on the effect of the last one.” This pragmatism is quite consistent with the president who, on grounds of moral principle, refused to compromise on the slavery issue even if the consequence meant civil war. This was not the pragmatism of Bill Clinton.
Morally neutral or unprincipled pragmatism—the coin of hack politicians—cannot but undermine American Exceptionalism in a world steeped in moral relativism and tyranny. In this forbidding world, America has been the guardian of Judeo-Christian civilization. We saw this in the Second World War and in the Cold War, when the United States saved mankind from the totalitarian imperialism of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Today we face the threat of Islamic totalitarianism. This threat has been trivialized by Barack Obama, Bill Clinton’s political descendant, a cultural relativist who disparages the American Declaration of Independence, the basis of American Exceptionalism.
The ups and downs of America Exceptionalism are most significant in American foreign policy. Mr. Clinton’s abandonment of American Exceptionalism was most evident in his dignifying PLO terrorist chief Yasser Arafat at the White House, and allowing him to open the equivalent of an embassy in Washington, D.C. Is it any wonder that there is hardly a single state in the democratic world that did not dignify the godfather of international terrorism? The first casualty of democracy is honor. Read More →
At the outset of 2012, irrespective of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the “Palestinian issue,” the defining geopolitical and religious schism in the Middle East is boiling, exacerbating violent intra-Muslim fragmentation. The battle inside Islam is taking place on the religious, tribal, ideological and geographical levels.
The Syrian death toll is approaching 7,000, trending toward Papa Assad’s 1982 massacre of 20,000 Sunni rebels. The Turkish-Kurdish confrontation has shifted to a higher gear, exceeding 40,000 casualties since 1984. During the first week of January, a series of sectarian-driven bombings devastated Baghdad and Nasiriyah in Iraq, murdering more than 140 people. More were killed in the Sunni stronghold of Mosul. Car bombs, suicide bombings and improvised explosive devices have become daily routine in Iraq, whose Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is a Shiah Arab, President Jalal Talabani is a Sunni Kurd and Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi is a Sunni Arab. Iraq has become an explosive platform for its vindictive Shiah Arab majority (60 percent), which has been dominated and oppressed by the Sunni Arab minority (20%) since the seventeenth century. The historic conflict between Iraq’s Arabs and its 15% Kurdish minority—which claims independence in northern Iraq, where it also confronts the Turkish military—further complicates matters.
The Sunni-Shiah confrontation, which has traumatized the Middle East since the seventh century, has re-emerged in Iraq in the aftermath of the U.S. military evacuation, and is fueled by Iran’s policy of expansion. The U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, its expected departure from Afghanistan and the perceived U.S. abandonment of Egypt’s Mubarak—simultaneously with the Islamists’ victories in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia—have emboldened Iran Read More →
If we exclude Israel’s destruction of Iraq’s Osirac nuclear reactor in 1981 and the Syrian reactor in 2007, it would not be wrong to say that Israel has pursued a defensive military strategy. Unless I am mistaken—and without forgetting the Six Day War—this has long been the normative policy of the Israel Defense Forces.
Apparently, Israel’s Command and Staff College has been influenced by the doctrine that small states cannot afford to take the military initiative. The doctrine is fallacious and pernicious. It may be one reason why Israel is fixated on a futile diplomatic track, hence to wait and absorb the first blow.
Weapons of mass destruction aside, a large country like the U.S. can afford a policy of self-restraint because it can absorb lesser blows and still have the wherewithal to conquer its enemy. Pearl Harbor did not cripple America, let alone the al-Qaeda attack of 9/11. But a small country like Israel cannot rationally pursue such a policy; it must take the initiative and without being deterred by adverse world opinion, the bogey man of Israeli prime ministers. Read More →
This month, in Amman, Jordan, Israeli and Palestinian peace negotiators met for their first time in 15 months to try to restart the “peace process.” Meanwhile, the Palestinian group that rules in Gaza, Hamas, has repeated its declaration: “The battle for the liberation of Jerusalem is closer than ever and, God willing, we will win.” Which is it to be, peace or war?
If Jewish sovereignty in Israel is incompatible with the Qur’an, the rest becomes clear.
Perhaps this question should be considered against the background of the recent ruckus Newt Gingrich caused in December by saying, “Remember, there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. We have invented the Palestinian people, who are, in fact, Arabs and are historically part of the Arab people. . .” The entire political spectrum took umbrage. A critique from the right came from Elliott Abrams, a former Bush deputy national security adviser, who said: “There was no Jordan or Syria or Iraq, either, so perhaps he would say they are all invented people as well, and also have no right to statehood. Whatever was true then, Palestinian nationalism has grown since 1948, and whether we like it or not, it exists.”
This critique seems to confuse two things. Palestine, of course, has never been a state. In 1920, Palestine was carved out as a territory by the British, against the wishes of the Arabs living there Read More →
Political journalism is not politically neutral or “value-free.” This may also be said of political science, pretensions to the contrary notwithstanding. The reason is this: The reporting of news, like academic discourse on politics, inevitably involves criteria of importance: some things are intrinsically more important than others. But criteria of importance are not politically neutral.
Projecting Western ideas onto the Arab Spring seriously underestimates the danger of Islamism. Last July Matthew Kaminski opined in the Wall Street Journal that the transition to democracy in the Middle East would be as easy as it was for the democracies that emerged after the fall of the Soviet empire. Alas, this was predictably
Back when I was even younger, and living in Rome, the main topic of conversation was of course Communism. Italy had the largest Communist Party outside the Soviet Union, and it was forever on the cusp of becoming the biggest party in Italy, thus forming the government, thus taking over. (Marginal comment for those who
There seems to be two kinds of Americans. There are those who wish this nation could once again be what it used to be, a beacon for those who cherished freedom and liberty. Then there are those who look at America and wish it could be more like Cuba, of all places. Or if not
Imagine Socrates in Israel. What would be the fate of this lover of truth in a country that boasts of being the only democracy in the Middle East? To answer this question, recall the trial of Socrates in Plato’s dialogue, the Apology. Socrates was accused of not believing in the gods of Athens, indeed, of
From the start of his presidency, Barack Obama has favored the creation of a “nuclear weapons-free world.” Not only is this preference naive, it is undesirable in principle. In the particular case of Israel, any “successful” denuclearization could open the doors to escalating and irremediable enemy acts of aggression. Risks of war are not generally
Islam is at War with the West
[audio:http://i-ari.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/defining-the-enemy-islam.mp3|titles=Paul Eidelberg on Defining the Enemy: Islam]
Islam is at war with the West. The...
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Journalism
by Paul EidelbergPolitical journalism is not politically neutral or “value-free.” This may also be said of political science, pretensions to the contrary notwithstanding. The reason is this: The reporting of news, like academic discourse on politics, inevitably involves criteria of importance: some things are intrinsically more important than others. But criteria of importance are not politically neutral.