In 1868, a British army led by Sir Robert Napier sailed from India to Abyssinia (Ethiopia) to rescue several English and European hostages from the mentally unstable, sadistic King Theodore. Theodore had become enraged a few years earlier because his letter to Queen Victoria asking for military assistance had been ignored, and so he retaliated by taking the hostages. Napier’s expedition required the building of a port, railroad, and road in order for his army of 13,000 soldiers to march to Theodore’s stronghold Magdala, 400 brutal miles from the coast. After the three-month march, the British met Theodore’s army at Magadala and routed it. The hostages were released, and Theodore committed suicide. Then Napier led his army back to the coast and sailed away, surprising many who believed that rescuing the hostages was a pretext for colonial expansion.

The Abyssinian expedition illustrates the British awareness that an empire must defend not just its material interests, but also its prestige. Insults and injuries to its citizens cannot be tolerated, for rivals and enemies will interpret such forbearance as a weakness to be exploited. The expedition was an expensive, massive undertaking, but one necessary in order to warn the Empire’s potential enemies that England would pay any price to defend its honor and interests. Power is not just about material resources, but also the perceptions of others that power will be used, a perception that works as a force multiplier. As Vergil says in the Aeneid, “They have power because they seem to have power.”

History is filled with examples of how costly it is for a nation to allow its prestige to be damaged, thus weakening its power and inviting aggression. By 1938, Hitler had no respect for the English or the French despite their combined military might, given their failure to respond to Germany’s serial violations of the Versailles settlement over the previous two decades. Thus Hitler’s brilliant manipulation of diplomacy in the Czechoslovakia crisis, when England and France, as Churchill would write later, “presented a front of two over-ripe melons crushed together.” Hitler agreed: a year later, he would respond to England and France’s guarantee of Poland’s security by sneering, “I saw them at Munich. They are little worms.”

Likewise the U.S. paid the price for its loss of prestige following the abandonment of South Vietnam in 1975. As Jimmy Carter publicly announced a “crisis of confidence,” fretted over America’s “recent mistakes” and “recognized limits,” and cut spending on the military, an emboldened Soviet Union went on a geopolitical rampage throughout the Third World. Equally ominous was the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the seizure of the embassy hostages, a grievous affront to our prestige met with toothless sanctions, U.N. resolutions, secret negotiations, and the whole repertoire of excuses to substitute talk for action. A byproduct of this blow to U.S. prestige was the creation of an oil-rich jihadist regime in the heart of the Middle East, one that immediately started creating and supporting terrorist groups that for 30 years have murdered Americans. A series of jihadist attacks followed Iran’s victory over the superpower America, from the 1983 Beirut bombing of the Marine barracks, to the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole, none of which were met with a punitive response that would have made clear the overwhelming price to be paid for assaulting America’s interests and citizens. So it was no surprise that Osama bin Laden, convinced that America was a “weak horse” with “foundations of straw,” on September 11, 2001 sent his jihadists to attack the very centers of American power and prestige in Washington D.C. and New York.

There is no idea so hateful or useless that some university somewhere won’t hold a conference on it. The latest example of this unfortunate truism is the recently announced “Israel/Palestine and the One-State Conference” scheduled for early March at the Harvard Kennedy School. Nineteen speakers and ten panels will spend two days explaining why “’two-states for two peoples’ is no longer a viable option for Israel/Palestine,” as the organizers assert, and discussing a “solution” to the Israeli-Arab crisis that has absolutely no chance of ever being implemented.

The adherents of this veiled assault on Israel argue that the “two-state solution,” “in which Israel is secure and the Palestinians have sovereignty,” as President Obama told Time magazine, has been a failure. Of course, the two-state solution has failed because since 1948, the first time Arabs rejected a Palestinian state, a critical mass of Palestinian Arabs have wanted something more than sovereignty: they want Israel destroyed and her land possessed by Arabs from “the river to the sea,” as PLO chief Yasser Arafat used to say. The one-state solution, which envisions a single nation comprising Arabs and Jews under a single government, is a way to achieve the same aim. Such a state would obviously require the end of Israel’s Jewish identity, and would result in an Arabic demographic explosion that in any kind of representative government would marginalize Jews. Moreover, we can see the most likely sort of regime that would rule the “one state” by looking next door at Egypt, where Islamists are now in control and relations with Israel have deteriorated. Whatever the result, such a state would not resemble the liberal democracy of Israel today.

Perhaps the conference will address issues like Arab intransigence, genocidal anti-Semitism, and terrorist violence, but judging from some of the speakers, such balance seems unlikely. Among the usual obscure academics and Palestinian activists camouflaged as scholars, one finds anti-Israel luminaries like Stephen M. Walt, who along with John Mearshimer in 2007 published The Israel Lobby, an academic recycling of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in which nefarious American Jews secretly control U.S. foreign policy in service to their Zionist puppet-masters. Even more suggestive of the conference’s bias is the presence of Ilan Pappé, whose scholarly malfeasance got him cashiered from Haifa University over his involvement in a student’s master’s thesis that fabricated an Israeli massacre of Palestinians. Such an episode will surprise no one familiar with Pappé’s own work, which as historian Efraim Karsh has written, displays a “consistent resort to factual misrepresentation, distortion, and outright falsehood.” Pappé is clearly an ideologue and propagandist, as he frankly admits: he sneers at “objectivity,” professes that he is “not as interested in what happened as in how people see what’s happened,” and crows that “my ideology influences my historical writings.” That such a travesty of the profession of history is invited to speak at a prestigious university testifies to how intellectually and morally corrupt the American academy has become.

This rather loose attitude towards evidence and fact embraced by Pappé reveals itself as well in the on-line descriptions of the panel topics, where one finds libels such as references to “the original 700,000 [Arabs] who were ethnically cleansed from Palestine in 1948 and 1967,” moral cowardice in phrases such as “a great deal of violence has isolated the two peoples from one another,” and the de rigueur question-begging epithet: “How can justice for the victims of racism or violence be achieved?” You get the picture: racist Israelis who ethnically cleansed Arabs from their homeland and incited a “cycle of violence” need to abandon their Jewish identity and their ancestral lands in order to resolve a bloody conflict.

The Kennedy School conference, then, is a propaganda exercise the effect of which is to further the Palestinian Arab “phases” strategy for destroying Israel. In this regard, history provides an interesting parallel to the way the Arabs have manipulated Westerners and obscured their true aim, the destruction of Israel. In 1938, Hitler began fulfilling his plan to create a racial German empire, one that also was put into place by “phases.” Just as the Middle East regimes today claim that their hostility to Israel results from the maltreatment of the Palestinians, who have been dispossessed of their homeland by an oppressive invader, Hitler justified his aggression against Czechoslovakia as in fact the liberation of his fellow Germans from an alien government oppressing them and violating their rights. Thus Hitler’s pretext that national and ethnic self-determination for the Sudeten Germans, necessary because of the Czechs’ “brutal treatment of mothers and children of German blood,” as Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels put it, was the reason he was interfering in Czechoslovakia.

The 33-year farce of Western appeasement of Iran may be reaching its denouement. For the last few months, the pace of events have quickened as the West sanctions and threatens, and Iran blusters about closing the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off oil to Europe, and unleashing its terrorist proxies. Just last week Iran’s “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei subtly suggested that Iran would step up its already considerable support of terrorist outfits targeting Israel and the U.S.: “From now on, in any place, if any nation or any group confronts the Zionist regime, we will endorse and we will help. We have no fear expressing this.” Indulging traditional Islamic anti-Semitic language, Khamenei said Israel was a “cancerous tumor that should be cut and will be cut,” and claimed that the U.S. would suffer defeat and damage its regional prestige if it decides to use military force to stop the country’s nuclear program.

Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has said there was a “strong likelihood” that Israel would attack Iran in April, May, or June of this year, a supposition reinforced by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. And Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said in his remarks at the Herzilya Conference that Iran’s “military nuclear program is steadily nearing ripeness and is about to enter the ‘immunity zone.’ From that point on, the Iranian regime will be able to act to complete the program, with no effective disturbance and a time that is convenient for it.” The backdrop of this war of words is the West’s imposition of yet more sanctions, while the Iranian regime once again rope-a-dopes the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors, and rumors of American troop concentrations in the region abound.

A constant in all this the diplomatic fencing is the threat of military action by Israel, along with the rumors surrounding such an event and speculations about the extent of Israel’s military capabilities. More important, however, is the unsavory way the Obama administration is using the threat of Israeli military action to influence Iranian behavior, at the same time it positions itself to avoid any responsibility for an attack. Thus Panetta publicly has been warning Israel against attacking, listing all the “unintended consequences” that would follow, at the same time the U.S. demands that Israel do nothing without alerting the United States in advance. However, despite these public warnings to Israel, it has long been clear that the administration’s diplomatic efforts have all been underwritten by the implicit threat that Israel will take unilateral military action. So it is that Israel is made the Dirty Harry of the Middle East, her actions decried by Western nations too cowardly to do what they know needs to be done, as in 1981, when Israel destroyed Iraq’s Osirak atomic reactor only to be condemned by the United States.

For make no mistake, Iran cannot be allowed to succeed in manufacturing nuclear weapons, or even achieving “nuclear latency,” the ability rapidly to produce them when needed. Such armaments in the hands of an Iranian regime besotted with apocalyptic Twelver Shi’ism and religiously sanctioned Jew-hatred would radically reconfigure the Middle East, sparking nuclear proliferation in the region and endangering not just Israel, but a large portion of the world’s oil supply. Yet on her own, Israel can at best delay Iran’s progress for at best three to five years. Apart from the logistical challenges of such a complex attack, nuclear production facilities in Iran have been dispersed into 17 known sites, many of which have been moved deep underground into fortified bunkers and tunnels.

The fallout of such an attack, moreover, could hit Israel hard. By Israeli estimations, Iran’s proxy Hezbollah has stockpiled in Lebanon 50,000 missiles, which can reach every corner of Israel. Following the fall of Mubarak and the ascendancy of the Muslim Brothers, the southern border with Egypt is no longer secure, thus providing an avenue for Hamas terrorist attacks. A beleaguered Bashar al Assad in Syria could distract attention from his slaughter of Syrians by attacking Israel in the Golan. Although the United States has said it would defend Israel in these circumstances, it is not certain how reliable that pledge is in an election year, with a U.S. president who already has shown by his actions a marked dislike for Israel. After all, this is a president who counts Turkey’s Recep Erdogan as one of his closest international buddies, despite Turkey’s naked support for the genocidal Hamas, but who publicly disparages Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. Certainly, Israel would find little sympathy and support in the U.N. or the E.U. after an attack on Iran.

Since ancient Athens, politics in democracies has been brutal. That’s because the conflicts that a democracy empowers a great variety of ordinary people to debate are not about technical matters requiring specialized knowledge. Rather, they arise from questions about the fundamental principles, beliefs, and values that give people their identities and provide meaning for their lives. Such questions are not “scientific,” and the conflicts they raise will not be resolved by experts and technicians. And since these principles and beliefs are so fundamental to our self-identity and meaning, they raise intense passions, and so the public conversation about them is often emotional, at times even angry. Throw in personal ambition, the lust for power, and the vanity of politicians and office-seekers, and the fights can get bloody indeed. But that’s the price we pay for free political speech. As the Athenian playwright Sophocles once said, “Free men have free tongues.”

Consider the biggest domestic problem facing the nation: metastasizing debt that promises to explode because of exponentially increasing entitlement spending. If the problem were simply a technical one, accountants could solve it. Look at the math: our debt has surpassed $15 trillion, over 100% of GDP, and absent entitlement reform will reach 344% of GDP by 2050. Spending on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and Obamacare will devour 18% of GDP by 2050, consuming all federal tax revenues. Total federal spending is slated to consume one-half of GDP by 2056. These numbers point to a Greece-like collapse unless entitlement spending is reined in.

Likewise, simple math discredits the solution Obama presented in his State of the Union speech with generous helpings of class-warfare rhetoric. Obama wants to impose a 30% minimum tax on the “rich,” defined as those making over $1 million. The “rich,” however, simply do not have enough money to solve the ballooning debt and entitlement-spending problem––confiscating outright all the wealth of Forbes magazine’s richest 400 Americans would barely cover Obama’s 2011 deficit, let alone the cost of future entitlement spending. As for making the rich “pay their fair share,” reducing the deficit by raising taxes on the two top brackets would require preposterous tax rates of over 200% in 2050. Worse yet, raising the capital gains tax, which Obama’s minimum tax on millionaires perforce would do, constitutes what Larry Kudlow calls a “tax on seed corn,” one that would reduce the amount of capital needed for investment and economic growth. Finally, the sorry record of tax increases disconnected from spending reductions should make us all chary of giving more money to a spendthrift federal government that has increased spending per capita 166% since 1965. Simple math points us to the only solution: cut entitlement spending and reduce deficits to more manageable levels.

But of course, the problem isn’t about math and how to balance the books. The conflict is one of differing visions of the federal government’s role in achieving certain contested ends. Obama claims a solution to our economic crisis demands that the rich pay their “fair share,” and we create an economy in which “everyone gets a fair shot.” But what is “fair”? The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development reports that the U.S. already has the most progressive tax system among industrialized economies. The top 10% of taxpayers in America pay 45% of all income taxes (personal income taxes and payroll taxes) but earn 33% of market income. In socialist heartthrob Sweden, by contrast, the top 10% pay a percentage of taxes equal to their income, 26.6%. Paying a greater share of taxes than one’s share of income might strike some people as more than “fair,” as would the simple fact that nearly half of Americans pay no personal income tax, while the top 10% pays 70%. But Obama has a different set of values and a different vision of what ends the government should pursue.

Ten years ago this week, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped by Islamic terrorists in Pakistan, after he had been lured into what he thought was an interview with Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani about the links between al Qaeda and the “shoe bomber” Richard Reid. The shadowy Pakistani group that kidnapped Pearl accused him of being a spy for the CIA, and made several demands, including the release of Pakistani detainees from Guantanamo. Nine days later, Pearl was murdered and beheaded, and on February 21, a video was released called “The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl.” The footage showed Pearl’s “confession” and brutal decapitation, interspersed with images of dead Muslims, George Bush shaking hands with Ariel Sharon, and Palestinians allegedly killed by Israeli Defense Forces, including 12-year-old Muhammad al-Dura, whose death was later exposed as a Palestinian fabrication. Later, captured 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would brag to interrogators that he personally had beheaded Pearl. As for his abductor, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, though tried and condemned to death, still lives in a Pakistani jail cell, from which according to some reports he has planned other terrorist attacks.

The killing of Pearl concentrated much of what Andrew McCarthy calls the “willful blindness” of many in the West to the Islamic roots of the perpetrators’ violence. At the time, most of the media mainly decried Pearl’s death because he was a reporter. Worse yet were the comments that scolded the terrorists for not understanding that American journalists are neutral observers whose impartiality could help them get their story out.  As a New York Times editorial put it,

“The terrible irony of Mr. Pearl’s murder is that he and other independent journalists have been trying to present a detailed and informed portrait of the mindset, motives and grievances of the Islamic fundamentalists in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and the war in Afghanistan. That work will continue despite the killing, but the kidnappers have only undermined their cause by their acts.”

The professional corruption of the mainstream-media was revealed in this statement, with its claims that journalists are objective (mostly false) and have no loyalties to their own country and people (mostly true), and that the murderers had a legitimate “cause” and “grievances” (moral idiocy and cowardice).

Most commentary also ignored the Koranic-inspired anti-Semitism of the words Pearl was forced to say in the execution video: “My name is Daniel Pearl. I am a Jewish American from Encino, California U.S.A. I come from, uh, on my father’s side the family is Zionist. My father’s Jewish, my mother’s Jewish, I’m Jewish. My family follows Judaism. We’ve made numerous family visits to Israel. Back in the town of Bnei Brak there is a street named after my great grandfather Chaim Pearl who is one of the founders of the town.”

The claim that Pearl was a C.I.A. agent was obviously a pretext; his real offense was being a Jew, a race the Koran calls “laden with Allah’s anger,” destined to suffer forever “abasement and poverty” and eventually to be transformed into “apes and swine.” In emphasizing Pearl’s Jewish ancestry and Zionist connections, the terrorists were conforming to the genocidal ambitions of many Muslims, from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has vowed to “wipe Israel from the map,” to the Muslim Brother affiliate Hamas, whose charter quotes the hadith proclaiming, “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say ‘O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’” As for the beheading, that too has its justification in Koran 8.12: “I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads.”

The global warming apocalypse and its Elmer Gantry, Al Gore, may have faded from public view lately, but that old-time green religion is still making mischief. President Obama has just delayed until after November’s election a decision on the Canadian Keystone XL pipeline. This truly shovel-ready project would create thousands of blue-collar jobs, help hold down the price of gasoline, and lessen our dependence on oil imported from thugs like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.

The administration’s excuses for this move are preposterous.  The State Department sniffed that it needs more time “to determine whether the Keystone XL pipeline is in the national interest” and, as Obama said in his announcement, can “protect the American people.” But three years, nine public meetings, and reams of reports have already shown that the pipeline’s alleged dangers to the Ogallala aquifer, or the malign effects of “dirty” crude oil, or the threat to endangered species, are specious pretexts. Like his slow-down of oil drilling permits and reduction of oil production on federal lands––down 40% compared to ten years ago––Obama’s decision is in fact both political and ideological, a mollifying bone tossed to the bicoastal progressive elites on whom Obama depends for campaign contributions and political support.

For these affluent urban-dwellers, the cult of environmentalism is a cheap way to indulge a vaguely leftist dislike of industrial capitalism while enjoying all the benefits that a high-tech, oil-fueled, free-market economy confers on them. Like the “telescopic philanthropy,” to use Charles Dickens’ label, directed at distant ghetto-dwellers or the Third World poor, the urban nature-lover conspicuously displays his concern over a natural world under assault by capitalism’s depravities. But he does so only from within a cocoon of technology that assures him a reliable, safe supply of food, freeing him from the drudgery of wresting sustenance from a hostile natural world; and that protects him from the disease, drought, famine, predators, malnutrition, and the other natural evils afflicting our ancestors and those living in the Third World today.

Equally hypocritical is the Marxist agenda lurking in environmentalism, which blames the degradation of the environment on the same free market capitalism and economic globalization that have created blue-state wealth. Given communism’s abject failure as an economic and social system, contemporary Marxism has insinuated itself into environmentalism as a way of wielding influence and recruiting adherents from among those dissatisfied with modern life and the trade-offs required by a free economy and its creative destruction. Issues such as pollution or species extinction are thus explained as the consequences of an evil capitalist empire that oppresses the international proletariat and the natural world alike. That’s why at most protests against the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank or Wall Street, the hammer and sickle can be seen flying beside the banners of Greenpeace. Forgotten, of course, is the fact that communist regimes like the old Soviet Union and today’s China are some of history’s worst polluters.

What gives this strange Marxist nature-love wider political traction, however, is the patina of science that disguises its mythic origins. Sentimental idealizations of nature as our true home, a superior realm of peace, harmony, freedom and simplicity destroyed by civilization and technology, are as old as the Greeks and their myths of the Golden Age and the Noble Savage. But today’s modern environmentalist cloaks these ancient myths in the robes of science. Overpopulation, pesticide pollution, resource depletion, extermination of species, and of course global warming have all over the years been presented as scientifically established facts that show the destructive consequences of modern capitalism. But in each case, the apocalyptic predictions have all ended in a whimper, and the science supposedly supporting them exposed as partial, incomplete, politically motivated, and riddled with unexamined assumptions and at times outright fakery. Nonetheless, politicized nature-love camouflaged with “science” permeates popular culture and our public schools, where kids are taught lies about drowning polar bears and melting ice caps, the quasi-pagan cult celebration Earth Day is solemnly celebrated, carbon-based fuels are demonized, and driving a Prius is a sacrament.

Two recent news stories about Afghanistan reveal the delusional mentality of those conducting our foreign policy. The first is about some Marines who urinated on the corpses of Taliban fighters. Such behavior, of course, is mild compared to the sort of brutal treatment of both the living and the dead typical of all wars ever fought. Nonetheless, this act is contrary to the rules of war and the professional code of the Corp, and as such should be punished. That’s all our official spokesmen need to say about the matter, for it concerns a violation of our military’s high standards that have helped make it the most professional, lethal, and ethical force in the world.

The foreign policy establishment, however, has fallen all over itself issuing solicitous apologies. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed her “total dismay,” a reaction stronger than her comments about the Egyptian military slaughtering Copts. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta phoned the utterly corrupt and duplicitous beneficiary of our power and money, Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai, to assure him that those responsible would be found and punished for such a “deplorable” act. Of course, this is a part of the world where brutal violence against civilians is routinely used as a tool of politics, and where torture and mutilation of the living, let alone the desecration of the dead, are standard operating procedure. Yet we cede the moral high ground to Karzai, who said the soldiers’ behavior was “inhuman and condemnable in the strongest possible terms,” something I don’t recall him ever saying about the terrorists murdering our soldiers. Even more risible was the response of the Taliban, who condemned the “inhuman act of wild American soldiers,” one “in contradiction with all human and ethical norms.” This from a group that when it ruled Afghanistan, used a European-built soccer stadium to bury non-shari’a-compliant women up to their necks and then stone them to death, and to machine-gun and behead other miscreants.

I know the rationale for all these anxious protestations of our “dismay.” As one of the consistent purveyors of such pointless public relations efforts, The New York Times, put it, the video raised “fears in Washington that the images could incite anti-American sentiment at a particularly delicate moment” in the war. This is the same old delusion that has conditioned our behavior for a decade now: the notion that jihadist hatred of us is the consequence of our bad behavior and offenses against Muslims, and so we have constantly to apologize and remind them how much we respect and honor their wonderful religion. Even before 9/11, our foreign policy officials took every opportunity to tell Muslims how wonderful their faith is. Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, called Islam “a faith that honors consultation, cherishes peace, and has as one of its fundamental principles the inherent equality of all who embrace it.” Except, of course, for women, homosexuals, and infidels. George Bush wasn’t much better, claiming in his first address after 9/11 that Islam’s “teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah.” Bush’s Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, called Islam the religion “of love and peace.” Hillary Clinton is on record praising Islam’s “deepest yearning of all––to live in peace.” No surprise, then, that these days official government policy proscribes any mention of “jihad” in public communications, and forbids any linkage of jihadist terror to Islamic doctrine. Of course, all this puffery is contradicted by Islamic theology, jurisprudence, history of conquest and occupation, and the continuing record of religiously sanctioned terrorist violence––18,283 attacks just since 9/11.

Complementing this flattery has been our hysterical reactions to bad behavior, both real and invented, perpetrated by our forces. The abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, most of which rarely rose above the level of a fraternity hazing, was labeled “horrific” by the Times, making us wonder what adjective the Times could use to describe what went on in Abu Ghraib when Saddam Hussein ran it. Then too, multiple investigations and public apologies followed from the government. Worse yet is the reaction to outright fabrications, such as the lie that prisoners in Guantanamo were abused and tortured, or the absurd allegation that a Koran was flushed down a toilet. Once again, apologies and investigations poured forth from the government in response to transparent propaganda. The reason for all this public breast-beating is the fallacious belief that Muslims really want to like us, but our insensitive misdeeds against their religion leave them psychologically vulnerable to terrorist “highjackers of Islam” who promise justified payback for infidel disrespect.

Iran’s 30-year war against the United States may be reaching its decisive moment. Signs of the worsening crisis abound. Iran just announced it has begun enriching uranium at the Fordo underground nuclear site, a key step to producing more quickly fissile material for a nuclear warhead. As Europe moves closer to embargoing Iranian oil, deputy commander of the Revolutionary Guard Ali Ashraf Nouri threatens, “ If enemies block the export of our oil, we won’t allow a drop of oil to pass through the Strait of Hormuz,” through which about one-fifth of the world’s oil passes. In support of this threat, the regime continues to stage war games in the area and to warn American warships from passing through the strait into the Persian Gulf. Meanwhile the U.S. and Israel have announced a joint missile defense exercise, as Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visits America’s enemies in Latin America, bearding the U.S. lion in its own hemisphere of influence.

Iran may be just indulging bluster and bluff. Perhaps the mullahs recall the severe punishment inflicted on its navy in 1988 during the Tanker War, an earlier attempt to disrupt oil shipments transiting the Persian Gulf. That effort ended when Ronald Reagan retaliated for a missile attack on an American warship by eventually destroying two Iranian oil platforms, two Iranian ships, and six Iranian gunboats. Yet our current president has not shown as yet any of Ronald Reagan’s guts and nerve, and the mullahs may be calculating that the bluff will work.

And why wouldn’t they? Iran has been killing Americans for 30 years with impunity, from the 241 military personnel killed in Beirut by a suicide bomber, to the hundreds more soldiers murdered in Iraq and Afghanistan by Iranian proxy terrorist outfits trained and armed by Tehran. Repeated rounds of sanctions, threats, U.N. Security Council resolutions, and deadlines for cooperating with the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors have been contemptuously ignored. Our citizens are arrested and held on trumped-up charges, our ally Israel is threatened with genocide, and incessant anti-American “Great Satan” rhetoric daily pours from Tehran. Just this week a former American Marine was condemned to death by an Iranian court for allegedly being a spy and a “mohareb,” or “fighter against God.” Yet Obama has answered this aggression against our security and interests with appeasing diplomatic “outreach” offered “without preconditions,” and pleas for “mutual respect” that the regime correctly interprets as a sign of weakness and failure of nerve.

Given that Iranian aggression has so far provoked appeasement and empty threats, the mullahs very well could believe that since they are the “best of nations,” as the Koran has it, in any conflict Allah will protect the Islamic Republic and render insignificant America’s overwhelming military superiority. After all, Muslims for centuries have believed in their superiority based on Allah’s special regard for them, as aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry noted in 1939: “Their [Muslims] pride was born of the illusion of their power. Allah renders a believer invincible.” The mullahs today will remember what the Ayatollah Khomeini said in 1980, after America’s ill-planned and half-hearted mission to rescue the embassy hostages was ignominiously thwarted by a sandstorm that caused two helicopters to crash and burn: “Those sand particles were divinely commissioned. . . . [President] Carter still has not comprehended what kind of people he is facing. . . . Our people is the people of blood and our school is the school of Jihad.”

Thirty years later, we still have not “comprehended” the nature of the Iranian enemy. We have continuously operated with a materialist calculus that ignores the spiritual motives that account for much of Iranian aggression. More depressing still, this is the same mistake the Carter administration made in 1979, when it ignored the religious roots of the Iranian Revolution, dismissed Khomeini as “nutty” and “a crazy man,” as Carter did, and assumed that the secular political parties and technical elites would eventually rule Iran and marginalize the mullahs, virulent Iranian hostility would wane, and “after a transition period common interests could provide a basis for future cooperation,” as an assistant to the Secretary of State reported. Similarly the West today has assumed that economic punishment, or the desire for “greater international integration,” as Obama put it, can change Iranian behavior. We still don’t believe what a member of the Revolutionary Council said a few months after the seizure of our embassy: “No individual, no official and no Muslim has the right to show forbearance or compromise toward an enemy who is not defeated and is not overthrown.”

Thirteen months after a Tunisian street-vendor immolated himself and sparked the revolutions in the Middle East dubbed the “Arab Spring,” the bipartisan celebrations that attended those events last year appear premature, if not delusional. Now that Islamist parties are consolidating their power in the wake of the regime changes in those countries, President Obama’s claim that Egyptians merely wanted “a government that is fair and just and responsive,” or Senator John McCain’s assertions that Libyans were aiming for “lasting peace, dignity, and justice,” or Senator Joseph Lieberman’s article in Foreign Affairs that summarized the Arab Spring as a struggle for “democracy, dignity, economic opportunity, and involvement in the modern world” each reflects dangerous wishful thinking rather than sober analysis.

This delusional enthusiasm of a year ago has not been chastened by subsequent events that have led to Islamist dominance across the region. That’s because the Arab Spring revolutions seemingly confirm a powerful narrative that for a decade has purported to explain the roots of jihadist terror, and the means for eliminating it. In his second inaugural speech, President Bush formalized this narrative in the Bush Doctrine, which articulated a foreign policy focused on ending the “resentment and tyranny” that left people vulnerable “to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder,” leading to terrorist violence that can “cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat.” Only the “force of human freedom” can “break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant.” When the uprisings of early 2011 removed brutal autocrats like Gaddafi, Mubarak, and Tunisia’s Zin El Abidine ben Ali, the power of democratic freedom seemingly unleashed by our interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan now appeared poised to work its magic in the heartland of the Islamic world.

A year later the dictators are gone and elections have been held, but this optimism about the power of democratic voting now appears simplistic and naive. The liberal democracies some expected to develop in the Middle East appear to be no closer to reality than they did under the tyrants. In Tunisia, an Islamist party, Ennahda, took 90 out of 217 seats on the new National Constituent Assembly. Like most Islamist parties, Ennahda takes it inspiration from Egypt’s Muslim Brothers, whose credo is “God is our objective; the Quran is our constitution, the Prophet is our leader; jihad is our way; and death for the sake of God is the highest of our aspirations.” Exploiting the naïveté of Westerners who believe in the oxymoron “moderate Islamist,” Ennahda founder Rachid Gannouchi has assured the West and Tunisian secularists that his party is moderate and does not intend to subordinate their rights and freedoms to shari’a law. Yet Ennahda counts as supporters the more radical Salafists who do want strict adherence to shari’a, and who find broad support among the poorer, more conservative rural Tunisians.

Gannouchi himself sometimes sounds like an Islamist, as when he told listeners at an election rally, “God wants you to vote for the party that will protect your faith.” Some Tunisians are already acting on this imperative to “protect” Islam. Salafists stormed a university in Sousse to protest its refusal to admit a veiled female student. A group of Muslims tried to convert a church into a mosque, and though dispersed by police, they have been invited to ask the government’s faith ministry to effect the conversion. A violent protest erupted against a television screening of the animated movie Persepolis, a negative portrayal of the Iranian revolution in which Allah is depicted as a cartoon. To chants of “Your god has been insulted, come out and defend him!” a mob attempted to burn down the house of the station’s owner. While disavowing the attack, Ennahda called the screening a “provocation” that was equally responsible for the violence. Understandably, secular and liberal Tunisians are skeptical about Ennahda’s promises of moderation, which perhaps are tactical deceptions, given the party’s more hardline base and Muslim Brothers roots. Najib Chebbi, for example, who heads the Progressive Democratic Party, has called Ennahda “a nondemocratic force” with “an ideological project they haven’t acknowledged yet.”

Next door in Libya, the continuing disorder in the wake of Gaddafi’s fall has created even more opportunities for Islamist domination. The epicenter of the rebellion, eastern Libya and the towns of Darnah and Benghazi––where the flag of al Qaeda has been seen flying over the courthouse––supplied proportionately more fighters against our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan than any other country. These veterans of the al-Qaeda affiliated Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) have now acquired weapons looted from arms depots, including assault rifles, machine guns, mines, grenades, antitank missiles, rocket-propelled grenades and thousands of SAM-7 surface-to-air missiles capable of bringing down commercial airliners. The LIFG fighters played a major role in the take-over of Tripoli and the capture of Gaddafi’s compound, and their leader, Abd Al-Hakim Belhadj, is the commander of the Tripoli garrison.  These Islamist allies of al Qaeda will be a major force in whatever government, if any, eventually rules Libya.

Equally worrisome, like the other militias in Libya, the LIFG veterans have refused to disband and hand over their weapons, contrary to earlier pledges to surrender them to the National Transitional Council, Libya’s interim government. Just this month, gun battles erupted in Tripoli between militias from that city and those from Misrata, casting in doubt the possibility for a stable government anytime soon. In the east, some of the largest and best- armed of these militias with ties to Islamist groups are forming political parties. The NTC is unlikely to be a liberal counterweight to these well-armed Islamists. Its draft constitutional charter proclaims, “Islam is the religion of the state, and the principal source of legislation is Islamic Jurisprudence (Shari’a).” On “liberation day” after Gaddafi’s death, Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, the chairman of the NTC and Libya’s interim leader, confirmed these intentions when he told the crowd to shouts of “Allahu Akbar,” “We are an Islamic country. We take the Islamic religion as the core of our new government. The constitution will be based on our Islamic religion.” One of his first pledges was to end the old regime’s ban on polygamy, since “the law is contrary to Shari’a and must be stopped.”

The Islamist ascendency is even more troublesome in Egypt, the most populous Muslim country in the region and birthplace of the Muslim Brothers, who have been the biggest beneficiary of regime change. In the first two rounds of voting, Muslim Brothers and Salafist parties took 70% of the vote, marginalizing the parties of the photogenic “Facebook kids” that charmed so many Western observers. Meanwhile, the Egyptian army, trained and financed by the United States and recipient of $1.3 billion in aid, continues its hold on power, joining in the murder of Christian Copts, brutalizing and killing protestors, and recently shutting down 17 international organizations that promote democracy. The outcome of the army’s stranglehold on Egypt and the struggle over control of the country could be yet another military dictatorship and increasing violence and chaos.

A more likely outcome will be a modus vivendi struck between the military and the Islamists, one that lets the army keep its economic privileges, while the Muslim Brothers install an Islamized constitution, something a majority of Egyptians would support. In a Pew survey from last year, 84% of Egyptians support the death penalty for apostates, and 82% support stoning adulterers. In another poll from 2010, 85% of Egyptians said Islam’s influence on politics is positive, 95% said that it is good that Islam plays a large role in politics, 59% identified with Islamic fundamentalists, 54% favored gender segregation in the workplace, 82% favored stoning adulterers, 77% favored whippings and cutting off the hands of thieves and robbers, and 84% favored death for those leaving Islam. And 60% of Egyptians in a Pew poll in 2011 said that laws should strictly follow the teachings of the Koran. All these traditional Islamic beliefs and preferences are inconsistent with the foundational ideals of liberal democracy such as tolerance, separation of church and state, respect for individual rights, a flourishing civil society, and equality for all before the law.

This year will be a time of crisis and opportunity. The incompetence of President Obama is now manifest to all but his most devoted followers, who remain trapped in their progressive Jonestown, chanting the bankrupt mantra of “hope and change” as they stir the vats of government Kool-Aid. For the rest of us, Obama’s economic failures are obvious in the numbers: $15 trillion in debt, $4.5 trillion of it added just during his three years in office; 8.6% official unemployment, while the real number of jobless is more than 11%; the proliferation of job-killing regulations with an average annual cost of $12.5 billion; and a complete indifference to the looming crisis of “unfunded liabilities” created by entitlements, a tab that Andrew McCarthy has calculated at $80 trillion, more than the whole net worth of the richest country on the planet. All these fiscal dysfunctions are concentrated in the trillion-dollar entitlement called Obamacare, a hijacking of one-sixth of the economy that will increase government spending and debt, and strangle the health-care industry with intrusive and expensive regulations.

This fiscal failure is matched by Obama’s political malfeasance. The “post-racial” president who would transcend party and unite all Americans has been one of the most divisive and partisan presidents in recent history. He has exacerbated racial tensions by recycling when politically convenient the old “whitey done us wrong” melodrama peddled by the race-mongering hustlers and conmen. He even sacrificed his own grandmother to this narrative when he chastised her for voicing the perfectly rational fear of black criminality Jesse Jackson had once articulated. Lately his Attorney General Eric Holder, who once called Americans “cowards” on the subject of race, has been Obama’s racialist Luca Brasi, using the coercive power of his office for his boss’s political advantage. Look at Holder’s ongoing legal thuggery against South Carolina’s voter-I.D. law, one similar to others already deemed constitutional by the Supreme Court. With a record of dismal failure, not least being a worsening unemployment rate for black Americans, Obama must scare black voters to the polls in November by conjuring up dusty Jim Crow bogeys. As for the coming fiscal apocalypse, all Obama can do is play the class warfare and class envy cards, increasing income redistribution disguised as “stimulus” spending, as he castigates the “rich” for not “paying their fair share”–– even though the top 10% already pay 70% of federal income taxes, and confiscating all the wealth of Forbes magazine’s richest 400 Americans would barely cover Obama’s 2011 deficit.

Then there is the crony capitalism that rewards political friends like the United Auto Workers and the “green energy” industry with tax-payer-funded bailouts and subsidies. Perhaps even worse are the disastrous policies the sole purpose of which is to gratify his political base and make sure the campaign donations keep flowing no matter how much damage such decisions inflict on the rest of the country. The refusal to approve the Keystone pipeline, which would create up to 20,000 jobs and replace the oil we now import from thug regimes like Hugo Chavez’s with oil from a friendly Canada, is the most egregious example of partisan opportunism in recent memory. And it is just the latest decision––think of the ban on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico after the BP oil spill, or the EPA’s assault on coal-fired power plants––that has harmed our economy and national security merely to gratify the juvenile nature-love of well-heeled bicoastal liberals.

Obama’s foreign policy has been equally disastrous. To give him his due, he has kept in place much of the George Bush anti-terror apparatus he vilified as a candidate, though the proscribing of water-boarding has taken away an interrogation technique that generated reams of intelligence, including the information that allowed Obama to enjoy one of his few triumphs, the killing of Osama bin Laden. And his liberal use of drone attacks has been a cause for cheer.

But these few achievements are dwarfed by the more numerous failures. The attempt to push the “reset” button with Russia by negotiating an unfavorable arms control agreement and backing off anti-missile installations in Eastern Europe gained us nothing but Russia’s firmer intransigence against supporting meaningful sanctions against Iran. His “outreach” to the Muslim world, replete with protestations of American guilt and fantasy histories of Islamic tolerance and cultural achievement, has made America even more unpopular among Muslims than it was under George Bush, and done nothing to secure our national interests and security. Obama’s groveling courtship of the mullahs in Iran has earned him nothing but contempt from a regime that continues to kill our soldiers, develop nuclear weapons, and most recently has threatened to close the straits of Hormuz.

The abandonment of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and the “leading from behind” collusion with France and England in removing Gaddafi in Libya––with no clue about what sort of regimes would replace them––was another grievous error. Obama sacrificed our national prestige and security to gratify fantasies about liberal democracies midwifed by tech-savvy “Facebook kids,” who are now marginalized by Salafists and the Muslim Brothers eager to impose illiberal shari’a law. The precipitous withdrawal from Iraq, another decision based on politics rather than national interests, has instantly been followed by sectarian violence that threatens the fragile government we left behind, and opens up opportunities for a predatory Iran. Meanwhile, our staunchest ally in the Middle East, Israel, has been bullied and treated with contempt, her security endangered by this administration’s incompetence. Obama has managed to convince the world that being America’s friend is much more dangerous than being America’s enemy.

While Western diplomats wring their hands over trivial insults to Islam, a slow-motion genocide of Christians has been unfolding in the Muslim world. The latest attack occurred on Christmas day in Nigeria, where the terrorist sect Boko Haram bombed two Catholic churches in the towns of Abuja and Jos, killing at least 39 worshipers. This same group killed 32 Christians last Christmas Eve. In this year alone, Boko Haram has murdered 491 people.

The killings in Nigeria are just one example of continuous violent attacks on Christians and their churches. Yet our Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been nearly silent about this war on Christianity. When the Egyptian military participated in the murder of 25 Egyptian Copts, her State Department rejected a request from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom to put Egypt on its list of countries that violate religious freedoms. Instead, Secretary Clinton issued a generic warning to the generals ruling Egypt “to ensure that the fundamental rights of all Egyptians are respected, including the rights of religious freedom, peaceful assembly and the end of military trials for civilians, and that efforts be made to address sectarian tensions.” Compare this reflexive diplo-speak to her more passionate reaction to the recent beating of Egyptian women during a demonstration, one of whom was publicly stripped: “This systematic degradation of Egyptian women dishonors the revolution, disgraces the state and its uniform and is not worthy of a great people,” she said. Apparently, exposing a woman’s blue bra is a more heinous crime than running over a Copt’s head with a military vehicle.

In fact, our official spokesman for American views on foreign behavior hasn’t had much to say about a modern persecution of Christians redolent of those perpetrated by the Romans. Nor have we heard anything about the sectarian cleansing that has been going on for decades. Christians who date their presence in the Middle East to several centuries before Islam was created are fast disappearing from the region, choosing exile and emigration over harassment and murder. In Iraq, where American blood and treasure were spent to create “democracy” and “human rights,” eighteen priests and two bishops have been kidnapped, and the archbishop of Mosul murdered.  In the last six years, mobs have attacked over 70 churches, 42 of them in Baghdad.  In October 2010, attackers murdered 58 Christians during evening mass at the Syrian Catholic Cathedral in Baghdad. The Christian population, which once numbered 1.5 million, has dwindled to less than 150,000. The story is the same in Pakistan, Lebanon, the so-called West Bank, Syria, and across the Middle East. A region Christian for six centuries before the rise of Islam will soon be emptied of Christians.

And what has been Secretary Clinton’s response to this assault on Christians? A conference in December to implement the so-called “Istanbul Process,” itself the mechanism for implementing the U.N. Human Rights Council Resolution 1618 on religious stereotyping and “stigmatization.” That resolution was a diplomatic effort to keep the Organization of Islamic Cooperation’s ongoing efforts to globalize Islamic blasphemy laws law from impinging on free speech. Clinton no doubt thought she was finessing the OIC’s drive to censor speech about Islam, but the OIC saw the meeting differently: “The upcoming [Washington] meetings … [will] help in enacting domestic laws for the countries involved in the issue, as well as formulating international laws preventing inciting hatred resulting from the continued defamation of religions.” As the Hudson Institute’s Nina Sheareported, “By standing ‘united’ (as the OIC head put it in a Turkish Daily op-ed) with the OIC on these issues, America appears to validate the OIC agenda, thus demoralizing the legions of women’s rights and human-rights advocates, bloggers, journalists, minorities, converts, reformers and others in OIC states who look to the United States for support against oppression.” Having intimidated most of Europe into legally repressing opinions or even statements of fact about Islam, the OIC is obviously using “diplomacy” to pressure U.S. government officials into censoring themselves when it comes to Islam.

Mitt Romney recently said something on Fox News Sunday that raises questions about his understanding of history and its pertinence for foreign policy. In the course of talking about the war in Iraq and the “lessons learned” from that conflict and its “errors,” Romney responded to a question about an incident from his father’s brief 1967-68 run for the Republican nomination. In August 1967, George Romney told a Detroit radio-television reporter, “Well, you know when I came back from Vietnam [in November 1965], I just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get when you go over to Vietnam. Not only by the Generals, but also by the diplomatic corps over there . . . . And, as a result, I have changed my mind . . . in that particular. I no longer believe that it was necessary for us to get involved in South Vietnam to stop Communist aggression.”

Little remembered today, Romney’s remark, particularly the careless use of the term “brainwashing,” ended his run for the nomination. The other governors and the journalists who had been on the 1965 trip disavowed Romney’s insulting characterization of the military and diplomatic personnel who had accompanied the governors. Romney was accused of flip-flopping on his earlier comments that the war was “morally right and necessary” and that withdrawal was “unthinkable.” One journalist, noting the amount of time between the trip and Romney’s about-face, wondered why it took so long for Romney to get his brain back from the laundry.  The media pounced on Romney’s clumsy use of the “brainwashing” metaphor: the New York Times headline read, “Romney Asserts He Underwent ‘Brainwashing’ On Vietnam Trip.” In February 1968, faced with polls showing voters in New Hampshire preferring Richard Nixon by a six-to-one margin, Romney dropped out of the race.

When Chris Wallace raised the issue in his Fox News Sunday interview, Romney responded, “Years later when my dad was proven to be right in terms of the errors in Vietnam, my wife asked him, ‘You know, dad, how do you feel about the fact that you’re finally being vindicated in what you said?’ And he said, ‘You know, I never look back. I only look forward.’ He’s quite a guy.”

Unfortunately, Chris Wallace didn’t ask an important follow-up questions. When Romney said his father “was proven to be right in terms of errors in Vietnam,” what exactly did he mean? Was one of the “errors,” as George Romney had explicitly said, getting involved in Vietnam in the first place “to stop Communist aggression”? And what events exactly does Mitt Romney believe “proved” his father was right? These are critical questions for understanding Romney’s grasp of history and its lessons.

As the last American troops roll south to Kuwait, the end of the war in Iraq invites unsettling comparisons to another war America declared over before losing its nerve and snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Then as now, Democrats have taken the lead in putting at risk the gains purchased with a trillion dollars, and nearly 4,500 dead and tens of thousands wounded American soldiers.

For all of the obvious differences between the conflicts in Vietnam and Iraq, the effects of an overhasty withdrawal on American prestige promise to be similar. The period following the fall of Saigon in 1975 was one of Soviet expansionist aggression in Latin America and Africa, even as Democratic president Jimmy Carter scolded Americans for their “inordinate fear of communism.” Carter embodied the spirit of national self-loathing and guilty retreat––the “crisis in confidence” as he called it  ––seemingly validated by the failure in Vietnam. In his inaugural speech he confessed the nation’s “recent mistakes,” advised us “even our great nation has its recognized limits,” and warned that America can “simply do its best.” This public pusillanimity was also noticed by the clerics in Iran, who began their modern jihad with the overthrow of the Shah, America’s ally abandoned by an administration devoted to “human rights” and disarmament, and addled by specious anti-colonial rhetoric. The mullahs confirmed their contempt for us by sacking our embassy and holding 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.

The audacity and success of this assault inspired the other jihadist groups––many trained and funded by Iran––that began attacking more boldly American and Western interests across the globe. The geopolitical lesson of American weakness was also noticed by a Saudi named Osama bin Laden, who preached to his trainees the cultural bankruptcy of America that Vietnam illustrated and that made America vulnerable to Allah’s warriors. “The Americans did not get out of Vietnam,” bin Laden preached, “until after they suffered great losses. Over sixty thousand [sic] American soldiers were killed until there were demonstrations by the American people. [The Americans] won’t stop until we do jihad against them.” After 9/11, bin Laden demanded “the American people to take note of their government’s policy against Muslims. They described the government’s policy against Vietnam as wrong. They should now take the same stand they did previously.” America is a “weak horse,” as bin Laden famously said, noting American retreat from Vietnam, Iran, and Mogadishu, and our failure to retaliate for the other terrorist attacks that culminated in the carnage of 9/11.

Those who quibble with bin Laden’s historical accuracy about these events are missing the point. The perception of American weakness he articulated became a motivator of action, and the same perception is now arising following the withdrawal from Iraq. There is no question that this politically rather than strategically motivated retreat puts at risk whatever gains have been made over the past eight and a half years. A politically fragmented Iraq is faced with myriad problems and dysfunctions. It is ruled by a Shia clique that in the absence of American power is unlikely to respect the autonomy and rights of Sunni and Kurdish Iraqis. Sectarian violence is already accelerating. Al Qaeda and other violent terrorist outfits are still active, and will no doubt step up their attacks on sectarian enemies, foreign workers, and oil facilities. Shia Islamists like Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mumahidoon party, virulently anti-American and backed by Iran, are likely to become a more powerful force in Iraq after the Americans are gone, either dominating the government or forming a Hezbollah-like autonomous state-within-a-state. Not encouraging are the billboards that have sprung up in Baghdad showing al-Sadr trampling a U.S. flag.

Newt Gingrich touched off a mini-firestorm when he told a Jewish television channel that the Palestinians are an “invented” people “who are in fact Arabs,” and “who were historically part of the Arab community.” This simple statement of historical fact was of course met with the usual bluster from the Palestinians, who called the statements “ignorant,” “despicable,” and of course “racist,” a meaningless charge. And what response from the Palestinians would be complete without the usual threat that the statement they don’t like will “increase the cycle of violence,” as Palestinian lead negotiator Saeb Erekat put it?

The truly “ignorant,”  however, are those who have bought the “Palestinian homeland”  propaganda. Where was all this talk about a homeland for the Palestinians in 1948, when the Arab armies invaded Israel? Their aim was not to create a Palestinian state, but rather to carve up the rest of British Mandatory Palestine, as the secretary-general of the Arab League, Abdel Rahman Azzam, confessed at the time: “Abdullah [ruler of Transjordan] was to swallow up the central hill regions of Palestine . . . The Egyptians would get the Negev. The Galilee would go to Syria, except that the coastal part as far as Acre would be added to the Lebanon.” Until 1967, the so-called “West Bank” was part of Jordan, but none of the Arab nations agitated for the creation of a Palestinian state. The “Palestinian homeland” became a tactical weapon after violence failed to achieve the real aim, the destruction of Israel.

In fact, the Palestinians themselves have admitted that the “Palestinian homeland” is a tactical weapon for the destruction of Israel. Listen to Zahir Muhsein, a member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization executive committee, from an interview with a Dutch newspaper given in 1977: “The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism. For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.”

Muhsein’s statement is consistent with the stated aims of the Palestinian leadership for the last half century: to destroy Israel in “stages.” In 1993, on the same day that the Oslo Accords handed over the West Bank to the PLO, Yasser Arafat told Jordanian television, “Since we cannot defeat Israel in war, we do it in stages. We take any and every territory that we can of Palestine, and establish a sovereignty [sic] there, and we use it as a springboard to take more. When the time comes, we can get the Arab nations to join us for the final blow against Israel.” Indeed, before 1967, Palestinians did speak of a homeland, but it was not to exist in the West Bank, but in Israel. The 1964 PLO Charter Article 24 explicitly said, “This Organization does not exercise any territorial sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, on the Gaza Strip or in the Himmah Area.” After 1967, this article was removed for strategic purposes. Thus any content to the notion of a “Palestinian homeland” is inextricably predicated on the destruction of Israel, as Article 2 of the 1968 Charter makes clear: “Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit.” Consistent with this principle, Arafat said in 1970, “We shall never stop until we can go back home and Israel is destroyed, peace for us means Israel’s destruction and nothing else.” In other words, the “two-state solution” that Westerners continue to chant like a mantra will not resolve the conflict between Israel and the Arabs.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s  “chiding” of Israel, as the Washington Post put it, was a strange performance, so muddled in its ignorance of fact and logic that one wonders if the Secretary was attempting some rhetorical misdirection to lull our enemies into complacency. Unfortunately, the more likely reason for his misguided remarks is the dead hand of foreign policy received wisdom and unexamined ideas.

The orthodox narrative purporting to explain the Israel-Arab conflict goes like this. The Palestinian people were deprived of their homeland as a result of the creation of Israel, which continues to occupy the territories belonging to Palestinians. Among the Arabs, a radical minority of terrorists, mirrored by a radical minority of Israelis, have fomented violence to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state. The goal of “two states living side by side in peace and in security,” as Panetta repeated the mantra, has thus for 60 years been blocked by these minorities, who have been abetted by weak, venal, or fanatic politicians on both sides. Instead we have the “cycle of violence” that creates fear among Israelis, and hence oppressive security measures that retard the economic development of the Palestinians and frustrate their daily lives, further radicalizing them and legitimizing more terrorist violence. The solution, according to Panetta, is “for Israel to take bold action and to move towards a negotiated two-state solution.”  Or as Panetta shouted, “Just get to the damn table.” Only then will stability and order flourish in the Middle East, and Israel’s security be assured.

The only problem with this story is that there is little evidence to support it. Sixty years of history shows that the primary aim of Arabs in the Middle East is the destruction of Israel, not the creation of a Palestinian state coexisting with Israel. Hence the impossible conditions for peace that always appear in the Palestinian list of demands, the worst being the “right to return” for a metastasizing population of Palestinian “refugees,” which would be a demographic WMD for the destruction of Israel. Nor is Panetta’s suggestion that the Israelis have refused to negotiate true to the facts. Most recently, Israel suspended building apartments in East Jerusalem for a year to lure Palestinian President Abbas back to the table, and Abbas did nothing until a month before the moratorium expired, insuring that talks would fail. This has been the pattern of “negotiations” for decades: start with impossible demands, trumpet a willingness to negotiate for the benefit of gullible Westerners, then sabotage the whole process, confident that the international community will blame Israel. This behavior makes sense if one realizes that negotiations, like terrorist attacks, are a tactic for pursuing the long-term strategy for the destruction of Israel. The Palestinians have followed the method of Konrad Henlein, Hitler’s Nazi stooge in Czechoslovakia, who in 1938 said, “We must always demand so much that we cannot be satisfied.” Having gone through this process repeatedly, why should the Israelis heed Panetta and once more play a game that furthers the aims of those who want to destroy them?

Indeed, every Israeli concession to and agreement with the Palestinians has been followed by more terrorist violence. After the Oslo Agreement of 1993 handed the West Bank over to the Palestinian Authority, 300 Israelis were killed by terrorist attacks. After Arafat was offered virtually everything he had demanded for creating a Palestinian state in 2000, in the following five years 1,100 Israelis were murdered during the Al Aqsa Intifada. After Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, another 118 Israelis have been killed, and thousands of rockets fired from Gaza into southern Israel. The 2000 withdrawal from Lebanon was followed by the creation of a Hezbollah terrorist state armed with 50,000 rockets. Only someone with a penchant for magical thinking could believe that more negotiations and concessions could lead to peace. To paraphrase Goldfinger’s comment to James Bond, the Palestinians don’t expect the Israelis to talk, they expect them to die.

Panetta’s other comments are equally naïve and blind to reality. For example, Panetta advises Israel to “reach out and mend fences with those who share an interest in regional stability – countries like Turkey and Egypt, as well as Jordan.  This is an important time to be able to develop and restore those key relationships in this crucial area.”  This would be the same Turkey that is virtually an Islamist state, one that supported the so-called “freedom flotilla” patently intended to isolate Israel internationally, one that has threatened to attack Israeli vessels developing natural gas fields in its territorial waters, one whose prime minister joined the genocidal Iranian president Ahmadinejad at the U.N. in September to slander Israel, expelled Israeli diplomats from his country, and in a speech in Cairo threatened that “Israel must pay a price for its aggression and crimes.” How do those actions reflect an “interest in regional stability”?

The parliamentary elections that have begun in Egypt will impress only the most starry-eyed of democracy champions. These are the people who, like Senator Joe Lieberman, think that the “Arab Spring” is all about people “demanding lives of democracy, dignity, economic opportunity, and involvement in the modern world.” What we’ve seen so far instead is the growing success of Islamist parties demanding a greater role for Islam and shari’a law in running their countries. Our failure of imagination that has reduced events in the Middle East to our own historical paradigms and ideals continues to compromise our foreign policy in that region, and endanger our national interests.

For example, since we prize freedom, human rights, separation of church and state, and tolerance for a variety of ways for individuals to pursue happiness, we think everybody else values or defines those ideas the same way we do. But what we call freedom, many Muslims see as a soul-destroying license and destructive self-indulgence. As the Ayatollah Khomeini preached in 1979, such Western-style freedom is a “freedom that will corrupt our youth, freedom that will pave the way to the oppressor, freedom that will drag our nation to the bottom.” Decades earlier, Muslim Brothers theorist Sayyid Qutb, along with Khomeini the most critical influence on neo-jihadism, likewise had scorned Western “individual freedom, devoid of human sympathy and responsibility for relatives.” Similarly, al Qaeda theorist Ayman al-Zawahiri wrote, “The freedom we want is not the freedom to use women as commodities . . . it is not the freedom of AIDS and an industry of obscenities and homosexual marriage.” For the faithful, true freedom is the freedom to live as an observant Muslim in harmony with Allah’s precepts, something far different from what we in the West mean by political freedom. So too with our ideal of human rights, which in Islamic terms means the right to be a faithful Muslim without any interference. That’s why Article 24 of the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam reads, “All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Shari’a.”

This failure to imagine the world-view of those unlike us is worsened by our failure to understand that “democracy” is more than just the mechanics of voting. As G.K. Chesterton said, “We shall have real Democracy, when . . . the ordinary man will decide not only how he will vote, but what he is going to vote about.” The evidence of elections in the Middle East so far––in Algeria, Gaza, Lebanon, and Tunisia, which have all seen Islamist parties triumph––suggests that most ordinary Muslims want democracy not to institutionalize Western goods and ideals such as personal freedom, individual rights, or tolerance for minorities, but to integrate more thoroughly Islam and shari’a into government. In Egypt this is the explicit program of the organization poised for success in the democratic elections, the Muslim Brothers. Their 2007 draft platform proclaimed that “Islam is the official state religion” and “the Islamic shari’a is the main source for legislation.” Nor are these demands for more religion in government coming just from a well-organized, unified minority. In a Pew poll from 2010, 85% of Egyptians said Islam’s influence on politics is positive, 95% said that it is good that Islam plays a large role in politics, 59% identified with Islamic fundamentalists, 54% favored gender segregation in the workplace, 82% favored stoning adulterers, 77% favored whippings and cutting off the hands of thieves and robbers, and 84% favored death for those leaving Islam.

Nor will we see in Egypt the sort of religious tolerance sanctioned by the Western separation of church and state. So far this year, 80 Christian Copts have been murdered, some by soldiers, and their churches attacked and destroyed. The intolerance that breeds such violence finds its sanction in traditional Islam, at least according to Sheik Ali Gomaa, the Grand Mufti of Cairo’s prestigious Al Azhar University. Gomaa calls Christians “infidels” and quotes the Koran’s injunction to “Fight … the People of the Book [Jews and Christians] until they pay the Jizya [tribute] with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” This faith-sanctioned intolerance explains why only 48% of Egyptians look favorably on Christians, despite the presence of 8 million Christian Copts, and a scant 2% look favorably on Jews. It is hard to see how a liberal democracy as we understand it can flourish in such an environment of intolerance.

The failure of the Congressional budget “super-committee” to address our geometrically expanding debt and deficits should surprise no one. From the beginning the committee was political theater designed to create the illusion of action when the will to act is missing. Unfortunately, this perennial bad habit of democracies to pursue short-time interests at the expense of long-term needs is now too dangerous to indulge.

The glory of constitutional government is its replacement of violence or coercion with speech and persuasion. But going back to ancient Athens, the primacy of verbal persuasion and processes makes it possible to substitute procedural words for actions when the courage or will to act is missing. The creation of committees, conferences, symposia, commissions of inquiry, and the like provides politicians with a ready answer to the citizens’ frustrated cry, “Why isn’t something being done?” Since few in government want to anger the voters by calling for the sacrifices and hard choices needed to put our fiscal house in order, creating a committee buys time and creates the illusion that “something is being done.” And we know where the reluctance to do anything comes from––making the hard choices necessary to deal with the impending fiscal apocalypse is attended by political costs that will have to be paid come the next election. Better to delay decisions until after November 2012, when the political stars will be better aligned one way or the other.

At this point many will be tempted into a “pox on both your houses” reaction, blaming Republicans and Democrats alike for the “gridlock” and “partisan politics” that are preventing a solution and letting us citizens down. But we should resist the lazy recourse to moral equivalency, which usually is a way to avoid making judgments about responsibility and culpability. Just look at the Israeli-Arab conflict, where a specious moral equivalency has let the Arab instigators of violence and disorder off the hook. So too with the current fiscal crisis, which is the result of overspending and the growth of the federal government. Thus the “fair and balanced” solution touted by the President––combining tax increases with cuts to federal programs––may sound good superficially, but will not solve the problem.

Quite clearly, the problem is spending, not revenues. When 40 cents of every dollar of GDP is spent by the government, when entitlement spending on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and Obamacare will devour all of federal income tax revenue by 2050, when debt is near 100% of GDP, when the latest deficit has reached a historical high of 8.7% of GDP, confiscating all of this country’s personal and corporate wealth, let alone raising top rates, will not balance our books. In fact, the International Monetary Fund estimates that all federal taxes would have to be increased 88% just to keep entitlement spending at current levels and to keep debt from growing. Moreover, history confirms Milton Friedman’s observation that “Politicians will always spend every penny of tax raised and whatever else they can get away with.” Research by Richard Vedder and Stephen Moore shows that between World War II and 2009, every dollar of new tax revenue led to $1.17 in spending.  Finally, most promises of spending cuts made to justify tax increases have not been kept, like the $3 of promised cuts that never materialized after Reagan’s 1982 tax increase, or the phantom cuts that sold George H.W. Bush on raising taxes in 1990.

The moral and intellectual corruption of American universities has recently manifested itself in the California State University system, the largest in the country. A group of faculty and administrators has sent a letter to Chancellor Charles Reed asking that he not approve the reinstatement of the Israel Study Abroad Program, which was suspended apparently for budgetary reasons. Behind the various pretexts justifying this request, however, lies the usual leftist hatred of Israel based on false history and moral idiocy.

The pretexts are transparently specious. The argument about budget constraints is made on a regular basis about everything the university does, and usually reflects professional or ideological preferences rather than principle. If the issue were a study abroad program at Arab American University in Jenin, which the letter writers recommend the CSU should create, money would not be a problem. Nor is the evocation of the State Department Travel Warning any more legitimate. In fact, if you read the actual warning, you’ll see that it is generated not by Israel’s malevolence, but by the threat of terrorist attacks by Palestinians: “Israeli authorities remain concerned about the continuing threat of terrorist attacks. U.S. citizens are cautioned that a greater danger may exist around restaurants, businesses, and other places associated with U.S. interests and/or located near U.S. official buildings, such as the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv and the U.S. Consulate General in Jerusalem. U.S. citizens are also urged to exercise a high degree of caution and to use common sense when patronizing restaurants, nightclubs, cafes, malls, places of worship, and theaters, especially during peak hours. Large crowds and public gatherings have been targeted by terrorists in the past and should be avoided to the extent practicable.” Moreover, if State Department travel warnings are grounds for eliminating a study-abroad program, shouldn’t the Cal State system suspend all programs in Mexico, where according to the State Department, “the security situation poses serious risks for U.S. citizens”?

The mention of Americans killed or injured in Israel is equally dishonest. Emily Henochowicz lost an eye to an Israeli tear-gas canister, but as the letter admits, she was involved in a violent protest against Israel. Charges that callous Israeli soldiers deliberately targeted her have been refuted by a video that shows her being struck by a ricocheting tear-gas canister. Even worse is the reference to Furkan Dogan, the Turkish-American killed when members of a Turkish hardcore Islamist outfit attacked Israeli commandos during an attempt to run the Israeli blockade of terrorist-run Gaza in an act of provocation. Of course, if an American student anywhere in the world involves himself in a violent protest against the host country, he runs the risk of injury. That’s why guests in another country should stay out of local politics they usually don’t understand. To suggest, as the letter does, that this risk exists only in Israel is dishonest. The fact is, the danger to Americans in Israel does not arise from Israeli security forces, but from the indiscriminate slaughter perpetrated by Palestinian terrorist attacks like the Hebrew University massacre in July 2002, which killed four American students.

We can’t say much about the veracity of the sexual harassment complaints leveled against Herman Cain 15 years ago, given the lack of specific detail or even the names of the accusers. But this mini-scandal provides an opportunity to revisit one of the most pernicious examples of government intrusion into our lives and workplaces.

As with most bad laws, good intentions paved this road to Big Brother’s regulatory hell. No one should get away with sexual quid pro quos, sleazy innuendos, the abuse of power to gain sexual favors, or grubby groping in the mailroom. But sexual harassment these days is seldom about those obvious offenses. Consider the legal definition of harassment, which occurs when “unwelcome comments or conduct based on sex, race or other legally protected characteristics unreasonably interferes with an employee’s work performance or creates an intimidating, hostile or offensive work environment,” as the FCC Encyclopedia explains the law. You’ll notice that harassment is no longer about victimized women, but a whole host of “protected characteristics,” which include “race, color, religion, sex (whether or not of a sexual nature and including same-gender harassment and gender identity harassment), national origin, age (40 and over), disability (mental or physical), sexual orientation, or retaliation.”

We shouldn’t be surprised that enshrining into law notions as vague and subjective as “intimidating,” “hostile,” or “offensive,” and then applying them to such a broad group of potential victims, will end up with the government intruding into people’s lives at the expense of their rights and freedom. Such elastic terms will mean whatever anybody, no matter how hypersensitive, neurotic, stupid, humorless, or Machiavellian thinks they do at any given time. Additionally, such subjectivity ends up in grossly unfair applications of harassment law. Flirtation that is clumsy or unwelcome suddenly becomes criminal harassment depending on the undesirability or repulsiveness or status of the perpetrator. Clever banter or sophisticated sexual wit likewise changes into harassment depending on the mood of the victim and her changing feelings for the person.

The consequences of the ad hoc standards at the heart of sexual harassment law are most obvious in politics. Bill Clinton’s antics as governor and president were textbook sexual harassment behavior. Yet the feminists and progressives gave him a pass, instructing puritanical, repressed Americans that it was none of their business. What a change from the sputtering high dudgeon on display when Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court, or from the scrutiny Herman Cain is being subjected to based on anonymous accusers and vague charges about “inappropriate” behavior, even as the media barely mentions the numerous genuine sexual assaults and rapes going on at various Occupy Wall Street venues.

Yet it isn’t just in politics that sexual harassment charges are weapons to be used against one’s enemies. The same thing happens in mundane office disagreements or personality clashes. When I was the chairman of my department, I was considered “management” and so had to be involved with sexual harassment complaints. Every single one was the result of a factional squabble among faculty that had nothing to do with sexuality or even gender discrimination. Actual charges included such silliness as the offender’s wearing overpowering cologne, or failing to acknowledge something the complainant put in the offender’s mailbox. No matter how juvenile, such charges can be effective. Faced with an investigation, most people will start monitoring their behavior and restricting their speech just to be on the safe side, since employers anxious about liability will err on the side of caution: they will investigate all charges, no matter how flimsy, and buy off accusers, as Cain’s were, rather than face a potentially more expensive lawsuit and the intrusion of federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commissioners inquisitors into their business. It’s simply more cost effective to enable a “chilling effect” on an individual employee’s freedom than to take on a government bureaucracy backed by the coercive power of the courts.

Having taught in a state university for thirty years, I’m not surprised by the ignorance on display among the Occupy Wall Street protestors. From kindergarten to university, for decades our schools have abandoned the teaching of basic facts and foundational thinking skills, and replaced both with leftish received wisdom and stale mythologies, all the while they have anxiously monitored and puffed up students’ self-esteem.

This lack of critical understanding and ignorance of simple fact characterize the main theme of the protests, that the wealthy “1%” of Americans have gamed the system to enrich themselves at the expense of everybody else, an analysis redolent of Scrooge McDuck cartoons or Frank Capra’s portrait of Old Man Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life. But these caricatures are woefully uninformed about how a global, free market economy works. For example, the protestors rail about growing “income inequality,” but they forget that this expansion of the wealth of top earners has been accompanied by that same cohort’s paying more and more of the total federal tax bill, so that today nearly half of tax-filers pay nothing. Nor do they consider the issue of income mobility: from 1999-2007, about half of households in the bottom quintile had moved up the income ladder, while nearly half of households in the top quintile had moved down.

As for those greedy “millionaires” who refuse to pay their “fair share,” in this same period, half were millionaires only once, and only 6% were millionaires for the whole nine years. Indeed, as the Treasury Department reports, among the top 1/100 of 1 percent in 1996––the group Mother Jones demonized for obscenely increasing their wealth over the last 30 years–– only 25% remained in this group in 2005, and the median real income of these taxpayers declined over this period. Finally, according to the Treasury Department, “Median incomes of all taxpayers increased by 24 percent after adjusting for inflation. The real incomes of two-thirds of all taxpayers increased over this period [1996-2005]. In addition, the median incomes of those initially in the lower income groups increased more than the median incomes of those initially in the higher income groups.” No doubt things have gotten worse for many because of the recession, but there are plenty of people to blame beyond the “1%” and Wall Street villains, from the federal appointees running Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to the home buyers lying on mortgage applications.

This obsession with income inequality, moreover, reflects profound ignorance of capitalism’s revolutionary genius. To the protestors, the fact that top earners increased their income more than others did is prima facie evidence of capitalist skullduggery. They seem to think that a Steve Jobs or a Bill Gates has a zillion dollars because they somehow purloined money that in a just world other people would have had. Of course, in reality Microsoft and Apple have created hundreds of thousands of jobs and enriched others at the same time the corporations enriched themselves. That’s how capitalism works: it creates wealth that indeed spectacularly benefits the few, but that also raises the living standards of the many by creating jobs. More important, it is a dynamic, open system, one that creates opportunities for the clever and hardworking. And it has been wildly successful, so much so that today, young people who in the past would have started work at 16, can now spend several years of extended adolescence in colleges and universities, where they can earn impecunious degrees in subjects like Medieval French Poetry or Postcolonial Literature, and then loaf about lower Manhattan protesting the evil system that has rescued them from the drudgery of farm labor or factory work, and given them nutritious cheap food, healthy bodies, straight white teeth, and gadgets like X-Boxes and I-Pads.