THE ORIGINS of today’s crisis of course lie in the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The modern global jihad began in the Afghan refugee camps of Pakistan’s frontier lands along the one-thousand-five-hundred-mile border between the two countries. Volunteers from across the Islamic world came to fight with the Afghans. According to a senior Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) commander at the time, the ISI trained eighty thousand fighters from forty-three countries.

Yet, this is not just about the fighters recruited, trained and radicalized by that battle. It is also a story of the “Islamization” of Pakistan’s society—an Islamization that was supported by Pakistan’s own president, Zia ul-Haq, and was used not only to fight the Red Army but also to create a warring corps that could violently enforce Islamabad’s interests. And those interests lie more with defeating India than with controlling Kabul.

Zia predictably saw the Soviet invasion as part of a plot between Moscow and New Delhi to destroy Pakistan. He quietly began working with the CIA to help the mujahideen; while at home, Zia began the transition of the country from the soft-Muslim, even almost-secular, state of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of modern-day Pakistan, to a more fundamentalist Islam. The country became the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the army became an instrument of jihad and the politics of Pakistan became Islamized. Zia, the hit of Washington, was feted in the White House. His repressive policies inside Pakistan, including harsh Islamic punishments; his immense expansion of the role of the ISI into domestic spying; and his systematic Islamization of Pakistani life went ignored. So too did the growth of a Kalashnikov culture in the western badlands and the breakdown of traditional order as millions of Afghan refugees poured into the country.

Over the objections of the more cautious professionals in the CIA, the United States provided Zia and the Pakistani intelligence service vast amounts of money and weapons. The Saudis became equal partners in the project, bringing even-more money, their Wahhabi Islamic faith and young volunteers like Osama bin Laden to the war effort. Thus was the groundwork laid for a radicalized and well-armed Pakistani state.

Once the Soviets were defeated, Pakistan’s army and its ISI focused their sights back on their primary enemy—India. Employing the terror tactics and weaponry they acquired on the battlefields of Afghanistan, they went on to support an insurgency in Kashmir in the early 1990s, returning to help the Taliban take over most of Afghanistan a few years later. Finally, in the late 1990s they created terror groups based in the eastern Pakistani province of Punjab, like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET) and Jaish-e-Muhammad (JEM), to take the war against their mortal enemy deep into India itself. Supporting asymmetric warfare is a tool to fight New Delhi. With an officer corps increasingly sympathetic to jihad, alliances with extremists were and are a natural fit.

And so Zia had helped create a fighting force that would become increasingly hard to control, let alone roll back. His successors found this out quickly enough. After Zia’s death, Pakistani politics came to revolve around a struggle between Ms. Bhutto and her archrival Nawaz Sharif. Neither was competent as a manager of the nation. Both were mired in corruption. Neither controlled the army or the ISI, which went on to build a state within the state and engage in creating a host of private terrorist armies to fight India and gain control of Afghanistan.

Because of this the Pakistani jihadists were inside Afghanistan and part and parcel of the Taliban problem at the time of 9/11. In 1999, General Pervez Musharraf, an enthusiastic supporter of the struggle against India, had come to power in a military coup that overthrew Sharif. As a member of the army, he could in theory better control the rogue elements of the state, but in large part his interests were allied with the extremists in their struggle to dominate Afghanistan and fight India. After 9/11, Musharraf reluctantly agreed under tremendous U.S. pressure to a crackdown on some terrorists, but not surprisingly it was a selective and halfhearted effort. After a couple of years, the Afghan Taliban was allowed to regroup in Quetta, the largest city in Baluchistan, and in Peshawar, in the North-West Frontier Province, helping give birth to the Pakistani Taliban. LET and JEM though formally outlawed were kept active just beneath the surface. Al-Qaeda found a new home in the tribal regions of Pakistan. Once again, Pakistan became the breeder of and a home to Islamist terrorists. This has been one of Pakistan’s greatest military assets and one of its greatest domestic weaknesses. The push and pull between the government, which has abetted these efforts, and the army and ISI, which created and in some parts run these groups, is fraught with tension.



PAKISTAN IS in the midst of a complex and difficult transition from the military dictatorship of Musharraf to an elected civilian government. The army is reluctant to surrender real power; it is the largest landholder in the country and has created a massive military-industrial complex that benefits the officer corps. And it controls Pakistan’s powerful intelligence service. For most of 2004 to 2007—when the jihadists regrouped—the director of ISI was General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, now the army’s commander. This shows not only the critical role of the ISI but also the pervasiveness and unity of the military-industrial complex. In contrast, the civilians are divided by party and region; they spend more time infighting than governing.

The economy is dominated by almost-feudal landlords. The education system has been in decline for decades, starved of funds by the military’s requirements. The judiciary has been systematically attacked by the army and the political parties and is only now trying to achieve independence and credibility.

Thus Pakistan is both a patron and victim of terror. The Frankenstein created by the army and the ISI is now increasingly out of control and threatening the freedoms of all Pakistanis. Incidents of terrorist violence in Pakistan doubled from almost nine hundred in 2007 to over one thousand eight hundred in 2008 according to the National Counterterrorism Center. Many remain in denial, however, especially in the army. Others blame it all on the Americans and the CIA. As the mayor of Karachi, the largest megacity in the Islamic world, recently told me, Pakistan today is a country in the intensive-care ward of the global state system. Many expect it will fail to recover. All too easily it could fail completely.

The country is ripe for change, but it could be radical change for the worst. The battle for the soul of Pakistan has never been so acute.

Extremist forces are beginning to align. The spread of their influence could come easily. To secure power, the Taliban—currently concentrated in the tribal areas west of the Indus and all along the border with Afghanistan—would need to move east. This would take them from the Pashtun-dominated regions into the Punjabi heartland, where they need to gain significantly more support. There is good evidence this is already happening. The Pakistani Taliban is now coalescing with the Punjab-based Lashkar-e-Taiba. Though differences between the organizations remain (they have no common leader or agreed-upon agenda other than jihad against India and the West), they could well overcome their differences and make overthrowing the government their common priority.

Terrorist leaders would likely be able to tap into the deep anger among landless peasants as well. In the India-bordering provinces of Punjab and Sindh, where they already have a great deal of support, the extremists could mobilize a mass movement similar in some respects to that which toppled the shah of Iran in 1979. Press reports suggest antilandlord agitation has been a part of the extremists’ success in the last year in Swat and elsewhere. And in this way the current civilian government would be swept from power and the army would be pressed to make an accommodation with the new Islamist leadership. Since many in the army back the jihadists already, a deal with an Islamist movement would be attractive, especially if the Islamists made promises of protecting the army’s interests (which might or might not be kept later). The new government would be composed of representatives of the Pakistani Taliban, LET and possibly the Islamist political parties that have contested electoral power in the past. It might even draw some support from disaffected parts of the two mainstream political parties, the Pakistan Muslim League (PML) and Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), hoping to “moderate” the movement and to “tame” the Taliban.



A JIHADIST state would presumably come to power through some combination of violence and intimidation, and the takeover would not be without its problems. But none would likely threaten the success of the transition. All, however, would lead to an increasingly unstable and violence-wracked state.

Indeed, the Islamists would face significant internal opposition. The fifth of Pakistanis who are Shia would be extremely uneasy with a Sunni-militant regime and communal violence would probably intensify, with implications for Islamabad’s ties with Tehran. Pakistan has long been shaken by bombings and murders orchestrated by extremist Sunni and Shia elements, sometimes stoked by the ISI. This could escalate into more extensive anti-Shia violence.

The Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) in the large cities of Sindh—Pakistan’s southeasternmost province—would probably resist and have to be defeated by force. The MQM is the representative party of Muslims who fled India in 1947 and has become a secular and liberal force in recent years, but its appeal is limited to a minority. Though especially strong in Karachi, Pakistan’s biggest city, the MQM is not a national party and its leadership is in exile in London, weakening its ability to stand up to extremists. It would fight for its life in Sindh but lacks the ability to lead a national resistance, and so it would be more of an annoying disruption than a real challenge to the new government.

Large numbers of educated and Westernized Pakistanis would try to flee a new Islamic Emirate of Pakistan. They would find it difficult to find a port willing to take them, however, as security services around the world would insist on tight visa controls; potential states of refuge like the UK or Norway, both of which have large Pakistani émigré populations already, would face strong internal opposition to taking in more Muslims. The Gulf city-states like Abu Dhabi and Doha would probably take the most exiles, especially those with money.

Imposition of harsh Islamic penalties for social reasons, land reforms and the flight of many with capital would damage an already-weak economy and discourage foreign investment and loans. The emirate would probably blame its economic difficulties on the outside world and use foreign pressure as an excuse for even-more draconian crackdowns inside.

The army would be the most dangerous adversary. Some in the officer corps that would rather be in power themselves would certainly resist and might indeed try to stage a coup. The emirate would move to purge the armed forces of these potential coup plotters. It might also set up a new military force to act as a counterweight to the regular army, akin to the role of the SS in Nazi Germany or the Revolutionary Guard in Iran. The ISI in particular would be cleansed to eliminate any potential threats to the regime from secularists or those who seek more personal power.

The new regime would be quick to take control of the nuclear arsenal as it purged the army of any dissident voices. And it would welcome Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri from their hiding places of the last decade (although they would presumably keep a low profile to avoid being attacked by outside security services). Certainly al-Qaeda, LET and a host of other terrorist groups would have much more room to operate, free of any significant constraints on their activities from the Pakistani authorities. Even worse, the new government might abet their terrorist activities, providing the use of embassies and missions abroad for staging operations.

In the end, we would be left with an extremist-controlled Pakistan, infested with violence, an almost completely dysfunctional economy, harsh laws and even-harsher methods for imposing them, and above all a nuclear-armed nation controlled by terrorist sympathizers.



THE EFFECTS of an extremist takeover would not end at Pakistan’s borders. A worsening conflict between Sunni and Shia could easily seep into the rest of the Muslim world.

Pakistan’s influence in Afghanistan would deepen. The south and east of the country would be a virtual part of the Pakistani state. The commander of the faithful, Mullah Muhammad Omar, and his Quetta shura (ruling council) would emerge as the odds-on favorite to take over the area. The non-Pashtun majority in Afghanistan would certainly resist, but in the Pashtun belt across the south and east, the Afghan Taliban would be even stronger than it is now. Afghanistan would go back to looking much like it did pre–the American intervention in 2001, with a dominant Taliban backed by Pakistan fighting the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Shia backed by Iran, Russia and the central-Asian republics.

Afghanistan would become a battleground for influence between Pakistan and Iran, as Sunni-dominated Pakistan and Shia-dominated Iran would find a war for ideological dominance almost irresistible. Both states would also be tempted to meddle with each other’s minorities—the Shia in Pakistan and Sunni in Iran, as well as both countries’ Baluchi minority. Baluchistan, Pakistan’s southwestern province that neighbors both Afghanistan and Iran, is already unstable on both sides of the border. It would become another area of conflict. The low-intensity insurgencies already burning in the border areas would become more severe with outsiders fueling the fires. As the Islamic Emirate of Pakistan suppressed its Shia minority, Tehran would be forced to sit and watch because of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. And so Iran would certainly accelerate its nuclear-weapons-development program but would be years, if not decades, behind its neighbor.

With many of the LET in power, a major mass-casualty attack on India like the November 2008 Mumbai bombings would be likely. And this time it could spark war. India has shown remarkable restraint over the last decade as the Pakistani army, militants in Pakistan or both have carried out provocations like the Kargil War in 1999, the attack on the Indian parliament in 2001 and the Mumbai raid last year. Of course, a big part of India’s restraint is the lack of any good military option for retaliation that would avoid the risk of nuclear Armageddon. But if pressed hard enough, New Delhi may need to take some action. Blockading Karachi and demanding the closure of militant training camps might seem to be a way to increase pressure without firing the first shot but it carries a high risk of spiraling escalation. And of course any chance for a peace agreement in Kashmir would be dead. Violence in the region would rise. The new militant regime in Pakistan would increase support for the insurgency.

And Israel would come into the emirate’s crosshairs as a major target. Pakistan has always supported the Palestinian cause. In the past, most of the championing has been rhetorical, but an Islamic state would become a more practical supporter of Sunni groups like Hamas, giving money and arms. Pakistani embassies could become safe havens for terrorists pinpointing Zionist and Crusader targets. Of course, Pakistan could also provide the bomb. Farther away from Israel than Iran, Pakistan would be a harder foe for the Israelis to counter with force. And Israel has done little or no strategic thinking about the Pakistani threat.

A militant Islamic state in Pakistan, the second-largest Muslim country and the only one with a nuclear arsenal, would have a massive ripple effect across the Islamic world. All of the existing Muslim regimes would be alarmed by the prospect of their own jihadists finding a new refuge and training facilities; the extremists would then have a new base from which to fight their home governments. The psychological impact on Muslim nations would be far more profound than previous Islamic takeovers in relatively remote or marginal states like Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia or Gaza.

The global Islamic jihad, spearheaded by al-Qaeda, would proclaim the liberation of the ummah, or community, was at hand. In Pakistani-diaspora communities in the United Kingdom and the Gulf states the risk of terrorism would be even greater than it is today. The United States would have to take steps to curb travel by its citizens of Pakistani origin to their homeland. The damage that could be wrought is many magnitudes greater than the capabilities lent to al-Qaeda through having a safe haven in Afghanistan. Our options in facing down an extremist-controlled Pakistan would be far more limited than those we had in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks.



A JIHADIST Pakistan would be the most serious threat to the United States since the end of the cold war. Aligned with al-Qaeda and armed with nuclear weapons, the Islamic Emirate of Pakistan would be a nightmare. U.S. options for dealing with it would all be bad.

Engagement would be nearly impossible as the new leadership in Islamabad would have no faith and little interest in any dialogue with the Crusaders and Zionists. If we retained an embassy in Pakistan, it would be at constant risk of attack—if not from the regime itself then from its allies like al-Qaeda. Islamabad would almost certainly demand an immediate and complete withdrawal of all foreign forces from neighboring Afghanistan and consider any counterterrorist operations on its territory cause for retaliation against American interests elsewhere. Since more than three-quarters of all of NATO’s supplies in Afghanistan come via Karachi, the new emirate would have us in a tight bind. In an international forum, Pakistan would outdo Iran as the leader of the anti-Israel cause and constantly demand the handover of all of Kashmir from India.

U.S. options to change the regime by a coup or by assisting dissidents like the MQM would be minimal. The United States is so unpopular in Pakistan today that American endorsement of a politician is the kiss of death. Ms. Bhutto learned this lesson literally. The Pakistani Shia community would look to Iran, not America, for help.

Military options would be unappealing at best and counterproductive at worst. The United States would discover the same difficult choices Indian leaders have looked at for a decade. Striking terrorist training camps achieves virtually nothing since they can easily and cheaply be rebuilt. The risk of collateral damage—real or invented—probably creates more terrorists than the raids could kill. Even a successful operation creates new martyrs for the terrorists’ propaganda machines.

A naval blockade to coerce behavior change would mean imposing humanitarian suffering on the population. It would also prompt terrorist reprisals in and outside of South Asia. Combined with air strikes, a blockade might impose real costs on the jihadist regime but is unlikely to topple it and would be hard to sustain in the absence of a major provocation.

Invasion á la Iraq in 2003 would require a land base nearby. Landlocked Afghanistan would be a risky place from which to work. Iran is a nonstarter. India might be prepared in some extreme scenario to attack with American forces, but that would rally every Pakistani to the extremists’ cause.

The Pakistanis would, of course, use their nuclear weapons to defend themselves. While they do not have delivery systems capable of reaching America, they could certainly destroy cities and bases in Afghanistan, India, the Gulf states and, if smuggled out ahead of time by terrorists, perhaps the United States. A victory in such a conflict would be Pyrrhic indeed.

Of course, the hardest problem would be the day after. What would we do with a country twice the size of California with enormous poverty, almost 50 percent illiteracy and intense popular hatred for all that we stand for after we have fought a nuclear war to occupy it?

The worst thing about the military option is that we might have little choice but to use it if al-Qaeda launched another 9/11-magnitude attack on the United States from a jihadist Pakistan. It is highly unlikely a jihadist Islamabad would turn over bin Laden for justice after a new “Manhattan raid,” and sanctions would be a very unsatisfying response to thousands of deaths—or more if al-Qaeda had acquired one of Pakistan’s bombs.

A jihadist, nuclear-armed Pakistan is a scenario we need to avoid at all costs. That means working with the Pakistan we have today to try to improve its spotty record on terrorism and proliferation. There is good reason for pessimism. Working with the existing order in Pakistan may not succeed. But there is every reason to try, given the horrors of the alternative.



FOR THE last sixty years American policy toward Pakistan has oscillated wildly between periods when Washington was entranced by Islamabad and embraced its policies without question (Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and Bush 43), or sanctioned Pakistan and blamed it for either provoking wars or developing nuclear weapons (Johnson, Carter, Bush 41 and Clinton). In the love-affair years, Washington would build secret relationships (the U-2 base in Peshawar and the mujahideen war in the 1980s) and throw literally billions of dollars at Pakistan with little or no accountability. In the scorned years, Pakistan would be démarched to death and Washington would cut off all military and economic aid. Both approaches failed dismally.

Moreover, America endorsed every Pakistani military dictator, no matter that they started wars with India and moved the country ever deeper into the jihadist embrace. John F. Kennedy entertained the first dictator, Ayub Khan, at Mount Vernon, the only time George Washington’s home has ever witnessed a state dinner. Richard Nixon turned a blind eye to Pakistan’s murder of hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis to keep his friends in the army in power—and his back channel to China open. Yet despite Nixon’s support of Islamabad, India still scored an overwhelming victory against Pakistan in the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War. Ronald Reagan entertained Mohammad Zia ul-Haq as he encouraged the Arab jihadists that would become al-Qaeda. George W. Bush let Pervez Musharraf give the Afghan Taliban a sanctuary to kill American and NATO soldiers in Afghanistan.

In contrast, LBJ cut off military aid when Pakistan started the 1965 war with India, and George H. W. Bush sanctioned Islamabad for building a bomb that Reagan had tacitly approved. Bill Clinton sanctioned the country again for testing the bomb after India goaded it into doing so (he had little choice, as the U.S. Congress mandated automatic sanctions for testing).

What the U.S.-Pakistan relationship needs is constancy and consistency. We need to recognize that change in Pakistan will come when we engage reliably with the Pakistani people, support the democratic process and address Pakistan’s legitimate security concerns. Candor needs to be the hallmark of an enduring commitment to civilian rule in Pakistan.

U.S.-aid levels should not be the product of temper tantrums on Capitol Hill. We should help Pakistan deal with its illiteracy rate, because literate women will fight the Taliban. We should provide the Pakistani army with the helicopter fleet it needs to combat insurgents in the western badlands. We should stop trying to legislate Pakistani behavior by attaching conditions to aid legislation, a tactic that has consistently failed with Pakistan in the past. Our goal should be to convince Pakistanis that the existential threat to their liberty comes not from the CIA or India, but from al-Qaeda.

We also need to engage India constructively on how to reduce and then end the tensions, including in Kashmir, that have resulted from partition. Ironically, the Pakistanis and Indians have made great progress on this issue behind the scenes in the last decade. Musharraf deserves credit for much of this. After trying to force India to give up Kashmir by limited war, nuclear intimidation and terror, he finally settled on a back-channel negotiation process. No one on either side denies how close to a deal they have come. Quiet and subtle American diplomacy should now try to advance this further.

None of this will be easy. Pakistan is a complex and combustible society undergoing a severe crisis. America helped create that crisis over a long period of time. If we don’t help Pakistan now, we may have to deal with a jihadist Pakistan later. That should focus our attention.

Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer, is a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. He has advised four sitting presidents on Pakistan. He chaired an interagency review of policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan for the Obama administration that was completed in March 2009. National Interest

Mohsen recalls, “That really shocked me. I asked myself, ‘Who persuaded this interrogator that he is an agent of God?’ A person who believes he has a mission from God can easily torture, kill, or do anything.”

That evening one of the interrogators told him that he was going to be released “because your friends have lied to Imam Khomeini, but rest assured you will be back here. We’ll be waiting for you.” He was turned over to a guard who led him outside the building, where he was allowed to remove the blindfold, and suddenly roles seemed to revert to normal. As they waited for a car to the prison gate, the guard said, “Mr. Sazegara, I know you are the head of the automotive industries. I’m trying to buy a van. Can you help me?” Mohsen declined.

The next morning, Mohsen went directly to the office of Minister Nabavi, his friend and patron, to review the previous day’s events. Nabavi told him that he had enlisted the help of Ardebili, the head of the Judicial Authority, and that the two of them had won over Ahmad Khomeini, the usually hard-line son of the Imam, who in turn went to his father and secured an order for Mohsen’s release.

Mohsen told Nabavi of the disturbing things he had seen and heard in Evin. “I have to tell Ayatollah Khomeini what is going on,” he said. Nabavi phoned Ahmad Khomeini and asked if they could come to see his father, and somewhat to their surprise, they were given an appointment for later that morning at the Ayatollah’s home in Jamaran, a northern suburb of Tehran (where he had moved from the holy city of Qom).

They sat on the floor of a small drawing room. Mohsen was not on personal terms with him, but the Ayatollah remembered the devoted young man on his staff in Neauphle-le-Château. Mohsen recited his experience at Evin, stressing the words of the interrogator who acted as if he were God’s deputy. Mohsen felt tense and he thought that Khomeini, who listened carefully, seemed to grow tense, too. Then, as Mohsen reconstructs it, he concluded with a bold albeit respectful appeal: “Imam, I have followed you from Paris. If you agree with what Lajevardi is doing, please tell me. Then I will know that I made a mistake and I will resign my position and ask God to forgive me. And if you do not agree, why don’t you remove Lajevardi?” Khomeini did not respond. . . .

As they left, Mohsen and Nabavi shared their astonishment that Ahmad had gotten them the meeting with his father so promptly, since they believed Ahmad was Lajevardi’s sponsor. Apparently something was in the wind. Ardebili, the head of the Judicial Authority, had grown unhappy with Lajevardi. Ardebili was close to Khomeini, and Mohsen heard later that he had brought some other former prisoners to tell their tales to the Imam. A week or so later, Lajevardi was removed from his post.

This, however, was not enough to make Mohsen feel whole again. After what he had seen in Evin, Mohsen says:

Something was broken inside me, and I was not the same person. Put it this way: You have raised a child and you like him very much. But one day, you see that he is doing something very bad, a crime. Something will break inside you. Still, you love him; this is your son. But you do not like what he is doing. I had such a feeling. I still loved the revolution. I was about 30 years old. I had spent so far 13 years of my life from early morning until late at night on it. And I really loved the movement that we made, that great victory. But now, I did not like that face of the revolution, the face of this new child.

Now, I began to believe many things that I had heard. Before that, I told myself, “No, they are exaggerating.” But now, I believed everything.

Mohsen . . . submitted his resignation, . . . signing on as an adviser to a few companies. Altogether this work required about 25 hours a week, and most of the rest of his hours he spent reading, or rather rereading. He began with the works of Ayatollah Khomeini, at the center of which lay the theory of Velayat-e Faqih, the rule of the religious jurisprudent. Mohsen recalls:

When I read that book the first time, I was 20. I did not notice the main idea of Ayatollah Khomeini. What was wonderful for me was his language against the U.S., the Shah, and Israel. This time, I did not care about the slogans. I was looking for the main ideas. And I said to myself, “Wow, what kind of political philosophy is this? So much authority for one person without any control, and a divine mission. This is despotism.”

It was, moreover, a despotism whose scowl Mohsen realized he had seen with his own eyes on the face of the heartless interrogator who thought he was acting for God when he ordered more lashes. National Review

— The preceding is an excerpt from The Next Founders: Voices of Democracy in the Middle East, by Joshua Muravchik, just released by Encounter Books.

Standing up to America and Israel fell to non-state entities such as Hamas and Hezbollah, and their money trail leads to Iran. Ahmadinejad is simply the latest leader whom Arabs have lionized and forgiven for cutting off our nose to spite our face.

Little did the repressions visited upon Iranians matter, even though the hardships they endured were often mirrored in Arab cities cheering on Ahmadinejad. Iran supported the Palestinians, and Ahmadinejad regularly railed at the United States and threatened Israel.

But with thousands in Ahmadinejad's own country filling the streets, effectively saying that it's not enough to simply stand up to America and Israel, what now for those Arabs who lionize Ahmadinejad? Especially now that George W. Bush is gone? Where is the sympathy or support for the plight of the Iranians?

Silence.

That silence is the sound of hearts breaking over the dream of political Islam. When the 1979 revolution swept away the U.S.-backed shah and his injustices, Iran held out the tantalizing mirage of rule by Islam, even for countries that were not majority Shiite. Thirty years later, Iranians are protesting not a secular, U.S.-backed dictator but a system run by clerics who claim to uphold democracy as long as its candidates are given the regime's stamp of approval.

What's happening in Iran is not about the United States or Israel. It's not about Ahmadinejad or Mir Hossein Mousavi. It's not even about the poor or the rich in Iran. The demonstrations are about people who feel their will and voice have been disregarded. In Egypt, it's our secular dictator, in power for almost 28 years, who disregards our will. In Iran, it's a clerical regime in power for 30 years, hiding behind God.

Dictatorship by clerics is not more acceptable because its torture and beatings are committed in the name of God.

This must be especially difficult for political Islamic organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, which congratulated Ahmadinejad on his "victory" and yet whose generational disagreements and divisions mirror those in Iran: A young generation of Muslim brothers and sisters has over the past few years challenged the Brotherhood's aging leadership on issues such as prohibiting female and Christian leaders.

That aging leadership gave the young Muslims the very undemocratic choice of shutting up or leaving.

How do we know? The same way we've known about much of Iran's strife -- through blogs and social networking Web sites such as Facebook and Twitter. These days, most of the noise in the Arab world is online.

Online, you will hear bloggers connecting repression in Iran and Arab countries. Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas, known for exposing police brutality on YouTube, was quick to send Twitter alerts that Iran's clerics, like the Mubarak regime, used plainclothes thugs to terrorize demonstrators. Online, you will hear young Arabs express envy over the huge Iranian demonstrations in the face of government crackdowns. Online, Arabs will expose U.S. hypocrisy and ask what happened to U.S. support for peaceful demonstrators when they were beaten and dragged off Cairo streets in 2005 and 2006.

Online, Arabs argue over the politics of cutting off our nose to spite our face, challenging each other to support Iranian democrats despite Ahmadinejad's taunts at America and Israel.

Tired of the Arab world's embarrassing silence over Iran? Go online. Iranian blogs are older and more established than many in the Arab world, but the Web is giving voice to the voiceless and shattering the silence. Washington Post

Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian-born commentator based in New York, writes and lectures on Arab and Muslim issues. She received the European Commission's 2009 Samir Kassir Prize for Freedom of the Press for opinion writing. Her e-mail address is info@monaeltahawy.com.

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Fantastic as these claims may have seemed three years ago, they sound mild when compared with the ravings and gibberings that are now issued from the Khamenei pulpit. Here is a man who hasn't even heard that his favorite conspiracy theory is a long-standing joke among his own people. And these ravings and gibberings have real-world consequences of which at least three may be mentioned:

There is nothing at all that any Western country can do to avoid the charge of intervening in Iran's internal affairs. The deep belief that everything—especially anything in English—is already and by definition an intervention is part of the very identity and ideology of the theocracy.

It is a mistake to assume that the ayatollahs, cynical and corrupt as they may be, are acting rationally. They are frequently in the grip of archaic beliefs and fears that would make a stupefied medieval European peasant seem mentally sturdy and resourceful by comparison.

The tendency of outside media to check the temperature of the clerics, rather than consult the writers and poets of the country, shows our own cultural backwardness in regrettably sharp relief. Anyone who had been reading Pezeshkzad and Nafisi, or talking to their students and readers in Tabriz and Esfahan and Mashad, would have been able to avoid the awful embarrassment by which everything that has occurred on the streets of Iran during recent days has come as one surprise after another to most of our uncultured "experts."

That last observation also applies to the Obama administration. Want to take a noninterventionist position? All right, then, take a noninterventionist position. This would mean not referring to Khamenei in fawning tones as the supreme leader and not calling Iran itself by the tyrannical title of "the Islamic republic." But be aware that nothing will stop the theocrats from slandering you for interfering anyway. Also try to bear in mind that one day you will have to face the young Iranian democrats who risked their all in the battle and explain to them just what you were doing when they were being beaten and gassed. (Hint: Don't make your sole reference to Iranian dictatorship an allusion to a British-organized coup in 1953; the mullahs think that it proves their main point, and this generation has more immediate enemies to confront.)

There is then the larger question of the Iranian theocracy and its continual, arrogant intervention in our affairs: its export of violence and cruelty and lies to Lebanon and Palestine and Iraq and its unashamed defiance of the United Nations, the European Union, and the International Atomic Energy Agency on the nontrivial matter of nuclear weapons. I am sure that I was as impressed as anybody by our president's decision to quote Martin Luther King—rather late in the week—on the arc of justice and the way in which it eventually bends.

It was just that in a time of crisis and urgency he was citing the wrong King text (the right one is to be found in the "Letter From a Birmingham Jail"), and it was also as if he were speaking as the president of Iceland or Uruguay rather than as president of these United States. Coexistence with a nuclearized, fascistic theocracy in Iran is impossible even in the short run. The mullahs understand this with perfect clarity. Why can't we? Slate

But the debate over the election is simply a catalyst. The uprising has moved well beyond the ballot issue. We are witnessing 30 years of frustration pouring into the streets. We see demands for a livable minimum wage, the end to compulsory veiling for women, freeing prisoners of conscience, banning the death penalty and guarantees for the rights to free expression, organization, strike and protest. The people don't want a recount; they want what they have been chanting for days: "death to the dictator." This is one step short of a true revolutionary call for the end of the regime itself. Freedom is on display in the streets of Iran. The people are taking back their sovereignty, making a stand in defense of their inalienable rights.

And in their wake, they have left the tattered claims of the cultural relativists.

The poverty of Islamic rule

The Iranian uprising is a direct challenge to the radical Islamist program pursued in Iran since the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's 1979 revolution. The Iranian people have had enough of radical clerical rule. This is not to say they are not, for the most part, believing Muslims. They are simply people more modern than their rulers. They are objecting to mullahs exploiting their faith to bolster a corrupt, repressive theocracy.

The Islamic regime stands and falls on its ability to maintain its religious legitimacy. That authority is now in question, partly due to the regime's tactical mistakes. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei quickly declared the tainted election results a "divine assessment" and since has stood firmly behind this conclusion. Once God is invoked it is hard to backtrack.

But God does not stuff ballot boxes. Now every night the people of Iran take to their rooftops and cry "Allah Akbar" into the darkness. They are appealing directly to God against those who presume to be his agents on Earth. The legitimacy of the jihad crowd to speak for ordinary Muslims is slipping away.

Iran wants America's attention

Private media are running rings around broadcast outlets funded by America and Israel to challenge Iran. The uprising in Iran has become an international sensation through the global reach of digital information technology. Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and e-mail have allowed the protesters to communicate directly to the world, bypassing feckless regime attempts to suppress journalists. The rawness of the videos and the frankness of the tweets allow observers to experience the events viscerally. The impact is powerful.

As for those who are saying it is wrong to "meddle" in Iran's internal affairs, would you please note that Iranians are holding signs in English. Many of the blog posts, tweets and YouTube narrations are also in English. If they are not crying out directly for American aid, why are they using English?

Neda Soltan's death is galvanizing many Americans too. While many others have been killed in recent days, the immediacy and the shock of this lovely woman dying on the streets has struck a chord. People who were barely aware of conditions in Iran now weep before their computer screens. Neda - whose name means "voice" or "call" - has become the voice of the aspirations of the Iranian people.

Engagement is dead

Even if the regime in Tehran decides for some reason to extend an unclenched fist, President Obama would be shaking a bloody hand. The human-rights violations shown on America's computer screens make it impossible for the president to engage in some 1970s-style detente with Iran. Even the realists realize that is now unrealistic.

The diplomatic climate necessary for the Obama administration's engagement policy is gone. The subtle signaling dance of the last few months is impossible now. The Obama team's original timetable, calling for progress by the end of the year, has been overcome by events.

Iran's bomb now can't be ignored

Iran's quest for nuclear weapons now worries more Americans than ever. If the regime is willing to be this cruel to its own people, could the American soldiers or Israeli citizens living within reach of Iran's missiles expect any mercy? United Nations nuclear overseer Mohamed ElBaradei said last week that he had concluded the regime was seeking atomic weapons to send a message to the rest of the world: "Don't mess with us." With the frailty of the regime broadcast worldwide, its sense of insecurity will have increased and, with that, the need to have a nuclear insurance policy. It is extreme folly for the United States to continue the official charade that the Tehran regime is not actively seeking such weapons. Politicizing this intelligence must end. The Obama administration should take this opportunity to demand an immediate halt to Iran's bomb program.

The time has come to face the Islamic Republic without the comfortable blindfolds we have worn over the past few decades. The reality of Neda Soltan, dead with her eyes open, should open our eyes too. Editorial Washington Times

In a perverse irony, we are witnessing the most serious threat to the Islamic Republic since its establishment, at the same time the first American president explicitly to accept the regime’s legitimacy happens to be in office. Whatever credibility the mullahs have lost in the street, they have picked up in the Oval Office, where the president bizarrely seems less enthusiastic about a change in dispensation in Iran than much of Tehran’s population.

Obama says he wants to avoid stoking a nationalist backlash. A legitimate, but overblown, concern. Iranians surely can understand the difference between the U.S. sending CIA operatives into the country to help stage an anti-democratic coup — as Obama constantly reminds the world we did in the 1950s — and speaking up against repression. Without undue “meddling,” Obama could note that governments in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan honor election results, and exhort Iran to lead the democratic wave rather than resist it.

Obama’s timidity speaks to a guilty conscience. At some level, he buys the post-colonial critique of the West as the root of the developing world’s troubles, and thinks we lack the moral standing to judge non-Western governments that resent and envy us. Obama is perfectly capable of launching moralistic broadsides — just at his own country, especially under his predecessor. Who are we to condemn the abuse of peaceful demonstrators when we waterboarded three terrorists?

And Obama is so dead-set on negotiating with the current regime, he doesn’t want to invest much in the hope of changing it. Obama is often compared to Jimmy Carter, but his approach in Iran is the opposite of Carter’s. Carter was deeply moved by human rights and put the possibility of promoting them above other priorities, such as stability and maintaining an ally in Tehran. Obama is putting human rights behind stability, in the ultimate cause of a prospective bargain with the mullahs.

This isn’t really “realism,” but a stubborn commitment to an illusory belief in the power of talks with an ill-intentioned, reform-resistant dictatorship. Beneath the veneer of its hardheaded distancing from the protesters, Obama’s policy has a goopy, naïve heart.

Whatever wan hope there was that we could talk the Iranian regime out of its nuclear-weapons program is diminishing. The regime doesn’t appear to be in a compromising mood, and Obama’s free pass for the crackdown is likely only to broadcast our weakness and pliability. If there is no cost to violating international norms in crushing flesh-and-blood protesters, why will there be a cost to defying the parchment strictures of the International Atomic Energy Agency?

Obama has gotten a preview of what extending his hand to a clenched fist looks like in North Korea. Six months into the era of Obama’s irenic, world-calming diplomacy, Pyongyang has tested a long-range missile and a nuclear device, and announced it’s going to weaponize its plutonium stock and proceed with a uranium-enrichment program. Kim Jong Il’s family dynasty shows no sign of realizing that the advent of Obama was supposed to change its nature, interests, and behavior.

Why will the mullahs? National Review


— Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. © 2009 by King Features Syndicate

There are a number of things wrong with all this — well aside from the strange spectacle of seeing once-fervent liberal critics of old-style Kissingerian realism suddenly espousing Barack Obama’s kinder, gentler version of it.

1. The coup that unseated Mohammad Mossadeq was in 1953 — nearly six decades ago. Its details are still controversial: the proportional degree of CIA intervention compared to that of the British, the role of fundamentalist clerics in the opposition, the degree to which Mossadeq himself entertained authoritarian measures, and so on. What Kermit Roosevelt Jr. did or did not do as the CIA officer in charge, what were the actual intentions of the Mossadeq government in the Soviet-American Cold War rivalry — all of that is all now in the distant past.

Blaming America for undermining Mossadeq but not blaming it for later undermining the Shah is about as logical as claiming we must hold the current generations of Japanese accountable for Pearl Harbor, or that German actions in World War II permanently warped the American psyche, or that the Chinese Communists’ butchering thousands of Americans in Korea must be held against current generations of Chinese. At some point, all nations, big and small, need to get a life and move on. Of course, when one rushes in and blabbers out apologies without context, then one becomes a prisoner of those past actions — we are to be sorry about Iran then and so must be sorry ever after.

Iran, remember, has no such reluctance about meddling. It endorsed Bush in the 2004 presidential race — to the delight of the Kerry campaign. For six years, it has tried to murder Americans in Iraq and destabilize the Iraqi democracy. It has killed Americans in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, and done its best to thwart democratic government in Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Iraq. How odd that Iranian theocrats have no worries about violently overthrowing democracy abroad, while we are terrified of supporting democracy by words alone.

Criticizing the Ahmadinejad government for its election fraud and its response to peaceful demonstrations is not synonymous with crudely egging on street demonstrations. Reagan found a way to voice support for the Polish resistance to Soviet thuggery. Kennedy made sure that the Berliners knew that we believed they were right and the Soviet-sponsored East German Communists wrong.

In contrast, Ford’s calculated snub of Solzhenitsyn brought no gratitude from the Soviets, but plenty of shame to America. The elder Bush’s allegiance to Gorbachev over Yeltsin was finally embarrassing, and was rendered obsolete almost before it was embraced. To the extent that George W. Bush spoke out against autocracy in the Gulf and Egypt, he was to be praised, and some liberalization followed; but to the extent that he grew quiet in his second term, we were branded as hypocrites for supporting freedom in Iraq but not elsewhere in the Arab world.

Support for the reformers can be framed in terms of shared criticism of what we and they oppose, rather than clumsy cheering for their own agenda.

2. Voicing careful and wise support for the challenge to Ahmadinejad’s thuggery can influence events. That’s why the European Union is well ahead of us in its condemnation of the Iranian election fraud and subsequent crackdown.

Ahmadinejad is going to blame the U.S. whatever it does. He rightly sized up the new administration and realized there is now an American government that will apologize for the CIA’s actions in 1953, but not ask Iran to apologize for its deplorable record in Iraq from 2003 to 2009. So it is a one-way street with Iran, and it’s better to be damned for voicing criticism than for being afraid to voice criticism.

The Iranian theocrats are realists par excellence; they do not give a damn about ideals or morality, and will deal with us in the future on their perception of their own self-interest: whether or not we “meddle” now, if they find it useful to talk in the future, they will; if they find it of no value to talk in the future, they won’t.

3. Obama’s third assumption makes even less sense than the first two. Mousavi may be a past supporter of Khomeinism, as are ostensibly all Iranian politicians. But he is not on a moral or even a practical par with Ahmadinejad. He has already voiced criticism of Holocaust denial, and has called for freer expression and communication, and for liberalization of Iranian theocratic law. In other words, he is a type of multicultural “other” who is a rational opponent of U.S. policy, but whom Obama actually could court.

Furthermore, the crowds seem already to have transcended Mousavi, seeing in him more a tool than a totem, hoping that his election would lead to far more liberalization than even he intended. One of the reasons Gorbachev was welcomed by Reagan was that he began to initiate change that would soon render Gorbachev himself obsolete. The same may well be true with Mousavi.

In conclusion, we are seeing a new multicultural realism in American foreign policy — the result of a number of currents in our popular culture. We do not judge the authoritarian “other” in the same way in which we judge authoritarian conservatives abroad who ape Westernism.

There is also a weird sort of multicultural fantasy about cleric-ruled Iran, fueled by the non-Western dress of its elites, the constant evocation of 1953 (ironically by fundamentalists whose forefathers approved of Mossadeq’s removal), and its serial Hollywood-like denunciation of America. Ahmadinejad brilliantly ties into the Che effect, which makes his blood-curdling remarks about Israel’s end about as disturbing to American public opinion as the fact that Che himself was a cold-blooded killer who executed the innocent with his own hands. Add it all up and we get a reprise of Bill Clinton at Davos in 2005 gushing on about Iranian democracy and its progressives, as if a rigged plebiscite overseen by a group of unshaven dictators in Nehru-like coats is somehow neat.

Iraq explains a lot — and provides the greatest irony of all. We wish not to meddle in Iran in order to encourage real democracy there, but we accept Iranian meddling intended to destroy Iraqi democracy. We reach out to the Shiite thug Ahmadinejad in Iran, but not to the Shiite moderate Maliki in Iraq. We feel so guilty about promoting Iraqi democracy that we won’t aid its budding counterpart in nearby Iran. We are so wedded to the canard that the removal of Saddam removed the counterweight to Iran and empowered the clerics that we cannot see the existence of Iraqi democracy as a great catalyst to the democratic forces in Iran, undermining the theocracy more with words than Iran could undermine the Iraqi democracy with guns.

Then, of course, there is Obama and his quest for a global messianic rather than an American presidential role. So far it pays to be Hamas and the Palestine Authority rather than Israel, Chávez rather than Uribe, Ahmadinejad rather than Maliki, Putin rather than an Eastern European elected prime minister, a Turkish Islamist rather than a Greek elected prime minister. The former all gain attention by their hostility, the latter earn neglect by their moderation and generally pro-American views. Praising Islam abroad is a lot more catchy than praising democracy — one boldly inspires Bush’s critics, the other sheepishly dovetails with Bush’s agenda. All that, in varying degrees, also explains the troubling neglect of the Iranians in the street.

One mystery remains: Does Obama do this because the squeaky problem gets the attention, or does he really empathize with the tired anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist refrain of those who used to be considered hostile? National Review

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Recently, your president ordered this mass grave to be destroyed. Why did he do that? I suspect it was out of fear. Because every day weeping mothers lay flowers on that inglorious pile of earth. Imam Khomeini promised the people Islamic justice -- those mass graves testify to what that means. They are the hallmark of the theocratic regime which you have led for the past 20 years.

Thirty years ago, millions of Iranians, young people mainly, took to the streets to demonstrate for three fundamental rights. First and foremost the three basic freedoms of Azadi-e Baian, Azadi-e Qalam, Azadi-e Andish-e: the freedom of speech, the freedom to write and the freedom of thought. Secondly, the right of independence. And thirdly, they demanded the (Islamic) republic.

Against our hopes we helped put a monstrous constitution in place. In the end, Imam Khomeini's doctrine of vilayat-i faqih, rule by a single ayatollah, created an unparalleled crisis for Iran and Islam itself.

Excellency, every response you have given in the face of non-violent protest has been one of more oppression and more violence. Even in constitutional questions: the appointment of the supreme religious political leader under the vilayat-i faqih system, has led to insoluble conflict. The periodical presidential elections have had no influence at all on the organization of the judicial system, on foreign policy or the government's security policy, and have thus undermined every form of public credibility and legitimacy. Former-president Khatami was eventually forced to concede in public that despite the high expectations of his supporters he had been unable to implement any serious reforms. You, as leader of Iran, blocked every presidential measure that you did not accept. As a result, millions of Iranians were disappointed in President Khatami -- although it was actually you who was to blame.

The revolution that had begun in freedom, ended in the rule of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. President Ahmadinejad boasted that he would wipe Israel, a member of the United Nations, from the map. Many like me feel a deep shame at this uncivilized and un-Persian anti-Semitism.

Iran's semi-official anti-Semitism and tyrannical rule towards its own people reveals the moral failure of the regime that you lead. Millions of people in Teheran and other Iranian cities have condemned this moral bankruptcy by demonstrating and by voting for Mir Hossein Mousavi. Your regime is finished. Surely you realize that too, Excellency? And if you have not realized it yet, then surely you, just like the Shah some 30 years ago, must have heard the hundreds of thousands in Teheran shouting "Allahu Akabar, down with the dictatorship!"

Excellency, the demonstrations attest that the people of Iran, the children of the revolution, will accept your rule no more. Your regime is no longer able to exercise sovereignty over the Iranian people without the recourse to violence -- extreme violence. I urge you to recognize that Iran is now undeniably at a crossroads: Either the will of the people is accepted and a peaceful transition to democracy is achieved or you plan to respond to these protests by launching a bloodbath, which will cause unprecedented chaos in Iran. Ask yourself: Can a regime, hated and rejected by a huge majority of the population, transform itself into a democratic administration that recognizes the rule of law? Has it ever in history been possible for a political transition to take place peacefully and without the shedding of blood?

The surprising answer is yes: it has been done. The Apartheid regime was also despised by the majority. And that regime was an extremely violent regime. Even so, South Africa opted for a peaceful transition under the brilliant leadership of Nelson Mandela. They negotiated to guarantee the interests (including security and property rights) of the ruling minority. At the same time, they discussed and developed a transitional constitution. This model, called Negotiating Justice, is founded on human rights and the principle of democracy. What happened in South Africa, a country torn apart by hatred and violence, can happen in Iran too.

Excellency, everything depends in the end on the will of the political leader. On you. You may, like the former president of South Africa, Frederik Willem de Klerk, decide to create an opportunity for transition, or you may, as you have done in the past, choose to suppress the will of the people with violence. But I urge you to consider that millions of Iranians trust Mousavi. In the latest election, it was not Ahamdinejad who won, but Mousavi. He could play the role that Mandela played in South Africa's peaceful transition. If you let him.

Naturally, people will ask what will happen to those who perpetrated the crimes against humanity -- the mass executions that were committed in the name of the Islamic state. Here, the precedent set by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa could provide a possible roadmap. The will of the people need not end in bloodshed. The United Nations could play a crucial role -- it has considerable experience in what is known as Transitional Justice. UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon should discuss this with the Security Council. Would this be an infringement of Iranian sovereignty? No.

Excellency, even you apparently have your doubts about the official results of the election since you have ordered the outcome to be investigated. The mass demonstrations in the cities of Iran show that the Iranian people want political transition.

Why should the UN Security Council concern itself with the Iranian question? Because an Iran dominated by violent internal conflict is a threat to regional peace and security and a threat to the people of Iran themselves. Furthermore, with the outcome of the current conflict in doubt, the existence of advanced missiles and enriched radioactive material poses a serious threat to international peace and security. It is up to the United Nations to persuade you, if you fail to realize yourself, that a peaceful transition is possible. In the end it is Iranians, including Iranians living abroad, who must make this change happen.

Excellency Khamenei, you and I know that no tyranny has ever succeeded in creating a political system that lasts. Your advisors have been misinforming you these past years. They have made you deaf and blind to what is really happening. The truth is that the people despise the ruling elite. Your puppet Ahmadinejad is reviled. If you continue to use violence against your people, then you have obviously learned nothing from the tragic fate of the last Shah of Persia.

The mothers of the members of my family who were executed will never forgive you. But they will let you withdraw peacefully, for the sake of freedom and the peace of their grandchildren. Time is short for both the Iranian people and for the international community. I wish you wisdom and peace,

Yours, Afshin Ellian
Spiegel

Despite absurd claims that Obama's Islam-smooching Cairo speech triggered the calls for freedom in Tehran's streets, these politics are local. But if those partisan claims of the "Cairo Effect" were true, wouldn't our president be obliged to stand beside those he incited?
Too bad for the Iranians, but their outburst of popular anger toward Iran's oppressive government doesn't fit the administration's script -- which is written around negotiations with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

To Obama, his dogmatic commitment to negotiations is infinitely more important than a few million protesters chanting the Farsi equivalent of "We Shall Overcome."

This is madness. There is no chance -- zero, null, nada -- that negotiations with the junta of mullahs will lead to the termination (or even a serious interruption) of Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons. Our president's faith in his powers of persuasion is beginning to look pathological. Is his program of negotiations with apocalypse-minded, woman-hating, Jew-killing fanatics so sacrosanct that he can't acknowledge human cries for freedom?

Is the Rev. Jeremiah Wright a better role model than Martin Luther King? It's a damned shame that our first minority president wasn't a veteran of our civil-rights struggle, rather than its privileged beneficiary.

An ugly pattern's emerging in our president's beliefs:

He's infallible. This is rich, given all the criticism of the Bush administration's unwillingness to admit mistakes. We now have a president with Jimmy Carter's naivete, Richard Nixon's distaste for laws, Lyndon Johnson's commitment to the wrong war, and Bill Clinton's moral fecklessness.

Democracy isn't important. Our president seems infected by yesteryear's Third-World-leftist view that dictatorships are essential to post-colonial development -- especially for Muslims.

Look where Obama has gone and who he supports: the pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia, his groveling speech in Egypt, his embrace of Hamas, his hands-off approach to the gory regime in Sudan -- and now his dismay at the protests in Iran.

Strict Islam is true Islam. This is bewildering, given Obama's childhood exposure to the tolerant Islam practiced in most of Indonesia. The defining remark of his presidency thus far was his Cairo demand for the right of Muslim women to wear Islamic dress in the West -- while remaining silent about their right to reject the hijab, burqa or chador in the Middle East.

History's a blank canvas -- except for America's sins. Of course, we've had presidents who presented the past in the colors they preferred -- but we've never had one who just made it all up.

Obama's ignorance of history is on naked display -- no sense of the brutality of Iran's Islamist regime, of the years of mass imprisonments, diabolical torture, prison rapes, wholesale executions and secret graves that made the shah's reign seem idyllic. Our president seems to regard the Iranian protesters as spoiled brats.

Facts? Who cares? In his Cairo sermon -- a speech that will live in infamy -- our president compared the plight of the Palestinians, the aggressors in 1948, with the Holocaust. He didn't mention the million Jews dispossessed and driven from Muslim lands since 1948, nor the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Christians from the West Bank.

Now our president's attempt to vote "present" yet again green-lights the Iranian regime's determination to face down the demonstrators -- and the mullahs understand it as such.

If we see greater violence in Tehran, the blood of those freedom marchers will be on our president's hands. Ralph Peters in the New York post

CONTINUED

* A third faction believes that the entire Khomeinist system has passed its sell-by date and that Iran is ripe for regime change in the same way that the Soviet bloc countries were in the late 1980s. This faction is led by people like former Interior Minister Abdallah Nuri (a mid-ranking cleric), former rector of Tehran University Muhammad Abbas Sheybani and former members of parliament like Mahmoud A'alami and Imadeddin Baqi.

It now seems likely that Mehdi Karrubi -- a mullah who was another of the three losing candidates -- may also be joining them. In a statement published in Tehran yesterday, Karrubi claimed that Khamenei's nomination as "Supreme Guide" in 1989 had also been "a fruit of fraud" -- an implicit call for him to step down.

The rigged election has also split the military. The third losing candidate was Gen. Mohsen Rezai Mir-Qaed -- who led the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for 16 years.

Rezai's humiliating defeat -- in an election widely viewed as rigged -- has angered many Guard officers, who see him as something of a father figure. Defense Minister Gen. Mustafa Muhammad Najjar has praised Ahmadinejad in public -- but the commander of the Revolutionary Guard, Gen. Ali Jaafari, has maintained a meaningful silence. More, he has refused to send in Guard units to crush demonstrations in Tehran and 16 other major cites.

Since Ahmadinejad owes his ascent to support from the military-security establishment, any split in the Guard and its allied organs could spell trouble now.

Some compare the current popular unrest with the riots that shook Iran during Muhammad Khatami's presidency. But there are a number of key differences:

* Khatami was not as unpopular personally as Ahmadinejad is. Thus, Khatami was always able to act as a bridge between protestors and the "authorities."

* Back then, Khamenei managed to stay above the fray -- thus preserving the system's prestige, if not any actual popularity. This time, he has (for reasons hard to fathom) jumped in the ring in support of Ahmadinejad.

* Today, some heavyweights of the regime are siding with the protestors -- shattering the unity of the Khomeinist establishment in the face of a popular challenge. With every day that passes the number of dignitaries declaring support for Ahmadinejad declines -- while the number of those calling for his dismissal increases.

* This protest movement isn't limited to students in major cities. There are numerous reports of unrest in small towns and villages across the country. In some places, like Marivan and Gohar-Dasht, people have attacked government offices, burning the portraits of Khamenei and Ahmadinejad and seizing control of ballot boxes.

However the current struggle turns out, the regime has lost a good part of its legitimacy. It is also made clear that peaceful evolution within the regime is not possible. This makes the "regime change" option attractive for the first time since the mid-1990s.

Amir Taheri's latest book is "The Persian Night: Iran Under the Khomeinist Revolution." New York Post

Mr. Ahmadinejad was credited with more votes than anyone in Iran's history. If the results are to be believed, he won in all 30 provinces, and among all social and age categories. His three rivals, all dignitaries of the regime, were humiliated by losing even in their own hometowns. This was an unprecedented result even for the Islamic Republic, where elections have always been carefully scripted charades.

Many in Tehran, including leading clerics, see the exercise as a putsch by the military-security organs that back Mr. Ahmadinejad. Several events make these allegations appear credible. The state-owned Fars News Agency declared Mr. Ahmadinejad to have won with a two-thirds majority even before the first official results had been tabulated by the Interior Ministry. Mr. Ahmadinejad's main rival, former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, retaliated by declaring himself the winner. That triggered a number of street demonstrations, followed with statements by prominent political and religious figures endorsing Mr. Mousavi's claim.

Then something unprecedented happened. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the last word on all issues of national life, published a long statement hailing Mr. Ahmadinejad's "historic victory" as "a great celebration." This was the first time since 1989, when he became supreme leader, that Mr. Khamenei commented on the results of a presidential election without waiting for the publication of official results. Some analysts in Tehran tell me that the military-security elite, now controlling the machinery of the Iranian state, persuaded Mr. Khamenei to make the unprecedented move.

A detailed study of Mr. Khamenei's text reveals a number of anomalies. It is longer than his usual statements and full of expressions that he has never used before. The praise he showers on Mr. Ahmadinejad is simply too much. The question arises: Did someone use the supreme leader as a rubber stamp for a text written by Mr. Ahmadinejad himself? With Mr. Khamenei's intervention, Mr. Ahmadinejad's three defeated rivals are unlikely to contest the results of the election beyond lodging formal protests to the Council of the Guardians, a 12-mullah body that has the legal duty of endorsing the final results.

Buoyed by his victory, Mr. Ahmadinejad has already served notice that he intends to pursue his radical policies with even greater vigor. At yesterday's rally, he promised to pass a law enabling him to bring "the godfathers of corruption" to justice. His entourage insists that former Presidents Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammed Khatami, and former parliament Speaker Nateq Nouri, all midranking mullahs, may be among the first to fall in a massive purge of the ruling elite.

It is too early to guess whether these dignitaries would march to the metaphorical gallows without a fight. Even if they fight, they are unlikely to win. Nevertheless, Messrs. Rafsanjani, Khatami and other targeted mullahs could influence others who wish to prevent a complete seizure of power by Mr. Ahmadinejad's military-security clique, which is determined to replace the Shiite clergy as the nation's ruling elite. Nor is it at all certain that Supreme Leader Khamenei would stand by and watch his power eroded by a rising elite of radicals.

Mr. Ahmadinejad also plans to seize the assets of hundreds of mullahs and their business associates for redistribution among the poor. In his speech at his victory rally yesterday he promised to "dismantle the network of corruption," and vowed never to negotiate about Iran's nuclear program with any foreign power: "That file is shut, forever," he said.

Mr. Ahmadinejad's victory has several immediate consequences. First, it should kill the illusion that the Khomeinist regime is capable of internal evolution towards moderation. Mr. Ahmadinejad sees Iran as a vehicle for a messianic global revolution.

Second, the election eliminates the elements within the regime -- men such as Mr. Mousavi and Mahdi Karrubi (another of the three unsuccessful candidates who ran against Mr. Ahmadinejad) -- who have pursued the idea of keeping the theocracy intact while giving it a veneer of democratic practice. According to a statement published yesterday by Mostafa Tajzadeh, a former deputy interior minister who was among 132 anti-Ahmadinejad activists arrested over the weekend, the regime's "loyal opposition" would now have to reconsider its loyalty. With Iranian Gorbachev wannabes like Messrs. Khatami and Mousavi discredited, advocates of regime change such as former Interior Minister Abdullah Nouri and former Tehran University Chancellor Muhammad Sheybani look set to attract a good segment of the opposition within the establishment.

Mr. Ahmadinejad's victory has the merit of clarifying the situation within the Islamic Republic. The choice is now between a repressive regime based on a bizarre and obscurantist ideology and the prospect of real change and democratization. There is no halfway house.

The same clarity may apply to Tehran's foreign policy. Believing that he has already defeated the United States, Mr. Ahmadinejad will be in no mood for compromise. Moments after his victory he described the U.S. as a "crippled creature" and invited President Obama to a debate at the United Nations General Assembly, ostensibly to examine "the injustice done by world arrogance to Muslim nations."

Iran's neighbors are unlikely to welcome Mr. Ahmadinejad's re-election. He has reactivated pro-Iranian groups in a number of Arab countries, notably Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain. He is determined to expand Tehran's influence in Afghanistan and Iraq, especially as the U.S. retreats. He has also made it clear that he intends to help the Lebanese Hezbollah strengthen its position as a state within the state and a vanguard in the struggle against Israel.

Even Latin America is likely to receive Mr. Ahmadinejad's attention. The first foreign leader to phone to congratulate the re-elected Iranian leader was Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez, whose "brotherly message" received headline treatment from the state-controlled media in Tehran. Later this year, Mr. Ahmadinejad plans to attend the summit of the nonaligned movements in Cairo to claim its leadership, according to Iran's official news agency, with a message of "unity against the American Great Satan" and its allies in the region.

Buoyed by his dubious victory, Mr. Ahmadinejad appears itching for a fight on two fronts. He thinks he can have his way at home and abroad. As usual in history, hubris may turn out to be his undoing. WSJ Online

A communiqué published by the official Islamic Republic News Agency described the president's re-election as "the revival of the revolution" and a "victory for Hezbollah and the soldiers of Allah."

Ahmadinejad defeated those who "mocked his anti-Israel campaign in support of the wronged Palestinian nation" and "those who regard a crippled creature named the United States as a superpower," the communiqué claimed.

Recalling the president's belief that we are living at "the end of times," the communiqué said Iran would use its power to prepare for "the return of the Master of Time," referring to the Hidden Imam of Shiite Islam, who disappeared 14 centuries ago.

Yesterday, the defeated candidates, with Khatami, gathered at Rafsanjani's house to forge a common strategy against what they now see as a threat not only to their positions but also to their safety within the Islamic Republic. Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad's supporters marched in Tehran streets, calling on the re-elected president to "bring the thieves to justice."

Ahmadinejad presents himself as the champion of a new generation of revolutionaries who believe that most of the older ones have betrayed Ayatollah Khomeini's ideal by creating a new class of "parasitical rich sucking the blood of the poor masses."

His re-election is also a victory for the military and security organs of the state that have tried to secure more power at the expense of the mullahs.

Under Ahmadinejad, the number of mullahs in key official positions has been cut by almost 70 percent. In every case, their places have been taken by members of the Revolutionary Guard or its allied security services. Friday was historic in that this was the first presidential election in which no mullah was featured as a major contender. The only mullah allowed to stand, Karroubi, was put at the bottom of the polls and credited with less than 1 percent of the votes.

Ahmadinejad's re-election is bad news for President Obama's key foreign-policy ambition of making a deal with the Islamic Republic. Ahmadinejad is convinced that the United States has embarked on a "historic retreat" and that, as a "sunset power," it lacks the political courage to challenge a rejuvenated Islamic revolution in Iran.

The Khomeinist regime remains deeply unpopular, especially among young Iranians, who account for two-thirds of the population. Yesterday, Tehran and other major cities witnessed a series of anti-regime demonstrations, mostly with young people shouting, "Shame on you, Ahmadinejad! Quit the government!" Though small and isolated, these demonstrations could in time snowball into a mass movement against a divided regime that relies on social bribery and repression for its survival.

Unless the "Supreme Guide," Ali Khamenei, succeeds in calming things down, the two camps, frowning at one another like a pair of angry cats for months, are certain to clash at some point. The clash could push Iran, already facing economic meltdown, ethnic revolts and mass labor unrest, closer to the edge.

Ahmadinejad may end up with what looks like a pyrrhic victory. New York Post

Our new president did not tell a virulent anti-Semite to travel to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington to kill Jews, but he is most certainly creating a climate of hate against us. It is no coincidence that we are witnessing this level of hatred toward Jews as President Barack Obama positions America against the Jewish state.

Just days ago Obama traveled to Cairo, Egypt. It was his second trip in a short time to visit Muslim countries. He sent a clear message by not visiting Israel. But this was code. In Cairo, Obama said things that pose a grave danger to Jews in Israel, in America and everywhere. And if his views are not vigorously opposed they will help create a danger as great as that posed by the Nazis to the Jewish people. Just last week, Obama told his worldwide audience — more than 100 million people — that the killing of six million Jews during the Holocaust was the equivalent of Israel’s actions in dealing with the Palestinians.

This remark is incredible on its face, an insult to the six million Jews who died as a result of Hitler’s genocide — and it is a form of revisionism that will bode evil for Jews for years to come. While Obama acknowledged that “six million Jews were killed — more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today” — his discussion about the Holocaust was followed by this statement: “On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people — Muslims and Christians — have suffered in pursuit of a homeland.”

“On the other hand . . . ”?

Obama’s clever construct comparing the mass genocide of six million Jews to the Palestinian struggle will not be lost on the estimated 100 million Muslims who tuned into to hear him. Perhaps it was not lost on James W. von Brunn, the 88-year-old white supremacist identified as the alleged attacker Wednesday at the Holocaust Museum. He apparently felt that he could easily take retribution against the Jews for the atrocities Obama implies they are guilty of.At first blush Mr. Obama’s speech seemed rosy, optimistic — one that espoused tolerance and understanding.

If you scratch the surface it is a dangerous document that history will view as a turning point for America and Israel — one that will lead to dangerous times ahead for both Jews and believing Christians.The immediate danger posed by Obama’s speech is in its incredible re-writing of the history of Jews, Christians and Muslims from Medieval times to the present.Obama, continually throughout his speech, talks of Islam’s peaceful intent. And while there are certainly Koranic verses that support this interpretation, Islam has a long and bloody history of violence against fellow Muslims, Jews and Christians.

Has Obama not heard about the Muslim’s violent conquest of the Middle East, Spain and half of Western Europe? Was he never taught that the Crusades sought to turn back this Muslim onslaught that demanded subjugated populations convert or die? In his almost hour-long speech, there is not a single word about Islam’s well known and checkered past. Ironically, the American president offered plenty of references to what he sees are America’s evils, such as its “colonialism” and history of slavery.

“For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation,” Obama told his audience, citing a litany of American shortcomings. He failed to mention that Arab Muslims were the greatest slave traders in the history of humanity. According to Obama, Israelis, too, are guilty of wrongdoing, especially when it comes to their supposed maltreatment of the Palestinians.

Isn’t it odd an American president would go to a foreign country and slander his own country and its long-time ally? At the same time he praises — unconditionally — a religion and culture that has a long history of being antithetical to the very values that have made America a great nation? Mr. Obama even has the unbelievable gall, when talking about the treatment of Muslim women, to condemn Western countries for attempting to stop Muslim women from using the full facial cover, or hijab. This is a symbol of Muslim subjugation of women.

Listen to what Obama said: “Likewise, it is important for Western countries to avoid impeding Muslim citizens from practicing religion as they see fit - for instance, by dictating what clothes a Muslim woman should wear.” And Obama not only ignores the gross subjugation of women in many Arab societies — he does not mention even once the almost total religious intolerance throughout the Muslim world against Christians and Jews. In his speech, Obama’s only plea for Muslim women living in Muslim countries is that they should be afforded an education.

How about a discussion of the beheading of Arab women for “crimes” such as adultery? How about the malicious treatment of women in Muslim countries who choose not to wear the hijab? Obama insists that Islam has promoted tolerance and that in Islamic societies such ideals have flourished. Obama claimed that “as a student of history” he understands more than most the truth about “civilization's debt to Islam.” He added, “And throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality.”

Does he not know that a Jew or Christian would be beheaded in Saudi Arabia for practicing their religion today, now, this minute? Of course, Obama offers not one example of where religious freedom is truly tolerated in the Muslim world. Yet, he proudly told his audience that in every state of the union and throughout the U.S. there exist more than 1,200 mosques. But why, Mr. President, is there no Christian Church or Jewish synagogue operating within the borders of Saudi Arabia? Not even one.

Why in many countries, including your host Egypt, Christian churches have suffered vicious and continual persecution? Why is a once vibrant Cairo Jewish community — a home for the likes of Maimonides — today practically extinct? Why, dear president, has the ancient Christian community in the West Bank and places like Bethlehem been almost completely wiped out by the modern Muslim onslaught? “On the other hand,” to quote you Mr. President, you avoided mentioning some other truths.

Let’s start with the Israeli Arabs who can claim one of the highest standards of living in the Arab world. Indeed, they have more rights than Arabs in any Muslim country, their religious freedom is completely protected, and they even vote in free elections. Tell me what Muslim country matches Israel’s record in protecting its minorities? Even Arabs in the West Bank, during the time of Israeli control, saw their standard of living rise dramatically. Today, Arabs there are among the best educated in the world, thanks to Israel.

In your revisionist view, Israel has acted to harm these people. But it was not Israel that could not abide by United Nations resolutions clearly setting borders for both the state of Israel and an entity that had never existed before named Palestine. You cleverly omitted any discussion of these facts, or the continual attacks against the state of Israel over six decades by its Muslim neighbors. Nor is it the Israelis who persecute from time to time the Coptic Christians of Egypt.

No, Mr. President, I do not accept your assertion that you are seeking religious tolerance or that you are seeking to protect Jews. I do not accept it because you are inventing a false history to fit your own agenda. Mr. President, I am deeply disturbed that you would offer such a distortion of truth in the hopes of creating a lasting peace. A lasting peace cannot be created out of lies, distortions and half truths.

You profess to be a Christian. But you seem more intent on protecting Muslims. In your speech you talked openly of your Muslim heritage, your admiration of their way of life, and so forth. You said in your speech that you have made one of your chief aims of your presidency repairing the image of Islam. Why did you hide these views from the American public during the recent presidential campaign? Why, as president, did you fully bow to the Saudi king, who refuses to allow any religious freedom for any Christian or Jew?

You have made clear, by your words and assertions, that you are re-positioning the United States away from Israel, America’s lone democratic ally in the Mid-East. You have made clear through your statements and those of your minions that Israel should, under no circumstances, prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons. And yes, you have promised to retaliate against Iran if it ever attacks Israel with nuclear weapons.

But you know full well that if Iran succeeds in its admitted goal of “wiping the Jewish state off the map” — and hits this tiny nation with nuclear warheads — there will be no Israel for the U.S. to retaliate on behalf of.

Some Jews may be naïve, but we are not stupid. Newsmax

Rabbi Dr. Morton H. Pomerantz is a member of the Reform movement of Judaism and serves as a chaplain for the State of New York. A former Navy and Marine Corps officer and chaplain, he has also served as deputy national chaplain for the Jewish War Veterans of the United States.

In his speech last week in Cairo, President Obama proclaimed he was a “student of history.” But despite Barack Obama’s image as an Ivy League-educated intellectual, he lacks historical competency, in areas of both facts and interpretation.

This first became apparent during the presidential campaign. Candidate Obama proclaimed then that during World War II his great-uncle had helped liberate Auschwitz, and that his grandfather knew fellow American troops that had entered Auschwitz and Treblinka.

Both are impossible. The Americans didn’t free either Nazi death camp. (Regarding Obama’s great uncle’s war experience, the Obama team later said he’d meant the camp at Buchenwald.)Much of what Obama said to thousands of Germans during his Victory Column speech in Berlin last summer was also ahistorical. He began, “I know that I don’t look like the Americans who’ve previously spoken in this great city.” He apparently forgot that for the prior eight years, the official faces of American foreign policy in Germany were Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice — both African-Americans.

In the same speech, Obama seemed to suggest that the world had come to together to save Berlin during the Airlift. In fact, it was almost an entirely American and British effort — written off by most observers as hopeless and joined by a handful of Western allies only when the lift looked like it might succeed.

In the recent Cairo speech, Obama’s historical allusions were even more suspect. Almost every one of his references was either misleading or incomplete. He suggested that today’s Middle East tension was fed by the legacy of European colonialism and the Cold War that had reduced nations to proxies.

But the great colonizers of the Middle East were the Ottoman Muslims, who for centuries ruled with an iron fist. The 20th-century movements of Baathism, Pan-Arabism, and Nasserism — largely homegrown totalitarian ideologies — did far more damage over the last half-century to the Middle East than did the legacy of European colonialism.

Obama also claimed that “Islam . . . carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment.” While medieval Islamic culture was impressive and ensured the survival of a few classical texts — often through the agency of Arabic-speaking Christians — it had little to do with the European rediscovery of classical Greek and Latin values. Europeans, Chinese, and Hindus, not Muslims, invented most of the breakthroughs Obama credited to Islamic innovation.

Much of the Renaissance, in fact, was more predicated on the centuries-long flight of Greek-speaking Byzantine scholars from Constantinople to Western Europe to escape the aggression of Islamic Turks. Many romantic thinkers of the Enlightenment sought to extend freedom to oppressed subjects of Muslim fundamentalist rule in eastern and southern Europe.

Obama also insisted that “Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition.” Yet the Spanish Inquisition began in 1478; by then Cordoba had long been re-conquered by Spanish Christians, and was governed as a staunchly Christian city.

In reference to Iraq, President Obama promised that “no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other.” Is he unaware that the United States imposed democracies after World War II?

After the defeat of German Nazism, Italian fascism, and Japanese militarism, Americans — by force — insisted that these nations adopt democratic governments, for both their own sakes and the world’s. Indeed, it is hard to think of too many democratic governments that did not emerge from violence — including our own.

Obama also stated: “For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights.”

With all due respect to our president, this assertion is again not fully accurate. The only thing that ended slavery in the United States was the Civil War, which saw some 600,000 Americans — the vast majority of them white — lost in a violent struggle to ensure that nearly half the country would not remain a slave-owning society. Also, the massive urban riots of the 1960s and 1970s were certainly violent.

This list of distortions could be easily expanded. President Obama, in elegant fashion, may casually invoke the means of politically correct history for the higher ends of contemporary reconciliation. But it is a bad habit. Eloquence and good intentions exempt no one from the truth of the past — President Obama included. National Review

— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal. © 2009 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Many supporters of Barack Obama who are also supporters of Israel— from both the Jewish and Christian communities—are now wondering whether their faith in America’s charismatic new president was misplaced on this key issue.

At the core of the queasiness is the Obama Administration’s sudden publicly strident approach against Israel. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton has become the Administration’s chief megaphone for the new policy, fond of publicly scolding Israel on settlements. "The president was very clear,” she stated, “when Prime Minister Netanyahu was here. He wants to see a stop to settlements—not some settlements, not outposts, not natural growth exceptions. We think it is in the best interests of the effort that we are engaged in that settlement expansion cease. That is our position. That is what we have communicated very clearly, not only to the Israelis but to the Palestinians and others. And we intend to press that point.”

At first, many Obama devotees simply muttered quietly about the harsh public tone taken against Israel. It began at the level of the “close listeners,” those who follow the minute-to-minute developments and promulgations of the Arab-Israel dynamic. Eventually, the national leadership began verbalizing concern as well, and then local leaders joined in. If leadership jitters continue, the rank-and-file from among Israel’s supporters could begin distancing themselves from Obama’s Mideast policy and even joining the loyal opposition on a range of issues. One seasoned Washington correspondent quipped, “It has not yet reached the Jimmy Carter level.”

The first articles reporting the jitters began appearing weeks ago in mainstream Jewish media outlets such as the JTA and the Forward. Indeed, the latest reporting by veteran JTA Washington correspondent Ron Kampeas bears the headline, “Some Israeli-U.S. Officials move to keep the volume down.” Kampeas’s current article quotes an e-mail from the White House to Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the umbrella body for public policy groups. "While we may have some differences of view with Israel at the moment over settlements,” the White House e-mail explains, “we are trying to work through them quietly, professionally, and without rancor or ultimatums, as befits a strong relationship with an important ally. We are confident we can do that."

The present clash functions at a number of domestic and international levels—some of them contradictory, and all of them granulated.

In many minds, the harsh new policy was presaged May 5, 2009 at the recent American Israel Public Affairs Committee annual policy conference. “You're not going to like my saying this,” declared vice president Joe Biden, “but do not build more settlements, dismantle existing outposts, and allow the Palestinians freedom of movement based on their first actions, its access to economic opportunity and increased security responsibility. This is a "show me" deal—not based on faith—show me.” That was day one of the new policy.

After the much anticipated May 18, 2009 White House summit between Obama and Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the differences quickly became apparent. First, Netanyahu would not commit to a two-state solution. Second, he resisted the idea of freezing settlements. The White House made it clear that both policies were indispensible. Netanyahu did not budge.

Then came the public scolding, primarily from Secretary of State Clinton. She has regularly repeated her refrain. In a June 5, 2009 press conference with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu in Washington, she countered any Israeli suggestion that a verbal agreement existed that allowed some “natural growth” in settlements. “There is no memorialization of any informal and oral agreements,” Clinton said. “If they did occur, which of course people say they did, they did not become part of the official position of the United States government.”

Obama himself has emphasized, “We will say in public what we say in private to Israelis, Palestinians and Arabs.”

The entire matter places Israel supporters in a torn situation. Start with the two-state solution. Until the recently elected Netanyahu government, standard Israeli diplomatic parlance accepted the two-state solution. Heading up a right-wing coalition, Netanyahu has refused to repeat those words, especially in the face of continued Palestinian stagnation on the peace process. This follows from the Israeli realization that for decades it has debated peace proposals with itself and that the Palestinian leadership’s most predictable word is still the word “No.” In facing the facts of Palestinian authority (with a small “A”), half of it is stagnated on the West Bank with the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority at the helm while the other half, in the form of Hamas, is engaged in the worst type of regime-sponsored terrorism from Gaza. A hard-bitten realist like Netanyahu wonders when the other side can bring itself to use the “yes” word. Peace and borders could have been achieved at any time during the past half century if the Arab side would have allowed it to happen. The original “Three No” concept adapted by the Arabs after Israel’s independence—No Peace, No Recognition, No Negotiations—has been replaced by a new Orwellian “Yes to Peace with Israel” so long as Israel shrinks to a militarily indefensible border, and then demographically transforms itself from a Jewish State to a “formerly Jewish state” flooded with Arabs residents from around the globe who have a historic claim to Palestine. Hence, Israel; would no longer be a Jewish State but a future Lebanon. Parenthetically, the million Jewish citizens expelled penniless by Arab regimes in the 1950s would continue to be a forgotten footnote.

In this discussion, false history becomes fundamental. Arab Palestine was never an Arab national territory. The land was owned and controlled not by peasants from generation to generation, but by Ottoman sultans from generation to generation—sultans who became more interested in selling a sphere of interest to the German Kaiser than allowing the residents to achieve self-government. Turkey only turned over the land titles to the Palestinians in May 2005 during a personal visit by then-Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The Turkish general directorate had for decades held 500,000 original title deeds in 254 volumes in the Land Registry Presidency building in Oran, Ankara. These covered the main cities previously governed by the Ottomans including: Jaffa, Nablus, Jenin, Gaza, and Jerusalem. Turkish rights in Palestine were seized by the League of Nations following World War I.

On the other hand, Jewish land deeds obtained through legal purchase and other forms of legitimate registration were meticulously kept as a sovereign right since the early twentieth century when the London-based Zionist Organization began the move to legally settle in Palestinian pursuant to international law.

The very concept of Arab nationalism was a twentieth century invention mainly of Christian Lebanese seeking reforms against Istanbul—the so-called “Young Turks.”

The much-disputed tug of war between British and French wartime lies and seductions to both Arabs and Jews about Palestinian nationhood are well-known. But all of them, from the McMahon correspondence to the Balfour Declaration are just pieces of paper with no force in international law or common sense. The real nation building was done in the 1920 and 1930s long after the ink dried on those illusory imperialistic promises and suggestions. Indeed, the only real bi-national agreement that matters was the one signed by Faisal and Chaim Weizmann in January 1919 agreeing to trade Arab sovereignty in Syria for Jewish nationhood in Palestine. But that agreement was spoiled by the French a year later when oil interests thwarted Arab nationalism with massacres and political backstabbing to achieve Western oil imperialism in the Middle East. By the way, it was in that year, 1920 that the Jihad against the West began—decades before Israel ever existed.

The rest is just unhappy history. Netanyahu knows this history even if the Twitterized White House does not.

Friction on settlements is equally problematic. Many of Israel’s core supporters in the United States and many Israeli citizens simply abhor the settlements. But by castigating Israel so publically, the Obama Administration has created a veneer of support for settlements that would otherwise not exist in the Jewish community. Hence, the reaction is not about settlements, it is about treating Israel like a pesky client.

Israel has shown its willingness to dismantle settlements on a dime. It destroyed Yamit and many others when it gave back the Sinai to Egypt. It relinquished precious Taba across from Eilat when the last international juridical appeal accepted a disputed Turkish cartographic reference that ruled out Israeli control. The Jewish State painfully pulled its own citizens kicking and screaming out of Gaza and evacuated the territory completely only to see it become not a greenhouse of development but a hothouse of terror.

The problem with settlements comes down to one word: “borders.” There are no borders. Until the Palestinians can draw a line on a map and stick to it, Israelis will continue to push down the hill, across the hill and up the next hill both by natural increase and by deliberate political design. What in America is simply “suburban sprawl” becomes an international breach in Jerusalem—precisely because there is no border.

Moreover, if a border agreement were made with the Palestinians, who would it be with. Hamas? The Palestinian Authority? How long would it last? One side or the other would declare it null and void before the last serif dried.

Create a border and the settlements stop instantly.

Israeli supporters are also rankled by bizarre Obama moral equivalencies, many of which were repeated in the recent Cairo speech. For example: the Holocaust was bad but so are checkpoints. Checkpoints throughout the West Bank are admittedly almost as bad as what we experience at the airport every day, although caused by the same factor: terrorism. The Holocaust on the other hand victimized six million innocents. Incidentally, the oil that ran the Nazi war machine was energetically supplied by the Arab States, mainly Iraq via Lebanon. The Arab community participated in the Holocaust by almost universally siding with the Nazis. They excuse this by saying the real enemy was Britain. The axis of Berlin and the Mufti of Jerusalem is well-known. Islamic divisions fighting with the Third Reich were under the direct protection of Himmler. The White House buys into the traditional false history that the Holocaust was an exclusively European event. A few days ago, Jews of Iraqi descent observed the anniversary of “the Farhud.” The White House may not even know what the word “Farhud” means until after they read this article.

Indeed, the Obama administration has not yet discovered that a plurality of Israeli citizens is actually of Arab descent. They are the men and women of Jewish faith who formerly dwelled for many centuries before Islam as citizens of what became Arab lands. Libya, Iraq, Egypt and many others in the Arab League expelled their Jewish citizens penniless for no other reason than their religion. The idea was to create a demographic time bomb of destitution in Israel. But unlike the Arab world, Israel assimilated refugees as full citizens. These Jews of Arab descent now rule much of Israel. They are originally Arabs, but of Jewish faith.

Another bizarre equivalency is linking the curtailment of settlements and stopping Iran’s nuclear threats against Israel. It is hard to read the balance sheet between a few doublewide trailer homes or even a complex of townhouses on the West Bank and nuclear annihilation. The comparison seems self evident. One seeks to create a mushroom patch, the other seeks to create a mushroom cloud.

The growing queasiness among Obama supporters who also support Israel was only magnified by Obama’s recent speech to the Muslim World. Clearly, the speech was courageous and exquisite. No one does better than Obama in catering to a crowd and uplifting it. He acknowledged that Western oil imperialism waged a war of hegemony against Arab peoples. That is true. He praises what needed to be praised about Arab scholarship over the centuries. In that, he got it half right when he stated: “It was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing.” Muslim scholars did excel at coastal navigation as raiders and traders, and at algebra to help in their magnificent architecture. The word algebra itself comes from the Arabic al-jabru and invokes the concept of balancing, hence equations. But Obama got it wrong—and this is a relevant wrong—when he added “our mastery of pens and printing.”

Surely, writing was a Babylonian invention. But the Middle East was virtually devoid of printing presses until the twentieth century. The Turks maintained a staff of some 90,000 scribes to commit to paper only what was authorized—legal rulings, regulations, and religious writings as well as the Koran. For decades after World War I, the Arab world controlled the printing press as a totalitarian tool, generally deploying it to afflict its domestic and foreign enemies and foster group hatred. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is still the biggest seller in the Arab world.

Obama has achieved one thing. He has launched the rocket of “even-handedness” that the Arab World has been calling for. His Cairo speech is heralded far and wide in the Arab and Muslim worlds. If that momentum results in some lasting peace with Arab cooperation, the jitters are worth enduring. If it only encourages greater intransigence by Arab negotiators and longer stalemate, then Barack Obama will not have brought “change” but proved that some that some things never change.” The Cutting Edge News

Edwin Black is the New York Times bestselling author of Nazi Nexus, Banking on Baghdad and IBM and the Holocaust. He can be reached at http://www.edwinblack.com/.