Iran: It's Getting Real

Charles Krauthammer is a policy wonk first and a Foxified partisan second. In this column, he keeps Obama-bashing to a minimum while painstakingly analyzing Anthony Cordesman's three-step plan for deterring Iran's weapons program, if any, without war: Making clear the U.S. will attack if necessary, showing Iran that it can't win by going nuclear, and offering the mullahs incentives for abandoning nuclear weapons that sound a lot like Nixonian detente.

Wrapping up, Krauthammer sounds worried that war is looming -- and if he's worried, so am I:

If we simply continue to drift through kabuki negotiations...one thing is certain: Either America, Europe, the Gulf Arabs and the Israelis will forever be condemned to live under the threat of nuclear blackmail (even nuclear war) from a regime the State Department identifies as the world's greatest exporter of terror. Or an imperiled Israel, with its more limited capabilities, will strike Iran – with correspondingly greater probability of failure and of triggering a regional war.

All options are bad. Doing nothing is worse. "The status quo may not prevent some form of war," concludes Cordesman, "and may even be making it more likely."

The Danger Of One Man, One Vote, One Time

From Charles Krauthammer, a stark warning about Egypt that unfortunately can't be overlooked:

The Egyptian awakening carries promise and hope and of course merits our support. But only a child can believe that a democratic outcome is inevitable. And only a blinkered optimist can believe that it is even the most likely outcome.

Yes, the Egyptian revolution is broad-based. But so were the French and the Russian and the Iranian revolutions. Indeed in Iran, the revolution only succeeded - the shah was long opposed by the mullahs - when the merchants, the housewives, the students and the secularists joined to bring him down.

And who ended up in control? The most disciplined, ruthless and ideologically committed - the radical Islamists.

This is why our paramount moral and strategic interest in Egypt is real democracy in which power does not devolve to those who believe in one man, one vote, one time. That would be Egypt's fate should the Muslim Brotherhood prevail.

Hat tip to Hugh Hewitt

Obama Isn't The New Carter

On his radio show today, Hugh Hewitt announced that President Obama had "said nothing" about the crisis in Egypt in his remarks today. Hewitt seemed somewhat startled when his guest, Charles Krauthammer, repeatedly praised the president for what he said and what he's doing:

[The U.S.] had two choices. Do we either say nothing, or even undermine [Egyptian president Hosni] Mubarak, as Jimmy Carter did in 1979 when he kicked the stool out from under the Shah, and then he’s done, or do we try a riskier course, which is we stay with Mubarak, which is what Obama did, but insist that he bring in democrats, bring in reformers, bring in the opposition, and essentially begin a transition out of the Mubarak era. It’s going to end anyway. He’s 82. He’s not going to run any reelection, he’s not going to win reelection, either. His son is not going to take over. So do you want a controlled transition to democracy? Or do you want an abdication, riots in the streets, chaos, out of which it’s more likely that the bad guys are going to win? So I think they chose the slightly more difficult course, staying with the guy who’s quite despised, but insisting that there’s a transition that is obvious to the Egyptians...

That Hoity-Toity Krauthammer

Jonathan Tobin didn't like Sarah Palin's response when Bill O'Reilly asked her about Charles Krauthammer's criticism of her reality TV show:

Her response was vintage Palin, combining a sort of schoolyard banter with bristling resentment. “Oooh. Sorry that I’m not so hoity-toity,” was the best she could come up with as a retort while gesturing that she was not someone who had to put her finger in the air to determine what to think, as if the intellectual yet down-to-earth conservative sage Krauthammer was some liberal media consultant. Just as disturbing as the obnoxiousness of her response was the vague thought that perhaps she’s not quite sure who exactly Krauthammer is.

Obama's Brilliant Move

Charles Krauthammer gets it. But he sure doesn't like it.

Atheism's Useful Idiots

In their opposition to the lower Manhattan mosque, atheists and the movement once known, ironically enough, as the religious right are combining their efforts, no doubt without meaning to, to weaken the First Amendment's command that government leave religion alone.

As I wrote yesterday, it endangers everyone's freedom when powerful politicians try to hold religious leaders publicly accountable for their beliefs, whether it's Muslims' conception of the state, the weird stuff in the Book of Mormon, Roman Catholics' opposition to abortion, or for that matter the Episcopal Church's prevailing support for gay marriage.

Notwithstanding that danger, the unlikeliest of anti-religion coalitions has taken shape in opposition to the mosque. We all know about Baptist-turned-Roman Catholic Newt Gingrich comparing Muslims to Nazis. Religionists from Gary Bauer to Hindu Human Rights Watch are on board as well. But you don't have to be faithful to ride their train to glory. Atheist Charles Krauthammer is one of the mosque's most strident critics. Atheist Christopher Hitchens doesn't oppose it per se, but he thinks Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf should be called to account for his favorable view of Iran's theocratic regime.

I don't question the motives of everyone in the atheist party. Krauthammer's position is consistent with his years of hawkish commentary about Islamic fundamentalism. Hitchens has been harder on Imam Rauf's GOP critics than on the imam himself. To paraphrase Sen. Mitch McConnell, both say they're supporters of the U.S. Constitution's religion protections, and I take them at their word.

But it's also true that a dominant theme of the post-Sept. 11 neoatheist movement is that religion does more harm than good. In the U.S., it does its nasty business under the mighty wing of the Constitution. As leading atheist voice Sam Harris wrote in 2006:

Religion is the one area of our discourse in which people are systematically protected from the demand to give good evidence and valid arguments in defense of their strongly held beliefs.

Well, not anymore, at least if you're a moderate imam following in a 1300-year-0ld Abrahamic tradition who has Jewish and Christian admirers and a wife who lobbies for women's rights within Islam. If that's you, and you want to build a community center in lower Manhattan that includes a tiny worship space, now you have to answer Christopher Hitchens' questions about your views on Iran. You also have to "give good evidence and valid arguments" to the Republican Party and maybe even, if the pressure keeps up, to the agencies of the City of New York that will decide your project's fate.

Krauthammer says he's not calling on government to stop the mosque. Sarah Palin summed up that argument in her Facebook challenge to President Obama: "We all know that they have the right to do it, but should they?” Palin should use her bully pulpit for a civics lesson in tolerance and freedom of religion. Instead she, fellow ex-governor George Pataki, a former speaker of the House, and other current and former officeholders are creating a hostile environment for a perfectly legitimate faith community.

As the debate becomes more and more noxious, can government action, perhaps in the form of the kind of dodge recently suggested by Chapman University constitutional law professor Hugh Hewitt, be far behind? Of course thanks to all the political and rhetorical firepower and the public's susceptibility to anti-Muslim tendencies, the anti-religion coalition might be able to drive Imam Rauf's establishment out of town without even bothering to enable a constitutionally inconvenient regulation or law such as Hewitt suggests respecting the establishment of a religion.

But just you wait. Whether they succeed in their efforts or not, the atheists and rightists will soon part company. Someday, the political winds will shift. The case of the inconvenient mosque would be a useful precedent for harassing others with unpopular or controversial views such as Roman Catholics, orthodox Jews, Mormons, and even Rick Warren and his fellow Southern Baptists. Should that moment come, religion's enemies would smile as they remembered the day when Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin became their useful idiots.

The Revenue Side Of Health Care Reform

Charles Krauthammer says use the 2,000-page House and Senate bills to ignite the Yule log and start over:

Insuring the uninsured is a moral imperative. The problem is that the Democrats have chosen the worst possible method -- a $1 trillion new entitlement of stupefying arbitrariness and inefficiency.

The better choice is targeted measures that attack the inefficiencies of the current system one by one -- tort reform, interstate purchasing and taxing employee benefits. It would take 20 pages to write such a bill, not 2,000 -- and provide the funds to cover the uninsured without wrecking both U.S. health care and the U.S. Treasury.

Keeping The Fox In The Pool

While today's media-White House wars aren't as fierce as in RN's day, Charles Krauthammer makes the important point that Fox News, its partisanship notwithstanding, has pushed legitimate stories that the mainstream media have neglected. And yet good for the MSM:

[T]he administration tried to make them complicit in an actual boycott of Fox. The Treasury Department made available Ken Feinberg, the executive pay czar, for interviews with the White House "pool" news organizations -- except Fox. The other networks admirably refused, saying they would not interview Feinberg unless Fox was permitted to as well. The administration backed down.

The Stuff Of Nobels

Surveying the Obama administration's poor performance so far in Iran and the Middle East, Charles Krauthammer sums up Secretary of State Clinton's recent visit to Moscow, during which the Russians retreated on Iranian sanctions:

The Russian leadership, hardly believing its luck, needs no interpreter to understand that when the Obama team clownishly rushes in bearing gifts and "reset" buttons, there is nothing ulterior, diabolical, clever or even serious behind it. It is amateurishness, wrapped in naivete, inside credulity. In short, the very stuff of Nobels.

Bringing Krauthammer Down

Charles Krauthammer says the French think we're appeasing Iran. Actually, I wonder if the distinguished columnist can actually prove that. Evidently President Nicolas Sarkozy (or his aides, who had to rewrite his speech, poor dears) wanted President Obama to reveal Iran's secret nuclear facility last week during the UN Security Council meeting instead of a day later at the G-20 summit. The news from Qom was so dramatic, the weakening impact on Iran's position so immediately discernible, that it doesn't matter where Obama sprang it. But it appears Krauthammer also would have preferred the grandeur of the once-hated UN to the prosaism of Pittsburgh.

What a difference a year makes. To employ a favorite device of U.S. conservatives, the right would've given George W. Bush high fives and hallelujahs for irritating the French and choosing a city in Gov. Palin's "real America" for his dramatic announcement. Le difference is that Krauthammer thinks Obama's wasting time on Iran with weak diplomatic posturing. While I agree that Iran's bomb is probably our greatest national security challenge, it's too early to pronounce the Obama policy a failure. For instance, Krauthammer's column fails to take into account positive developments at this week's Geneva meeting.

I suppose if you think that Obama is hopelessly incompetent or feckless, that he would never be willing to take the ultimate steps that may someday be necessary to keep a madman from having a doomsday weapon, then you want to underrate and even undermine everything he does. I'm just not that pessimistic. I also believe that irrespective of the eventual outcome of the Iraq war, history will judge Bush harshly for failing to push harder on sanctions before going to war. So with Iran, every possible diplomatic expedient must be used short of the use of military power, including delaying tactics in the hope of regime change in Tehran.

Nobody should be eager to go to war against Iran (or anyone). So everyone should be hoping the Obama policy succeeds. By the same token, it makes no sense to pretend it's working when it isn't. But the French president's speechwriter's having to crank out a new draft and a questionable location choice for a press conference don't rise to the level of five-alarm crisis.

Subsidizing The Gentle Nudge

Charles Krauthammer commits coherence on the end-of-life counseling debate:

We...have to tell the defenders of...Section 1233 of H.R. 3200 that it is not quite as benign as they pretend. To offer government reimbursement to any doctor who gives end-of-life counseling -- whether or not the patient asked for it -- is to create an incentive for such a chat.

What do you think such a chat would be like? Do you think the doctor will go on and on about the fantastic new million-dollar high-tech gizmo that can prolong the patient's otherwise hopeless condition for another six months? Or do you think he's going to talk about -- as the bill specifically spells out -- hospice care and palliative care and other ways of letting go of life?...

[W]hy get Medicare to pay the doctor to do the counseling? Because we know that if this white-coated authority whose chosen vocation is curing and healing is the one opening your mind to hospice and palliative care, we've nudged you ever so slightly toward letting go.

It's not an outrage. It's surely not a death panel. But it is subtle pressure applied by society through your doctor. And when you include it in a health care reform whose major objective is to bend the cost curve downward, you have to be a fool or a knave to deny that it's intended to gently point you in a certain direction, toward the corner of the sick room where stands a ghostly figure, scythe in hand, offering release.

Relying On Politics, Not Word Games

In his column today, Charles Krauthammer doesn't try to make the case that waterboarding isn't torture. Instead, he rests his argument on two political realities. The first is that if the Bush administration overstepped its bounds, it was in order to protect the people of the United States. The second is that Nancy Pelosi and other top Democrats knew what the administration was doing and didn't object.

A third reality -- rarely noted by his critics -- is that President Bush stopped the waterboarding in 2005 in response to media revelations and political pressure.

For the sake of the public's right to know and guidance for future Presidents, I say yes to full disclosure of what techniques were used, on whom, by whom, and to what effect, but only if it wouldn't endanger national security. To prosecutions of elected or appointed officials, attorneys, judges, or interrogators because of waterboarding and other extreme techniques, no.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

We'll Give Up Ours If You Give Up Yours

Charles Krauthammer thinks President Obama's call for the abolition of nuclear weapons would carry more weight if he were more effective at persuading Iran and North Korea to give up theirs.

Level Land

Charles Krauthammer:

[Obama's] goal is to rewrite the American social compact, to recast the relationship between government and citizen. He wants government to narrow the nation's income and anxiety gaps. Soak the rich for reasons of revenue and justice. Nationalize health care and federalize education to grant all citizens of all classes the freedom from anxiety about health care and college that the rich enjoy. And fund this vast new social safety net through the cash cow of a disguised carbon tax.

Obama is a leveler. He has come to narrow the divide between rich and poor. For him the ultimate social value is fairness. Imposing it upon the American social order is his mission.

Back In The Day, Not So Great, Either

Echoing Charles Krauthammer, the "National Interest" says the former president of the Harvard Law Review didn't get the recent history of U.S.-Islamic relations right when drafting his inaugural address:

Krauthammer argues that Obama’s history is just wrong. “Thirty years ago,” [he] writes...“saw the greatest U.S.-Muslim rupture in our 233-year history: Iran’s radical Islamic revolution, the seizure of the U.S. embassy, the 114 months of America held hostage.” This crisis came on the heels of an Arab oil embargo that caused our economy to tank. Oh, and before that, our ambassador to the Sudan was kidnapped and murdered by Arab terrorists. So Obama’s “halcyon days of U.S.-Islamic relations” from two to three decades ago were anything but. Oops.

The Opaque President

Charles Krauthammer:

Clinton craves your adulation (the source of all his troubles). Obama will take it, but he can leave it too. He is astonishingly self-contained. He gives what he must to advance his goals, his programs, his ambitions. But no more. He has no need to....A complicated man, this new president. Opaque, contradictory and subtle.

The Coming Bush Revival

Charles Krauthammer believes that President Bush's rehabilitation will begin sooner than everyone thinks, thanks to the PE retaining key Bush Administration personnel as well as the fundamentals of his anti-terrorism policies. Of course it all hinges on Iraq, which will loom large in Bush's legacy:

Obama opposed the war. But the war is all but over. What remains is an Iraq turned from aggressive, hostile power in the heart of the Middle East to an emerging democracy openly allied with the United States. No president would want to be responsible for undoing that success.

In Iraq, Bush rightly took criticism for all that went wrong -- the WMD fiasco, Abu Ghraib, the descent into bloody chaos in 2005-06. Then Bush goes to Baghdad to ratify the ultimate post-surge success of that troubled campaign -- the signing of a strategic partnership between the U.S. and Iraq -- and ends up dodging two size-10 shoes for his pains.

Absorbing that insult was Bush's final service on Iraq. Whatever venom the war generated is concentrated on Bush himself. By having personalized the responsibility for the awfulness of the war, Bush has done his successor a favor. Obama enters office with a strategic success on his hands -- while Bush leaves the scene taking a shoe for his country.

Which is why I suspect Bush showed such equanimity during a private farewell interview at the White House a few weeks ago. He leaves behind the sinews of war, for the creation of which he has been so vilified but which will serve his successor -- and his country -- well over the coming years. The very continuation by Democrats of Bush's policies will be grudging, if silent, acknowledgment of how much he got right.

In March 2003, at the beginning of the war, when I was still a ministry intern, I preached a sermon at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Tustin, California in which I said that Bush would be judged on the basis of whether, 20 years after the war had ended, we were closer to peace in a fractious region. While not exactly bloodcurdlingly pro-war, it definitely wasn't antiwar, and many of my brothers and sisters were disappointed.

In the years since, when the war was going poorly, I've regretted this witness, especially because I had erred by lumping Saddam Hussein with Muslim fundamentalists. In the wake of the surge, I've felt better. Perhaps this shows that preachers shouldn't talk about foreign policy, or just that they should do it better than I did. Far more important, it reminds us that leaders sometimes have to make decisions whose consequences, for good or ill, won't be fully clear until long after they leave office. Do we want Presidents who will only take a risk on a policy they believe is best if they can be guaranteed favorable results in the next two or four years, or in time for the opening of their Presidential libraries? (Seeing the Krauthammer column as mere partisan repositioning, Andrew Sullivan takes exception to Krauthammer's rosy assessment of the situation in Iraq. Sullivan supported the war, too, of course, so to that extent he and Bush are in this together. Yet while Bush's approval numbers are historically low, Sullivan just won best blog. Go figure.)

As of now, many can't wait for George W. Bush to leave. This group may well include George W. Bush. Some, including Katie Couric, can't bring themselves to say the word "President" when introducing him. Others wish he had communicated as openly over the last eight years as he has in the last two weeks. And yet how interesting that the Presidential transition has gone so well, a tribute to the temperaments and love of country of both men. How interesting it would be if President Obama took the same pains to keep Bush informed as President Nixon did with his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, and especially if it became known that 44 was having the occasional private chat with 43.

Many are eager for new leadership because they think that Obama will be able to wave a magic wand and quickly repair an economy stunted by a generation of bipartisan mismanagement. Perhaps when he can't -- perhaps when he too is tested by challenges to U.S. security and interests -- we'll gain new appreciation for the complexities and ambiguities of the office. Perhaps then we'll say to George W. Bush, as Barack Obama no doubt will on the inaugural stand next Tuesday, "Godspeed, Mr. President, and thank you."

Obama Fakes To Center And Goes Long

Charles Krauthammer says don't be fooled by the PE's centrist foreign policy and financial teams He's FDR on borrowed steroids:

Obama was quite serious when he said he was going to change the world. And now he has a national crisis, a personal mandate, a pliant Congress, a desperate public -- and, at his disposal, the greatest pot of money in galactic history. (I include here the extrasolar planets.)

It begins with a near $1 trillion stimulus package. This is where Obama will show himself ideologically. It is his one great opportunity to plant the seeds for everything he cares about: a new green economy, universal health care, a labor resurgence, government as benevolent private-sector "partner." It is the community organizer's ultimate dream.

Ironically, when the economy tanked in mid-September, it was assumed that both presidential candidates could simply forget about their domestic agendas because with $700 billion drained by financial system rescues, not a penny would be left to spend on anything else.

On the contrary. With the country clamoring for action and with all psychological barriers to government intervention obliterated (by the conservative party, no less), the stage is set for a young, ambitious, supremely confident president -- who sees himself as a world-historical figure before even having been sworn in -- to begin a restructuring of the American economy and the forging of a new relationship between government and people.

Don't be fooled by Bob Gates staying on. Obama didn't get elected to manage Afghanistan. He intends to transform America. And he has the money, the mandate and the moxie to go for it.