Posts Tagged ‘Foreign Policy’
Tuesday, June 12th, 2012
I’m seeing Twitter reports (including one from what appears to be the Egyptian Minister of the Interior) that former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has died. Waiting for confirmation.
Mubarak was right around the 50-yard line for brutality and corruption for Arab dictators, more a symptom of the sickness in Arab politics than a cause. He actually observed the treaties his country signed. He was notably worse than Anwar Sadat, but almost certainly better than whoever ends up following him.
Updated to add: That Twitter account is pretty new, so this could well be a hoax. Also, why would the official Twitter feed for the Interior Minister of Egypt be following 320 accounts less than a day of starting up?
I would try to find confirmation on the official Egyptian Interior Ministry webpage, but their server doesn’t feel like working right now…
Update 2: NBC reporter Richard Engel says the interior ministry has denied that Mubarak has died. So I think we can update his status to “I’m getting better.”
Tags:Egypt, Foreign Policy, Hosni Mubarak, Jihad, Middle East
Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad | No Comments »
Monday, January 30th, 2012
What the headlines says, although they were repulsed.
If President Hamlet was thinking about helping topple Assad, now would be a Real Good Time to jump off the fence.
Plus, unlike Libya and Egypt, not only would it be very hard for the next government to be worse than the current one. Plus it would be a blow to Iran and Hezbollah, and thus would dramatically improve the possibility of real peace and a stable government in Lebanon.
(Hat tip: Michael Totten)
Tags:Bashar Assad, Damascus, Foreign Policy, Hezbollah, Lebanon, Michael Totten, Middle East, Syria
Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad | No Comments »
Tuesday, January 24th, 2012
This Houston Chronicle piece by Joe Holley is an example of why so many people are dissatisfied with the job the legacy media is doing of reporting events.
In covering the American Jewish Committee/World Affairs Council of Houston senate candidate forum on foreign policy I mentioned previously, we have a news story that is demonstrably deficient in several areas:
You get told who wasn’t there (Craig James, Paul Sadler, and Lt. Governor Chupacabra), and even how many of each flavor were there (“six Republicans, three Democrats and one Libertarian”), but the article itself only lists five of those ten. That would be the very first “W” of the “Five Ws and an H,” assuming they still teach that at journalism school. (Maybe they’re replaced it with another class on “Reporting Social Justice.”)
However, because I’m so Old School, I actually went out and got a list of who attended the forum from the AJC: Republicans Ted Cruz, Tom Leppert, Glenn Addison, Lela Pittinger, Charles Holcomb, and Ben Gambini (yes, an actual Ben Gambini sighting!), Democrats Daniel Boone and Jason Gibson, Libertarian Jon Roland, and independent candidate Mike Champion. So it turns out that even the summary of candidate affiliations was wrong.
In an article on a foreign policy forum that runs just shy of 500 words, a grand total of 96 of them actually dealt with the candidate’s foreign policy views, and even those are essentially free of concrete information. Let’s repost those parts in their entirety:
Cruz also said that “President Obama has been the most anti-Israel president this nation has ever seen.”
[snip]
Leppert emphasized his experience as an international businessman familiar with issues of currency and international trade.
[snip]
Cruz and Leppert were the only two candidates who were able to respond with practiced ease to a series of sophisticated questions dealing with world affairs, ranging from Israel’s response to the Iranian nuclear threat to whether the United States should help bail out faltering European economies. Most of the others on the stage seemed unfamiliar with even the most basic foreign-policy issues.
That’s it. That’s the extent of coverage of the candidates’ foreign policy views in a forum dedicated to that very subject. We are no wiser as to what any candidate thinks of our troops levels in Afghanistan, what our relations with Pakistan should be, whether we should help topple the Assad regime in Syria, how to counter an increasingly bold China, or whether we should use military force to prevent the Islamic Republic of Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Were those topics covered? We don’t know, as Holley and the Chronicle do not deign to tell us.
Instead of giving the candidates’ actual views, Holley merely gives us his dismissive analysis of eight of the ten candidates, telling us they are “unfamiliar with even the most basic foreign-policy issues” without bothering to provide a single example of this ignorance.
The rest of the piece consists of horse race analysis, noting Dewhurst’s absence, audience attendance figures, and an interview with a random forum attendee. All of which would have been fine in a longer piece.
Joe Holley and/or his editor have missed a chance to actually inform their readers. I have a hard time thinking of a blogger who couldn’t have done a better job.
Tags:2012 Election, Charles Holcomb, David Dewhurst, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Glenn Addison, Houston Chronicle, Joe Holley, Lela Pittenger, Libertarians, Media Watch, MSM, Republicans, Ted Cruz, Texas, Texas Senate Race, Tom Leppert
Posted in Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Republicans, Texas | 1 Comment »
Thursday, November 24th, 2011
“In a direct echo of previous events in Libya, France has formally recoginsed the opposition Syrian National Council and proposed that international troops should protect civilians.”
Meanwhile, those rebels are calling for international air strikes against the Assad regime.
It’s quite possible that the Assad regime could unravel much faster than Moammar Gadhafi’s regime in Libya did, since whole army units have already defected, and Assad is much more isolated from his country’s Sunni majority that Gadhafi was (at least ethnically) from his.
Tags:Bashar Assad, Foreign Policy, France, Libya, Middle East, Military, Moammar Gadhafi, Syria
Posted in Foreign Policy, Military | No Comments »
Sunday, November 13th, 2011
Maybe. News that the Arab league has suspended Syria indicates Bashar Assad may be on even shakier ground than previously thought. Getting suspended by the Arab League for oppressing your own people is only a couple of steps above getting kicked out of the Klu Klux Klan for being too racist.
And unlike Libya, even a hardline Islamist government would be a slight improvement on Assad, especially in Lebanon, if only because the Sunnis would break with Iran and cut off funding for the Shia Hezbollah.
But it’s hard to tell. When Syrian generals defected at the end of July, that looked like it might have been the final push, but wasn’t. never underestimate a cornered dictator willing to do anything to stay in power.
Frontline does a report from inside the Syrian uprising.
Here’s an interactive map.
Will Obama decide to roll out drone strikes in Syria? Maybe, but I wouldn’t count on it, as Obama hasn’t seemed terribly interested in Syria, even by the lax standards of his foreign policy engagement. Also, the geography is more daunting than in Libya; to be effective, they’d have to come in over Lebanon or Israel to hit targets in Damascus, each of which presents (different) political problems.
Stay tuned…
Tags:Bashar Assad, Foreign Policy, Hezbollah, Islam, Lebanon, Michael Totten, Middle East, Predator Drone, Syria
Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad, Military | No Comments »
Monday, February 14th, 2011
And they’re every bit as warm as those for Spiderman: Turn off the Dark:
Mary Steyn: “For the last three weeks, the superpower has sent the consistent message to the world that (as Bernard Lewis feared some years ago) America is harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.”
Niall Ferguson in Newsweek (yes, it’s evidently still being published):
“Last week, for the second time in his presidency, Barack Obama heard those footsteps, jumped up to grasp a historic opportunity … and missed it completely….This failure was not the result of bad luck. It was the predictable consequence of the Obama administration’s lack of any kind of coherent grand strategy, a deficit about which more than a few veterans of U.S. foreign policy making have long worried….The defining characteristic of Obama’s foreign policy has been not just a failure to prioritize, but also a failure to recognize the need to do so. A succession of speeches saying, in essence, ‘I am not George W. Bush’ is no substitute for a strategy.”
Michael A. Walsh in the New York Post: “No matter how things shake out in Egypt, one thing has become depressingly clear: Something is very wrong with the American intelligence services.”
Investor’s Business Daily:
“As our once-stable ally Egypt hurtles down a path leading into the dark unknown, the U.S. can blame itself. The White House apparently did little after our intelligence agencies warned late last year that President Hosni Mubarak’s government was wobbly. Like Jimmy Carter’s handling of Central America, the U.S. backed a revolution, hoping it would make the revolutionaries our friends.”
Victor Davis Hanson in National Review: “For nearly three weeks, the Biden/Clinton/Obama policy concerning the tottering Mubarak regime was contradictory, incoherent, and predicated entirely on the perceived pulse of the demonstrations.”
Like Julie Taymor’s production (which I have not seen, but I have seen enough of Ms. Taymor’s previous work to trust the reviews of it I’ve read), Obama’s foreign policy is far more concerned with flash and spectacle than the boring matter of actual substance. Unfortunately, there’s no chance that Obama’s foreign policy will fold in previews, and we can’t make things better by getting Bono and The Edge to write us a few new tunes…
Tags:Egypt, Foreign Policy, Hosni Mubarak, Jihad, Mark Steyn, Michael A. Walsh, Middle East, Niall Ferguson, Obama, Spiderman: Turn off the Dark, Victor Davis Hanson
Posted in Democrats, Foreign Policy, Jihad | No Comments »
Thursday, June 3rd, 2010
A handful of links you may find of interest:
CHL carriers get an express lane through Texas State Capitol Security. This is a testament to how effective the CHL program has been.
Catholic Bishop killed in Turkey.
George Will on the conflict between the limited government of the founders and Progressivism’s vision of unlimited government power to meet an ever-expanding array of material “needs.”
Victor David Hanson on Europeans waking up to History returning to Europe, “from Mediterranean insolvency, to the threat of radical Islam, to demographic decline, to new international dangers on the horizon.” But I’m guessing Europeans will hit the snooze button a few more times before they will bother to rouse themselves from their slumber. And by then it may be too late.
A statement of the obvious, sure to infuriate those on the left: “The U.S. can’t afford to provide everyone with food, clothing and shelter, not to mention medical and child care, college tuition, a low-interest mortgage and a Social Security check until death.”
Tags:CHL, Europe, Foreign Policy, Guns, links, LinkSwarm, Welfare State
Posted in Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Welfare State | No Comments »