Today it is contraception and the morning-after pill. Tomorrow it will be kosher slaughter, or matrilineal descent, or circumcision, or other matters of existential importance to Jewish observance. If the Obama administration gets away with forcing Catholic institutions to step across lines of life and death in the name of “health,” the federal government will have a precedent to legislate Judaism out of existence — as several other countries have already tried to do.

Now the Obama administration has told Catholic institutions that they don’t have to dispense pills that kill babies. Instead, they can pay the insurance company, and the insurance company will dispense the pill for them. It is an accounting trick (as Paul Ryan called it) that the White House misrepresents as a compromise. The Catholic bishops, of course, reject it. And only one Jewish organization, the haredi organization Agudath Israel, offered a sharp response. Its Washington director Abba Cohen stated:

Whether or not the White House’s new “compromise” proposal adequately addresses the religious freedom concerns raised by the Catholic Church is for the Catholic Church to say, not us – and, frankly, not the White House, either. The important points here are that no religiously sponsored entity, and no religiously motivated individual, should be forced by government to violate its or his sincerely held religious principles; and that the determination of religious propriety must be left to the religious entity or individual, not to the government.

The Orthodox Union, according to press accounts, guardedly praised the “compromise,” saying: “The president’s stated commitment is a positive first step forward, the details of implementation are crucial and we look forward to working with the administration to see that through.” As a late-in-life returnee to Jewish observance, I habitually defer to  the Orthodox Union leadership in such matters. Having had the misfortune to have spent half my life among the atheists and religion-haters, though, I know how embittered and unrelenting are the supposed disciples of science. They are in fact  religious fanatics of the worst kind. You can’t make a deal with them. After they come for the Catholics, they will come for us. They already are coming for us all over the world.

It isn’t happening in the United States — not yet, except for a laughable referendum in San Francisco last year to prohibit circumcision. But it’s happening in England, where the country’s highest court has ruled that the religious definition of Jewish identity is racist. It’s happened in several European countries as well as New Zealand, which have banned or might ban kosher slaughter.

Contraception is not the issue. The issue is whether science has the right to decide the ultimate matters of life and death, or whether this is reserved to faith. We can argue the practical consequences all day and not get anywhere. It’s not as if contraception has ushered in a glorious era of human reproduction in which every child is planned and wanted. More than half of births to American women under 30 now occur outside of marriage, the New York Times reported Feb. 18, and overwhelmingly to working-class women who are economically unprepared for single motherhood. And 71% of total African-American and 53% of Hispanic births are out of wedlock as well. The cultural shift from the nuptial mystery of religion to the blandishments of recreational sex has left us with a catastrophic rate of illegitimacy and the prospect of a self-perpetuating underclass.

But that isn’t the issue. The fact that the liberals have left us with a social dystopia instead of a golden age is beside the point. The issue is: Who has the right to draw the lines where life and death are concerned? Morning-after pills may not seem too horrible to most of us. It’s not the same as sucking out the brains of a fully-developed fetus in a so-called “partial birth abortion,” or dismembering a 3-month-old fetus that responds to stimuli and can feel pain, is it? The Australian comic Jim Jeffries has made a career out of a routine that claims heaven must be boring; if you think of eternal bliss as a simple extension of ordinary time, you’d get used to it eventually. That sort of paradox of time has been in the literature since St. Augustine. But the paradox cuts both ways. If you don’t like sucking the brains out of a fully-developed fetus at eight months, how about 7 months? Or six months? Or five months? Three months? How about three months less one minute? Or less one second? Where do you draw the line? Nothing in our science can tell us where life begins. If you can overrule the Catholic assertion that life begins at conception on putative scientific grounds and require Catholic institutions to pay for morning-after pills, you have given “science” carte blanche to determine where life begins — and ends.

Pages: 1 2 | 400 Comments

There are plenty of analysts who deal with the logistics of nuclear weapons and their interdiction in the abstract, and a very few who have dealt with the matter as an existential issue. Apart from the Israelis, for whom Iranian nuclear capability represents an existential threat, the list is short. The German defense expert Hans Rühle headed the Policy Planning Staff of Germany’s Defense Ministry during the 1980s, when the U.S. installed the medium-range Pershing missiles in Germany and undercut Russia’s military advantage in the European theater.  A nuclear exchange with Russia remained a live possibility in those days; after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the high water mark for strategic risk during the Cold War came in 1983, when then-Soviet premier Andropov declared a nuclear alert, ostensibly in response to NATO’s “Able Archer” exercise, but really as an attempt to panic the Germans.

Hans Rühle was one of the toughest and most perspicacious analysts in those heady days. Today he evaluates Israel’s capacity to knock out Iran’s nuclear program in an essay in the German conservative daily Die Welt. It is worth reading (for non-German speakers, there’s Google Translate).

Rühle is highly confident that Israel could knock out Iran’s nuclear program for a decade or more with about 25 of its 87 F-15 fighter-bombers and a smaller number of its F-16s. Each of the F-15s would carry two of the GBU-28 bunker busters, with the F-16s armed with smaller bombs. Rühle writes

There are 25 to 30 installations in Iran which are exclusively or predominately dedicated to the nuclear program. Six of them are targets of the first rank: the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, the conversion works in Isfahan, the heavy water reactor in Arak, the weapons and munitions production facility in Parchin, the uranium enrichment facility in Fordow, and the Bushehr light water reactor.

The location, nature, and defenses as well as (with some limitations) the type of installed anti-aircraft systems are extensively known.

The information about Natanz are solid. The project has been under satellite surveillance from the beginning and watched by Israeli “tourists.” At the moment there are a good 10,000 centrifuges installed, of which 6,500 are producing. Israel’s strongest “bunker buster” is the GBU-28 (weight 2.3 tons), which demonstrably can break through seven meters of reinforced concrete and 30 meters of earth. It would suffice to break through the roof at Natanz. In case of doubt, two GBU-28s could be used in sequence; the second bomb would deepen the first bomb’s crater and realize the required success.

Pages: 1 2 | 83 Comments

Now that America-hating Islamists control three-quarters of Egypt’s parliament and the military government has rejected American protests at the prosecution of U.S. citizens for supporting democracy, Egypt is asking for $11 billion in Western aid. That has to be the least popular idea to float down the Potomac in a long time. Nonetheless, the Obama administration and its supporters in the Punditeska doubtless will ask American taxpayers to ante up a large part of the $11 billion handout, in the interest of  “promoting Egyptian democracy.” Only in America do we feed the mouth that bites us. CPI Financial News reported on Sunday:

Mumtaz El Saeed, Egypt’s Finance Minister, says the country needs $11 billion to help it get through the next fiscal year, as well as help with economic reforms, according to a report in Al Ahram, a local newspaper.

This comes as rating agency Standard & Poor’s lowered its long-term foreign- and local-currency sovereign credit ratings on the country to ‘B’ from ‘B+’; with a negative outlook.

S&P said that Egypt’s external position has deteriorated and is likely to weaken further, absent stabilisation in the domestic political situation alongside external financial support.

“Egypt’s external financing risks have risen significantly, with foreign direct investment having declined sharply and net portfolio flows also having turned negative. Egyptian Central Bank interventions–to support the Egyptian pound in the face of significant capital outflows and double-digit annual inflation–have resulted in a sharp decline in net international reserves. These were $16 billion at end-January 2012, down from $36 billion at the start of 2011. Historically, S&P’s assessment of Egypt’s external score has been a relative strength to the rating; this is now being eroded. It estimates that net international reserves, excluding gold, now cover less than three months of goods and services imports compared with more than six months at the start of 2011,” the rating agency said.

What Egypt’s reserves might be is unclear — the New York Times recently published an estimate of $10 billion, or less than two months’ imports — but at least half of the $20 billion to $25 billion loss in reserves is the result of flight capital. Only half reflects the minimum, essential import needs of a broken economy that imports half of its caloric consumption.

Pages: 1 2 | 74 Comments

Robert Kagan’s new book, The World America Made, argues with a straight face that an anti-American Egypt is good for the United States, as long as it is democratic. This remarkable assertion encapsulates the trouble with most foreign policy thinking on the right wing of American politics.  I review the book today at Tablet Magazine; in a nutshell:  “Kagan’s purpose  in defending U.S. foreign-policy activism here is to deflect criticism of America’s unpopular engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is no easy task, and to perform it, Kagan adopts the two-stage approach to persuasion made famous by Prof. Harold Hill in The Music Man: Establish first that there is trouble in River City, and then propose a solution, namely a marching band. Kagan also offers a marching band, but with 40 divisions behind it.”

Hardest to fathom is Kagan’s enduring faith in the efficacy of Muslim democracy. He writes:

The inevitable victory of Islamist parties in some Arab states will probably bring governments to power that are less accommodating to some American interests than the previous dictatorships had been….Americans’ enduring interest in a liberal world order generally transcends other, more narrow and temporary interests. The United States can lose an Egyptian ally but still gain a healthier world order.

Like many of his colleagues in the conservative foreign policy establishment, Kagan believes that the democratic process must lead to desirable content, no matter who is voting or for what reason. He believes that “devout Muslims” are the key to democracy in the Muslim world, and that the democratization of the Arab world will inaugurate a new “fourth wave” of democracy around the world. As I observe in the Tablet review:

In 2004, Kagan lauded in the New York Times the “small but growing movement among scholars of Islam, a group diverse enough to include Gilles Kepel of France and [fellowWeekly Standard contributor] Reuel Marc Gerecht of the United States, that believes the real promise of democracy lies with devout Muslims.” And he continues to believe that the world revolves around the prospects for Muslim democracy. After the second great wave of democracy that followed World War II, and a third wave from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, Kagan writes:

it is possible that in the Arab Spring we are seeing a continuation of the Third Wave, or perhaps even a fourth. The explosion of democracy is about to enter a fifth straight decade, the longest and broadest such expansion in history.

He has no illusions that Muslim democracy, should it materialize, will be friendly to America:

Americans, having helped topple dictators in the Middle East, are not sure how they feel about what may follow. The inevitable victory of Islamist parties in some Arab states will probably bring governments to power that are less accommodating to some American interests than the previous dictatorships had been.

But Kagan thinks this is a good thing rather than a bad thing: “Americans’ enduring interest in a liberal world order generally transcends other, more narrow and temporary interests. The United States can lose an Egyptian ally but still gain a healthier world order.” Indeed, he lauds the Obama Administration for helping to topple erstwhile Arab allies: “America found itself withdrawing support from longtime allies like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. … American power became a decisive factor shaping the regional and international environment in which the Arab political turmoil unfolded.”

Pages: 1 2 | 96 Comments

At Salon, the award-winning liberal pundit and “former Constitutional and civil rights litigator” Glenn Greenwald attacks my previous post, “Lessons About Iran from Hitler,” in the usual manner of litigators and land salesmen: distract the jury from the substance of the matter by seizing upon an irrelevant detail and portraying it out of context. The McGuffin in Mr. Greenwald’s courtroom mummery is Iran’s military budget, which “Mr. Goldman is flagging as proof of Iran’s aggressive intentions: ‘Iran is planning to double its defense budget even though its currency is collapsing,’” he warns. Mr. Greenwald then adapts the celebrated Alec Baldwin monologue that opens Glenngarry Glen Ross (“That watch costs more than your car!”) to show that Iran’s military spending is negligible next to America’s:

That Ahmadinejad claims that Iran will increase its military budget for next year by 127% was widely reported this week. For a variety of reasons relating to Iran’s economic difficulties, that plan is quite infeasible — typical Ahmadinejad blustering — but let’s assume for the moment that it will actually happen. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Military Expenditure Database, Iran’s total annual military spending is $7 billion; an increase of 127% would take it to $15.8 billion — also known as: less than 2% of total U.S. military spending (which was $698 billion for fiscal year 2010).

An entirely different question occupied my post, which Mr. Greenwald says disrupted the tranquility of his Saturday morning:  “Will sanctions persuade Iran to stop building nuclear weapons?” I concluded that “it is more likely that the Obama administration’s graduated sanctions will accelerate Tehran’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.” The absolute size of Iran’s military spending is irrelevant to this calculation; the point, rather, is that the sanctions give Iran’s government a near-term advantage: “Iran is planning to double its defense budget even though its currency is collapsing. These are related events: in the medium term, the free-fall of Iran’s rial constitutes a transfer of wealth to the government from what remains of Iran’s private sector.” Over time, of course, the advantage turns into an economic disaster, which narrows Iran’s window of opportunity and thus creates an objective incentive to acquire “game-changing” nuclear weapons as quickly as possible.

Mr. Greenwald derides the “ludicrous claims about the Grave Iranian Threat” from the Obama administration, among other sources, and cannot bring himself to discuss the efficacy of sanctions, given that he considers the threat to be “ludicrous” to begin with. He would rather talk about something else, in the manner of litigators and land salesmen. The trouble is in that part of the world, first prize is, you get to compete for first prize once again; second prize is, you’re dead. To adopt another tagline: Why take chances?

80 Comments

Will sanctions persuade Iran to stop building nuclear weapons? No such question can be answered with finality, but it is more likely that the Obama administration’s graduated sanctions will accelerate Tehran’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. The Obama administration, according to news accounts, is aghast that Israel might take preemptive action rather than give sanctions time to work. Sanctions, though, are more likely to prompt Iran to stake everything on the nuclear card. The last time the West dealt with a similar case, the prospect of economic collapse and the fear of regime change motivated the outbreak of World War II.

Iran is planning to double its defense budget even though its currency is collapsing. These are related events: in the medium term, the free-fall of Iran’s rial constitutes a transfer of wealth to the government from what remains of Iran’s private sector. As the Washington Post reported yesterday, “The government, which receives oil revenue mostly in dollars and euros, is profiting from the rial’s decline, analysts said. ‘Their income is in dollars, so a strong dollar helps them to buy more rials to pay their bills,’ said one prominent economist, who asked not to be identified, for fear of reprisals.” At least for the time being, sanctions strengthen the relative position of the regime, while undermining its long-term staying power — unless, of course, Tehran begins a new set of regional wars under a nuclear umbrella.

An important insight into the character of the Iranian leadership can be gained from Adolf Hitler’s speech to the German army’s top commanders at Obersalzberg on Aug. 22, 1939, a week before the invasion of Poland. Hitler began by explaining that he initially had wanted to attack the Allies in the West but that circumstances compelled him to take Poland out first. The question, then, was why begin war at that particular moment. And the answer had two parts: economic weakness and the threat of regime change.

We have nothing to lose, but much indeed to gain. As a result of the constraints forced upon us, our economic position is such that we cannot hold out for more than a few years. [Hermann] Goering can confirm this. We have no other choice, we must act. … At no point in the future will Germany have a man with more authority than I. But I could be replaced at any moment by some idiot or criminal. … The morale of the German people is excellent. It can only worsen from here.

Pages: 1 2 | 216 Comments

The Republican message for 2012 is as irrefutable as  1 + 1 = 2. And Obama threw himself headfirst into the bear trap with his veto of the Keystone project.

One one hand, we have nearly a fourth of working-age Americans without jobs, the worst proportion since the early 1980s. On the other, we have $2 trillion of cash sitting idle on corporate balance sheets, as President Obama complained in a February 2011 speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. We have investors languishing for lack of returns, and unemployed people languishing for lack of work.

Standing in between prospective workers and prospective investors, preventing capital from employing labor, is Barack Obama. Someone really ought to to draw the cartoon: a $2 trillion cash pile gathering cobwebs on one side, an endless line of unemployment on the other, and Barack Obama in the middle, keeping them apart.

Under Obama, the United States has suffered the steepest drop in private investment since data were kept, as well as the slowest recovery.

The flip side of the investment bust is the worst employment-to-population ratio since before the great Reagan recovery:

To put this in perspective, $2 trillion of idle cash represents two years’ worth of American investment in equipment and software. Why would corporations rather earn rounding-error levels of interest at the bank than put their money to work  in profitable ventures?

Pages: 1 2 | 89 Comments

It is a disgrace that the US government has held direct talks with the Muslim Brotherhood, and an outrage that that America is accelerating aid payments to Egypt to support a government dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood and other pro-terrorist, anti-American extremists. The Brotherhood won 47% of seats in Egypt’s parliament, and along with other extreme Islamist parties controls about three-quarters of the total. Reuters reports:

DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan 25 (Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama plans to accelerate the pace of American aid to Egypt, a top State Department official said on Wednesday, as the most populous Arab nation reaches a critical stage in its uncertain transition away from autocratic rule.

Undersecretary of State Robert Hormats, part of a U.S. delegation that held unprecedented talks last week with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, said Washington wanted to provide “more immediate benefits” to Egyptians, who earlier this month conducted their first democratic elections in decades.

“During this period, we want to be as supportive as we can. This is an historic moment. Egypt’s a country of enormous importance,” Hormats said.

Under the plan, some non-urgent U.S. aid slated for other countries – he did not name them – would be redirected to Egypt. And funding in the pipeline for long-term programs in Egypt would be shifted to quick-impact projects, he said.

This is the same Muslim Brotherhood that is infiltrating terrorists into the United States, according to the director of the FBI.  Now it is in position to control a military establishment created by the United States that includes, among other things, more than two hundred F-16′s.

The Egyptian people are free to choose any party they please, but if they choose parties that are embittered and implacable enemies of the United States and Western freedom in general, we should not help them consolidate their rule. Fortunately, $2 billion here and there won’t help Egypt very much; that’s roughly 2 weeks’ of flight capital leaving the country. American foreign aid will simply help the military kleptocrats who ran Egypt for decade to move more of their private fortunes out of the country, before the Islamists lock the country down. And there is no reason for American taxpayers to subsidize the London townhouses and Paris apartments and Monaco yachts of the Egyptian generals.

42 Comments

It won’t decide the 2012 election, but the meltdown of Barack Obama’s Islamophile foreign policy has to hurt. Iran’s imminent acquisition of nuclear weapons humiliates a president so committed to dialogue with the evil lunatics in Tehran that he refused to support a mass outpouring of democracy demonstrators during the summer of 2009. Obama’s closest foreign policy friendship is with the Islamist president of Turkey, who has jailed more journalists than China and steered his country towards imminent economic disaster. Tayyip Erdogan may not be a terrorist, as Rick Perry said in last week’s debate, but he backs them, including Hamas.

And then there is Egypt: Even the New York Times has noticed that Egypt’s economy is collapsing, and that the country faces disaster as it runs out of money.

The reasons for his plight have been piling up all year: a virtual cutoff of foreign investment, a 30 percent decline in tourist visits and the stagnation of economic growth. The official unemployment rate is 12 percent, but among young people the real rate of unemployment is at least double that figure.

The military rulers have also presided over a period of financial turmoil. Inflation has surged into double digits, and the exchange rate for the currency, the Egyptian pound, is under heavy pressure. Foreign exchange reserves have plunged, as the government is spending about $2 billion a month in a losing battle to prop up the pound. Foreign currency reserves have fallen to about $10 billion, after certain obligations, from about $36 billion before the revolt.

Readers of this blog are familiar with the story. The only piece of news in the Times’ very belated offering is the estimate that Egypt’s foreign exchange reserves are down to just $10 billion (rather than the reported $18 billion), or import coverage of a month and a half, preparing an “all but inevitable further devaluation of Egypt’s currency that could send the prices of food and other goods soaring.”  In an Asia Times essay last Monday, I observed that the Egyptian government no longer could borrow from its own capital markets, suggesting that reserve figures were much lower than reported; the Times does not say where it got the $10 billion number, but it sounds reasonable.

Pages: 1 2 | 112 Comments

President Obama thinks that the improving economy will win him a second term, the New York Times reports today. Whatever he’s drinking, order me a double. His poll numbers look a little better because the Republicans have spent the past several months in a fratricidal bloodbath. Fortunately, the memory of the American electorate for such antics is short. Once we choose a candidate (and I am happy with Romney, Santorum, or Gingrich) and unite behind him, we will win, unless, of course, we find a way to sabotage ourselves.

People are hurting, and badly. The official unemployment rate may have fallen, slightly, but the real unemployment rate — the number of working-age Americans who aren’t working — rose from about 12% before the 2008 crisis, to about 23%, and hasn’t come down. That includes people who have retired early because they can’t find work, spouses who used to earn a second income but have gone back to homemaking because work isn’t available, self-employed people whose businesses have collapsed, young people who live in their parents’ basement because they can’t afford tuition and can’t find work. The chart below, courtesy of the Shadow Government Statistics website, shows (in the blue line labelled “SGS alternative”) the way unemployment feels to Americans: one in four Americans who could be working, isn’t. That’s roughly twice the pre-recession level.

Another way to gauge the pain factor is the so-called Civilian Employment-Population Ratio. Prior to the recession, nearly 65 percent of working-age Americans (not in the military or in prison) had jobs. Now it’s down to 58%. The difference is 16 million people who should be working, but aren’t — about the same as the entire working-age population of Australia. The slight increase in employment during the past few months barely tracks the natural increase in population.

Pages: 1 2 | 195 Comments