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Barack Obama’s Moral Concession to Evil

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Commentary Magazine - By Peter Wehner - Mar. 01 (Opinion) - The Obama administration’s position assumes that Muammar Qaddafi needs a pretext to kill Americans. He actually doesn’t. He has done so in the past, and he could just as easily do so now, regardless of what kind of “messaging” emerges from our government.

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The Worst Ecological Disaster Ever?

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Commentary Magazine - By John Steele Gordon - Jul. 11 (News Analysis) - David Axelrod on Fox News Sunday this morning said that the Gulf oil spill is the “worst ecological disaster ever” — or words to that effect (the transcript is not yet available). This, of course, is historical nonsense. Except in terms of the volume of oil released into the environment, it is not even the worst oil spill in American history. The Gulf well is 50 miles out to sea in the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, while the Exxon Valdez spill was in the confined and much colder waters of Prince William Sound. The warmth causes the volatiles in the oil to evaporate fairly quickly. And while tar balls are unsightly at best, their coming ashore is nowhere near as ecologically damaging or as hard to remediate as crude oil doing so. Crude is very nasty stuff.

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Lebanon's Third Civil War

Sun, 11 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Commentary Magazine - By Michael J. Totten - May. 11 (Opinion) - With Iranian money and weapons, Hezbollah has built its own state-within-a-state in South Lebanon and South Beirut which is used as a base to wage war against Israel. Hezbollah also wishes to violently yank Lebanon from its current pro-Western alignment into the Syrian-Iranian axis. Roughly one-fourth of the population supports this agenda. No country on earth can withstand that kind of geopolitical tectonic pressure. For more than a year members of Hezbollah have tried unsuccessfully to topple the elected government with a minimal use of force, but their patience is at an end and they have turned to war.

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I'm Not Swooning

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Commentary Magazine - By Peter Wehner - Feb. 08 (Comment) - We should be able to praise Obama on the grounds we have without being accused of being "infatuated" with him and "swooning over him." We can recognize his gifts without viewing him as a "knight in shining armor." The reality is that Senator Obama is an impressive man and a remarkable political talent. He is also a conventional liberal and, on Iraq particularly, I believe his policies are unwise and even reckless. I disagree with him on probably every major issue-and yet I still find him to be an appealing figure.

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The Past, Present, and Future of Neoconservatism

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 19:32:13 -0700

Commentary Magazine - By Joshua Muravchik - Oct. 01 (Special Report) - The term "neoconservative" was coined in the 1970's as an anathema. It was intended to stigmatize a group of liberal intellectuals who had lately parted ways with the majority of their fellows. As a heretical offshoot of liberalism, neoconservatism appealed to the same values and even many of the same goals--like, for example, peace and racial equality. But neoconservatives argued that liberal policies--for example, disarmament in the pursuit of peace, or affirmative action in the pursuit of racial equality--undermined those goals rather than advancing them. In short order, the heretics established themselves as contemporary liberalism's most formidable foes.

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Hillary and Obama Go Nuclear

Fri, 03 Aug 2007 08:10:45 -0700

Commentary Magazine - By Gabriel Schoenfeld - Aug. 03 (Opinion) - Obama, on the defensive on account of his muddled idea last week of meeting foreign dictators without preconditions, precipitated the latest skirmish by calling for the possible use of U.S. troops to clean out terrorist enclaves in Waziristan. But then, in response to a question, he ruled out use of the most powerful weapon in the American arsenal...Hillary Clinton, hawk talons extended, immediately pounced, saying "I think that Presidents should be very careful at all times in discussing the use or non-use of nuclear weapons. Presidents, since the cold war, have used nuclear deterrence to keep the peace. And I don't believe that any President should make any blanket statements with respect to the use or non-use of nuclear weapons."

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Process or Symbol?

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 08:20:53 -0700

Commentary Magazine - By Michael J. Lewis - Jul. 06 (Opinion) - What exactly is a memorial? If you are someone who thrives on the sneers of the cognoscenti, try saying that it is the physical manifestation of an abstract idea (such as grief, triumph, or resolution), presented in symbolic terms. You will be told in no uncertain terms that a memorial is not an object but "a process," an open-ended and indeterminate series of negotiations that can never be brought to resolution. So I learned last year when participating in a panel discussion hosted by WNYC-FM on monuments and memorials in the wake of 9/11 (which you can hear here). The champion of the "process" concept of memorial was James Young, whose views enjoy great prestige in academic circles. (He was a juror on the panels that chose the designs for both the World Trade Center Memorial and Berlin's Holocaust Memorial.) His views might be paraphrased thus: In our postmodern age, we no longer possess the collective certainty to make bombastic civic monuments like the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials; we should recognize that there are multiple constituencies and multiple claims on the truth, and that each of these should be given voice in a memorial. The notion that a memorial can effectively symbolize a single abstract concept is the discredited vestige of a simplistic age.

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Good Bad News from Iran

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 09:20:31 -0700

Commentary Magazine - By Max Boot - Jun. 28 (Opinion) - Good news from Iran. The Associated Press reports that "Iranians smashed shop windows and set fire to a dozen gas stations in the capital Wednesday, angered by the sudden start of a fuel rationing system that threatens to further increase the unpopularity of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad." Why is this good news? Because it reveals the unpopularity of the theocratic dictatorship in Tehran, and its vulnerability to pressure. As the AP article goes on to note: "The rationing is part of a government attempt to reduce the $10 billion it spends each year to import fuel that is then sold to Iranian drivers at less than cost, to keep prices low. Iran is one of the world's biggest oil producers, but it doesn't have enough refineries, so it must import more than 50 percent of the gasoline its people use." That's a point of leverage that various analysts have suggested exploiting. In the pages of COMMENTARY, Arthur Herman argued for (among other things) imposing a naval blockade to stop the gasoline imports and oil exports that are the lifeblood of the Iranian economy. In USA Today this week, Peter Schweizer of the Hoover Institution suggested not only imposing a blockade, but also counterfeiting Iranian currency to drive its economy deeper into crisis.

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Warships for China?

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 09:03:08 -0700

Commentary Magazine - By Gordon G. Chang - Jun. 12 (Opinion) - Defense Secretary Robert Gates expressed optimism about our military relations with Beijing at the recently concluded Shangri-La Dialogue, the preeminent security conference in Asia. American efforts could be complimentary to, not competitive with, those of China, he said at the Singapore conclave. Gates listed the areas where China and America share security interests, such as terrorism, proliferation, and energy security. But he left one major issue off the list--the construction of large warships. This is particularly disturbing in light of the remarks made by Admiral Timothy Keating in Beijing last month. Keating, the commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, said he found his host country's ambition to build an aircraft carrier "understandable." After talks with China's navy chief, Admiral Wu Shengli, Keating offered to help the Chinese build a carrier "to the degree that they seek and the degree that we're capable." Will the Chinese seek to build a carrier? Without a doubt. They have been contemplating the prospect for decades, going so far as to purchase the hulks of one Australian and three Soviet carriers for purposes of reverse-engineering. Recently, Chinese military representatives have been touring international air shows to find strike planes that can be launched at sea. And the U.S. is, of course, capable of helping them build carriers. The only thing that prevents Keating from handing over the plans to the Nimitz is American legislation: a Tiananmen-era ban on military exports to China, as well as a strict limit, enacted later, on military exchanges.

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The Case for Bombing Iran

Mon, 21 May 2007 12:56:10 -0700

Commentary Magazine - By Norman Podhoretz - May. 21 (Opinion) - But listen to what Bernard Lewis, the greatest authority of our time on the Islamic world, has to say in this context on the subject of deterrence: MAD, mutual assured destruction, [was effective] right through the cold war. Both sides had nuclear weapons. Neither side used them, because both sides knew the other would retaliate in kind. This will not work with a religious fanatic [like Ahmadinejad]. For him, mutual assured destruction is not a deterrent, it is an inducement. We know already that [Iran's leaders] do not give a damn about killing their own people in great numbers. We have seen it again and again. In the final scenario, and this applies all the more strongly if they kill large numbers of their own people, they are doing them a favor. They are giving them a quick free pass to heaven and all its delights. Nor are they inhibited by a love of country: We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world. These were the words of the Ayatollah Khomeini, who ruled Iran from 1979 to 1989, and there is no reason to suppose that his disciple Ahmadinejad feels any differently.

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PBS's Islam Problem

Sun, 06 May 2007 17:23:08 -0700

Commentary Magazine - May. 06 (News Analysis) - Originally created for the America at the Crossroads documentary series currently airing on PBS, the film was nixed upon completion and kept off the air. Before the screening on Tuesday, Frank Gaffney and Alex Alexiev, two of the filmmakers behind Islam vs. Islamists, joked that theirs was one of the first films "roundly attacked by the people who commissioned it." Gaffney added, "The nicest thing they [PBS] said about it was that it was 'alarmist.'"

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