How to Save the Euro

At The Economist, "It requires urgent action on a huge scale. Unless Germany rises to the challenge, disaster looms":

SO GRAVE, so menacing, so unstoppable has the euro crisis become that even rescue talk only fuels ever-rising panic. Investors have sniffed out that Europe’s leaders seem unwilling ever to do enough. Yet unless politicians act fast to persuade the world that their desire to preserve the euro is greater than the markets’ ability to bet against it, the single currency faces ruin. As credit lines gum up and outsiders plead for action, it is not just the euro that is at risk, but the future of the European Union and the health of the world economy.

Keep reading. The piece keeps mentioning the "restructuring of debt," which follows from the fact that some European states simply can't make good on their obligations, and sovereign default would hammer commercial banks and cause even deeper economic turmoil. But the larger issue is whether EU members deal with the crisis in multilateral fashion or retreat to narrower self-interest, casting off Greece to its own misfortunes, and so forth...

RELATED: At New York Times, "Suddenly, Over There Is Over Here" (via Memeorandum).

Meetings on European Debt Crisis End in Debate, but Little Progress

This story's interesting beyond the financial crisis itself. Europeans snubbed Tim Geithner, but why? They think he's a clown? They think the Obama administration's a joke? Or America's weakened structurally, and it wouldn't have mattered who was Treasury Secretary?

See New York Times:

WROCLAW, Poland — European finance ministers ended a two-day meeting here Saturday without making substantial progress toward solving the region’s debt crisis, or any pledge to recapitalize Europe’s banks.

The meetings were highlighted by the appearance by Timothy F. Geithner, the United States treasury secretary, whose advice, and warnings, drew a tepid reaction from the euro zone’s finance ministers. And Mr. Geithner’s rejection Friday of a European idea for a global tax on financial transactions prompted a debate about whether Europe should go ahead on its own.

Meanwhile, with an October deadline looming for international lenders to agree to the release of around 8 billion euros, or $11 billion, of aid to Greece, without which it could default on its debt, George Papandreou, the Greek prime minister, canceled a trip to the United States.

“The coming week is particularly critical for the implementation of the July 21 decisions in the euro area and the initiatives which the country must undertake,” Mr. Papandreou said in a statement on Saturday.

The attendance of an American official at Friday’s meeting was unusual, and Jacek Rostowski, the finance minister of Poland who invited Mr. Geithner, said it showed “unity within the transatlantic family.”

That glossed over the grumbling about Mr. Geithner’s comments from several European ministers Friday, including Maria Fekter of Austria, who publicly said she was unimpressed with Mr. Geithner’s contribution.

Yet the American plea for urgent decisions to shore up the euro zone was echoed Saturday by two European ministers whose nations have stayed outside the single currency.

What We Got Right in the War on Terror

I was hoping to do some big analysis of Abe Greenwald's masterful essay, at Commentary, but never got around to it. This is simply the best piece I've read on the war on terror:

Over the course of the 10 years, American authorities foiled more than two dozen al-Qaeda plots. Those averted tragedies were not foremost on the minds of revelers who gathered to celebrate Bin Laden’s demise on May 1 at Ground Zero, Times Square, and in front of the White House. But if a mere few of the plots had materialized, those spaces might not even have been open to public assembly.

Not only have U.S. authorities managed to keep America safe from al-Qaeda for a decade; by the time he was killed, Osama bin Laden was barely a leader. Among the items recovered at his compound in Abbottabad were some recent writings, in which the former icon lamented al-Qaeda’s dramatically sinking stock and pondered organizational rebranding as a possible antidote.

His growing insignificance as a global player was not the product of chance. The marginalization of the world’s principal jihadist was the result of audacious American policy—indeed, the most controversial and hotly debated policy undertaken in the wake of 9/11. In the words of Reuel Marc Gerecht writing in the Wall Street Journal, “the war in Iraq was Bin Laden’s great moral undoing.” In his desperate attempt to drive American fighting forces out of Mesopotamia, Bin Laden sanctioned a bloody civil war in Iraq in 2005 and 2006. The carnage failed to repel the United States, but in the end, the countrywide slaughter of Muslims proved too much to bear for al-Qaeda’s own one-time and would-be supporters. The “Sunni awakening” that helped transform Iraq was an awakening out of al-Qaeda jihadism, and the blow it delivered to Bin Laden’s ambitions was stunning.

After the turnaround in Iraq, the landscape of the Muslim world suffered even greater changes—with ordinary Muslims rising to revolt against Persian and Arab tyranny, not against American hegemony. As Fouad Ajami has written: “The Arab Spring has simply overwhelmed the world of the jihadists. In Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, and Syria, younger people—hurled into politics by the economic and political failures all around them—are attempting to create a new political framework, to see if a way could be found out of the wreckage that the authoritarian states have bequeathed them.”

It was the Freedom Agenda of the George W. Bush administration—delineated and formulated as a conscious alternative to jihadism—that showed the way. Indeed, the costly American nation-building in Iraq has now led to the creation of the world’s first and only functioning democratic Arab state. One popular indictment of Bush maintains that he settled on the Freedom Agenda as justification for war after U.S. forces and inspectors found no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The record shows otherwise. “A free Iraq can be a source of hope for all the Middle East,” he said before the invasion, in February 2003. “Iraq can be an example of progress and prosperity in a region that needs both.”

And something of the kind has come to pass. “One despot fell in 2003,” Ajami has said. “We decapitated him. Two despots, in Tunisia and Egypt, fell, and there is absolutely a direct connection between what happened in Iraq in 2003 and what’s happening today throughout the rest of the Arab world.”

Thus, there are three intertwined achievements that have proved to be the dispositive features of American success in the war on terror: formulating the Freedom Agenda in the Middle East, reversing the course of the war in Iraq, and establishing a national-security apparatus to foil multiple terrorist attacks. It is no coincidence that they are also the most controversial foreign policies America has implemented since the Vietnam War.

September 11 was a hinge moment in American history. The attacks plunged the nation into a full-scale war against non-state entities. Any adequate American response had to break with previous approaches in previous conflicts. War could not be waged on parties inside states in the same way it had been waged on states themselves. Prisoners captured on a battlefield in a country not their own and with no interest in following the rules of conventional war could not be handled as they had been. Getting the edge on Islamist terror would mean fundamentally rethinking our approach to both the blunting of deadly threats and the shuttering of the political hothouses of the Middle East in which such threats thrive.

The adoption of these unprecedented and uncompromising means of war inspired animated debate in the United States. In fighting the war on terror, we have been told, America has become—depending on the accuser—either too dismissive or too enamored of democracy. Some on the left think our national-security apparatus undermines our defining ideals. On the right, outraged voices condemn our naive enthusiasm for helping to secure liberty for Muslims abroad, calling it a form of multicultural self-sabotage. After civil war seized post-invasion Iraq, critics from across the ideological spectrum denounced our misguided effort. The fits and starts and frustrations of the war decade have this one thing in common: we have done battle in an age when spectacular setbacks appear to provide irrefutable evidence of our own baseness and incompetence—a few years before drab good news arrives to refute both expert opinion and common knowledge.

The arguments that we have prosecuted the war on terror immorally and ineffectually are important, and deserve the respectful hearing they have received, even if many of those arguing these points have resorted to launching the most abject slanders and accusations toward those who believe the war on terror is just and has been fought honorably. To be sure, not everything the United States has done in the war on terror has been correct. Far from it. As Winston Churchill said, “War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.” In the fight against Islamist terrorism, American blunders have come in all shapes and sizes, and in truth there are few small wartime miscalculations. This is especially so in an age of instant global headlines.

We continue to suffer for our biggest mistakes. Concerning the failure to catch Bin Laden and make serious efforts to nation-build early in the Afghanistan war, inaccurate intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons, and the Pentagon’s ill-preparedness for the Iraqi insurgency, there can be no absolution. These errors have cost the country tragic sums in money, credibility, and life. They also set our efforts back precious years.

But these blunders, great as they are, have not undone America’s outstanding accomplishments. Ten years ago, the most delusional optimist among us would not have predicted the irrelevancy of Osama bin Laden or a decade without another al-Qaeda attack, let alone a democratic Iraq and a transformative explosion of antiauthoritarianism in the Middle East.

Nor do American achievements in this war mean we are in a position to quit the fight. The notion that America achieved closure with Bin Laden’s killing suggests to some, perhaps even the occupant of the White House, that the war on terror has had its decade and the United States can now move on. “America, it is time to focus on nation-building here at home,” said Barack Obama this summer as he announced a sizable drawdown of troops in Afghanistan for the fall of 2012. The suggestion that our work is done has traction only because resolute American action at home and abroad have provided a sense of security so pervasive it now goes unquestioned.

The United States has fallen prey to false comfort in the past. So before we submit to the siren song of closure, we would do well to recall that that is exactly where this war began—and our retaining some genuine measure of security has been the result of thinking and acting more boldly than we have in generations.

Now go read the whole thing.

The Palestinian Obsession

From Caroline Glick, at Jerusalem Post:

If nothing else, the Palestinians’ UN statehood gambit goes a long way towards revealing the deep-seated European and US pathologies that enable and prolong the Palestinian conflict with Israel.

In a nutshell, the Palestinian Authority – or Fatah – or PLO initiative of asking the UN Security Council and the General Assembly to upgrade its status to that of a sovereign UN member state or a sovereign non-UN member state is an act of diplomatic aggression.

Eighteen years ago this week, on September 13, 1993, the PLO signed the Declaration of Principles with Israel on the White House lawn.

There, the terror group committed itself to a peace process in which all disputes between Israel and the PLO – including the issue of Palestinian statehood – would be settled in the framework of bilateral negotiations.

The PA was established on the basis of this accord. The territory, money, arms and international legitimacy it has been given was due entirely to the PLO pledge to resolve the Palestinian conflict with Israel through bilateral negotiations.

By abandoning negotiations with Israel two years ago, and opting instead to achieve its nationalist aims outside the framework of a peace treaty with Israel, the Palestinians are destroying the diplomatic edifice on which the entire concept of a peace process is based. They are announcing that they have no intention of living at peace with Israel. Rather they intend to move ahead at Israel’s expense...

Libyan Rebels Enter Bani Walid in Final Push

At Telegraph UK.

Mexican Drug Cartels Hang Bodies Off Bridge as Warning to Social Media Users

At CNN: "Bodies hanging from bridge in Mexico are warning to social media users."

VIDEO: Afghanistan Firefight — NATO Headquarters, International Security Assistance Force, Kabul

Via This Ain't Hell...:

And at New York Times, "Militants Attack U.S. Embassy in Kabul."

KABUL, Afghanistan — Heavily armed insurgents wearing suicide vests struck Tuesday at two of the most prominent symbols of the American diplomatic and military presence in Kabul, the United States Embassy and the nearby NATO headquarters, demonstrating the Taliban’s ability to infiltrate even the most heavily fortified districts of the capital.

As the insurgents fired rocket-propelled grenades, Westerners sought shelter — one rocket penetrated the embassy compound — and Afghan government workers fled their offices, emptying the city center. NATO and Afghan troops responded with barrages of bullets. At least 6 people were killed and 19 wounded.

Keep reading.

Israel's Memorial to September 11

At Berman Post, "Israeli 9/11 Memorial":

If the measure of a true friend is how sincerely they mourn for your loss, Israel once again showed how close of an ally they are to the United States.

RELATED: At Jerusalem Post, "PM on 9/11: We are still susceptible to terror attacks."

George W. Bush Speech at Shanksville Flight 93 Memorial

Watch President Bush in full at Gateway Pundit, "George W. Bush at Flight 93 Memorial: “One of the Lessons of 9-11 Is That Evil Is Real and So Is Courage” (Video)."

Beyond Cairo Embassy Attack, Israel Senses Wider Siege

See New York Times, "Beyond Cairo, Israel Sensing a Wider Siege":

JERUSALEM — With its Cairo embassy ransacked, its ambassador to Turkey expelled and the Palestinians seeking statehood recognition at the United Nations, Israel found itself on Saturday increasingly isolated and grappling with a radically transformed Middle East where it believes its options are limited and poor.

The diplomatic crisis, in which winds unleashed by the Arab Spring are now casting a chill over the region, was crystallized by the scene of Israeli military jets sweeping into Cairo at dawn on Saturday to evacuate diplomats after the Israeli Embassy had been besieged by thousands of protesters.

It was an image that reminded some Israelis of Iran in 1979, when Israel evacuated its embassy in Tehran after the revolution there replaced an ally with an implacable foe.

“Seven months after the downfall of Hosni Mubarak’s regime, Egyptian protesters tore to shreds the Israeli flag, a symbol of peace between Egypt and its eastern neighbor, after 31 years,” Aluf Benn, the editor in chief of the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz, wrote Saturday. “It seems that the flag will not return to the flagstaff anytime soon.”

More at that link, and see also, Barry Rubin, "Ten Years After September 11: Who’s Really Winning the War On Terrorism." Rubin looks at the range of extremist terrorist groupings outside of al Qaeda --- Hamas, Hezbollah, Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt --- and suggests that terrorism is on the march. Israel is right smack-dab in the middle of it all. As a challenge for U.S. foreign policy, the war on terrorism is hardly won.

Ari Fleischer Remembers 9/11

This is an extremely fascinating discussion, from Alexis Garcia, at Pajamas Media, "PJTV: Ari Fleischer on 9/11 and the Fog of War." I'm struck by Fleischer's discussion of signalling to President Bush, upon first learning of the attacks, when he was still at the Florida elementary school, that he wasn't to go public with announcements or statements that the U.S. was under attack:

We Didn't Overreact to 9/11

At the video, an interesting clip featuring Ann Coulter and Matt Welch.

And see Charles Krauthammer, at Washington Post, "The 9/11 ‘overreaction’? Nonsense":

9/11 was our Pearl Harbor. This time, however, the enemy had no home address. No Tokyo. Which is why today’s war could not be wrapped up in a mere four years. It was unconventional war by an unconventional enemy embedded within a worldwide religious community. Yet in a decade, we largely disarmed and defeated it, and developed the means to continue to pursue its remnants at rapidly decreasing cost. That is a historic achievement.

Our current difficulties and gloom are almost entirely economic in origin, the bitter fruit of misguided fiscal, regulatory and monetary policies that had nothing to do with 9/11. America’s current demoralization is not a result of the war on terror. On the contrary. The denigration of the war on terror is the result of our current demoralization, of retroactively reading today’s malaise into the real — and successful — history of our 9/11 response.

I love Krauthammer. Read it all.

Protesters Attack Israel Embassy in Cairo

Well, if they're using Molotovs they're basically terrorists.

At NYT, "Israeli Ambassador Leaves Cairo After Protest Turns Violent":

CAIRO — Israel flew most of its diplomatic staff out of Egypt on Saturday after thousands of protesters the day before tore down a protective wall around the Israeli Embassy and broke into its offices the day before.

Prime Minister Essam Sharaf of Egypt called an emergency cabinet meeting to deal with the aftermath of the attack and the Egyptian government put its police on alert to guard against more violence.

The Egyptian Interior Ministry said Saturday that at least two people had died in the clashes, one from a bullet wound and the other from a heart attack, while as many as 1,200 had been injured in overnight clashes with the police, mostly around the Israeli Embassy. Protesters scaled the walls of the embassy to tear down its flag, broke into offices and tossed binders of documents into the streets.

The rioting began after large groups of protesters split off from what had been a peaceful protest in Tahrir Square. Thousands attacked the Israeli embassy while others converged on the Interior Ministry, defacing its headquarters. Dozens were also injured in clashes with the police there.

Israeli officials signaled Saturday that they considered the breach of their embassy’s security a significant blow to relations between the two allies. Israeli officials placed several calls to their American counterparts, including from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to President Obama, and from Defense Minister Ehud Barak to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, to try to apply pressure on Egypt to resolve the crisis, Israeli and American officials said.

A "significant blow to relations"?

You think?

Egyptian Protesters Tear Down Israeli Embassy Security Wall

This video c/o Ahram Online, "VIDEO: Protesters take down Israeli embassy flag."

And at Weasel Zippers, "Arab Spring: Hundreds of Rampaging Egyptians Tear Down Concrete Wall Protecting Israeli Embassy…"

RELATED: At Los Angeles Times, "EGYPT: Thousands in Tahrir Square angry at slow pace of reforms."

No doubt.

The Global Left's Anti-Israel Forum

See Anne Bayefsky, at Weekly Standard, "Durban III: An Anti-Israel Forum Takes Shape" (via Memeorandum).

United Nations Anti-Semitism

Another devastating video, via Anne Bayefsky, at Big Peace, "The UN’s Anti-Semitism Agenda on Display in ‘Durban III’":

PREVIOUSLY: "United Nations Bias Against Israel."

Ten Years Without an Attack

From John Yoo, at Wall Street Journal (alternative link). Discussing President George W. Bush's leadership, Yoo writes:

Looking back over the decade, the first clear lesson is the critical importance of Mr. Bush’s decision to consider the struggle with al Qaeda a war. Unlike past administrations, his chose not to view al Qaeda as a Middle Eastern version of the mafia, if on a grander scale. The 9/11 attacks constituted an act of war—they were a decapitation strike, an effort to eliminate our nation’s leadership in a single blow. If the Soviet Union had carried out the same attacks, no one would have doubted that the United States was at war.

Al Qaeda’s independence from any nation state would not shield it from the American military and leave it solely to the more tender mercies of the FBI and the courts.

Choosing war opened the arsenal that has decimated al Qaeda’s leadership and blunted its plan of attack. A nation at war need not wait for a suicide bombing to arrest the “suspects” who remain. Instead, it can fire missiles or send in covert teams to pre-emptively capture or kill the enemy. Our government doesn’t need a judge’s permission before tapping an al Qaeda operative’s phones, intercepting his emails, or arresting him.

We need not provide terrorists with Miranda warnings, lawyers and jury trials. A nation at war can detain the enemy without lawyers or civilian trials and interrogate them for information to prevent future attacks.

In its second critical decision, the Bush administration pushed to translate knowledge into action. Winning the war requires, above all, the gathering, analysis and exploitation of intelligence. Before 9/11 our national security bureaucracies, prodded by the civil liberties worries of the courts and Congress, had deliberately handicapped their ability to pull all intelligence into a single mosaic. Passage of the Patriot Act, the expanded interception of international terrorist emails and phone calls, and the tough interrogation of a few high-ranking al Qaeda leaders broadened and deepened the pool of information on our enemy.

At the same time, the intelligence community and the U.S. Armed Forces have honed the integration of tactical intelligence and operations to a deadly knife’s-edge. Bin Laden’s killing this summer was not a one-off lucky shot, but the culmination of a decade of work combining intelligence-gathering, analysis and rapid strike teams. American presidents did not have such reliable options in the past—witness Jimmy Carter’s disastrous attempt to rescue the Iranian hostages or Bill Clinton’s failure to kill or capture bin Laden.

RELATED: "John Yoo at David Horowitz's West Coast Retreat, April 3, 2011."

'Climate Justice'

Climate justice?

That's a scam right? There's no such thing as "climate justice," right?

Think again, at Pirate's Cove, "Apparently, 4.5 Billion Years Of Changing Climate Threatens “Human Rights”." Follow the links to the discussion of "restorative justice" for "those countries worst affected by the issue..." And "those countries" would be the LCDs, in the latest round of the global left's developmental shakedown regime.

RELATED: From Zombie, "Justice Justice."

Deterring Enemies in a Shaken World

Daniel Byman reviews Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda, by Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker, at New York Times:

As they relate this new direction [in counter-terrorism after 9/11], Mr. Schmitt and Mr. Shanker put flesh on approaches and operations that in the past were largely in the realm of specialists. The book is sprinkled with small, vivid anecdotes that bring day-to-day counterterrorism work to life. Take the Horse Blanket, a “graduating series of contingencies that each federal agency could take in response to a potential or actual terrorist attack” beginning in 2007.

Much like a playbook, the Horse Blanket (whose intriguing name goes unexplained here) detailed the cost of each option, its level of disruption and its impact on foreign policy. A report of terrorist efforts to cross from Canada might lead to an increase in border security. Should intelligence agencies gather credible reports of the ultimate nightmare, a nuclear weapon being moved to attack an American city, the border would be shut. Policy makers can now ratchet counterterrorism up or down to match the perceived threat.

Technology has made a revolutionary difference. The authors explain how the contents of cellphones belonging to captured terrorists are cloned in seconds, with computers scanning the numbers to match those of other known terrorists. Such information can tie a suspect to an enemy network and its locations, which in turn helps interrogators ask smarter questions and enables them to direct military forces better. More bad guys die or are taken off the streets, and fewer innocents suffer.

Other efforts are aimed at the hearts and minds of those who have not yet taken sides. To discredit Al Qaeda with the Muslim public, officials sought “to create a constant drumbeat of anti-Al Qaeda information that was factual, directly quoted and heavily sourced,” as one White House official described it. So when the Taliban kill a schoolteacher or terrorists blind schoolgirls in an acid attack, the horrors are trumpeted in local and international media, countering Al Qaeda’s narrative that its fearless warriors fight only heavily armed United States soldiers.

Today, the authors write, American counterterrorism policy embraces “the new deterrence.” By imposing costs on terrorists’ reputations, chances for success, material assets — whatever they hold dear — you “alter the behavior and thinking of your adversary.” In contrast to deterrence strategies during the cold war, deterrence today does not involve a state actor, like the Soviet Union, with nuclear-tipped missiles but rather more nebulous networks that include not only fanatic suicide bombers but also more rational financiers, recruiters, arms runners and others who can be dissuaded by the threat of death or arrest. The new deterrence involves “kinetic” instruments, to use the military parlance for killing people, but also innovative information operations that might discredit a cause and scare away providers of funds.

Sounds like a great book.

Obama Administration Works to Stall Palestinian Statehood at the U.N.

Good luck with that.



At NYT, "U.S. Appeals to Palestinians to Stall U.N. Vote on Statehood":

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has initiated a last-ditch diplomatic campaign to avert a confrontation this month over a plan by Palestinians to seek recognition as a state at the United Nations, but it may already be too late, according to senior American officials and foreign diplomats.



The administration has circulated a proposal for renewed peace talks with the Israelis in the hopes of persuading the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, to abandon the bid for recognition at the annual gathering of world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly beginning Sept. 20.



The administration has made it clear to Mr. Abbas that it will veto any request presented to the United Nations Security Council to make a Palestinian state a new member outright.



But the United States does not have enough support to block a vote by the General Assembly to elevate the status of the Palestinians’ nonvoting observer “entity” to that of a nonvoting observer state. The change would pave the way for the Palestinians to join dozens of United Nations bodies and conventions, and it could strengthen their ability to pursue cases against Israel at the International Criminal Court.

Right.



Meanwhile, enemies of Israel leave comments like this at YouTube:

Jews stole and are stealing land from the Palestinians. Jews are subhumans. And jewish girls are harier than apes. And their nose is bigger than their penises. Jews are ugly as fuck. Fuck Israel. Give Palestinians their land back you landstealing parazides.