Obama and the Ottomanization of modern Turkey

Obama’s Middle East Is in Tatters

By Martin Peretz

It is not actually his region. Still, with the arrogance that is so characteristic of his behavior in matters he knows little about (which is a lot of matters), he entered the region as if in a triumphal march. But it wasn’t the power and sway of America that he was representing in Turkey and in Egypt. For the fact is that he has not much respect for these representations of the United States. In the mind of President Obama, in fact, these are what have wreaked havoc with our country’s standing in the world. So what—or, rather, who—does he exemplify in his contacts with foreign countries and their leaders? His exultancy gives the answer away. It is he himself, lui-mème. Alas, he is a president disconnected from his nation, without enthusiasts for his style, without loyalists to his policies, without a true friend unless that’s what you can call his top aide de camp,Valerie Jarrett, which probably you can. Obama is lucky, but it’s the only luck he has, that there are nutsy Republican enemies who aspire to his job. Maybe Rick Perry can save him from … well, yes, himself. I wouldn’t take bets on that, though.

Obama’s first personal excursions into the Middle East as president were to Turkey and Egypt. Recep Tayyip Erdogan welcomed his visit. Indeed, the president’s journey set the framework for the Ottomanization of modern Turkey’s foreign policy. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne formally abrogated the empire’s previous rights in North Africa, these being the rights it had lost in the First World War. From then on, the country was content to make trouble only for the Kurds across its borders and for Greece. A member of NATO, with more than 600,000 troops under arms (omitting more than half a million reservists and paramilitary), it certainly played a role in deflecting Soviet ambitions in the Mediterranean. Now, with the Russian threat (temporarily?) deferred, the military still faces minor annoyance from Georgia, Armenia, Iraq. But since Obama communed with Erdogan—by all accounts, it was love at first sight—the prime minister has been taking on new projects. Only in the last days has he made what can reasonably be called a conqueror’s march through Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia, evoking the old empire’s rule in North Africa not so long ago.

After all, let’s face it: Egypt is simply spent. Erdogan can seduce it with a speech or two. Yet it does have up-to-date military equipment. But, if it were tempted by war with Israel, Jerusalem would not give it the respectful pity that it gave Cairo’s Third Army 38 years ago. The Egyptian military has lost control of the Sinai to the Bedouins, even though Israel has already permitted thousands of Egyptian regulars, contravening specific prohibitions of the bilateral 1979 peace treaty, to re-enter the peninsula with heavy military equipment. For far into the future, I would assume. So what about the construction of Egypt in political, judicial, and economic terms? I’d give you heavy odds that in a decade or even two the political system will still be as undemocratic and corrupt as it has been since the comic and corpulent King Farouk reigned. By the way, it was the CIA’s Middle East head spook who initiated the coup that dispatched the monarch and his family to Italy and then to Monaco where he joined other deposed royals in the sedentary life. After Farouk came the reign of the colonels, a model favored by Allen Dulles whose wisdom spooked the region ever since. The courts will be fair when hell freezes over which, given global warning, is not at all likely. And the economy? My, my: With the desertification of the land, the high birth rate, and the functional illiteracy of most of the population, do not believe that anything will change quickly or, for that matter, anything much will change at all.

Were it not for Libyan oil, no country would have been tempted to intervene on “the shores of Tripoli” again. Even with its oil and with NATO intervention, the outcome of the civil war will not be as clear as folks like me had hoped or as decisive as the huge claque of always optimistic Arabisants have already concluded. Tout va bien. (Speaking of other Arabisants—without Arabic, incidentally—I wonder what my sort-of Harvard colleagues Stephen Walt and Joseph Nye now have to say about their notable protege Saif al-Qaddafi. Indeed, Walt has written against targeted killing by the alliance in Libya, doubtless making a pitch to save Saif’s ass. Yet the Kennedy School professor doesn’t seem nearly as interested in the random killings of Jews by Palestinians and other Arabs.) Under Qaddafi, Libya set its sights southward, trying to become a major force in sub-Saharan Africa. African leaders took the country’s petrodollars and gave Qaddafi the preposterous titles he required for his self-respect. He did become a comrade of Robert Mugabe and other gangster politicians, and even Nelson Mandela, yes, the sainted Nelson Mandela, has stood by him through thick and thin. But this augurs nothing special for the future of Libya. On the other hand, Erdogan’s stage show in Tripoli does put Turkey at the top of the list to dominate the crazy tyrant’s family business in oil.

The greatest folly of the modern era

Why The New York Times and American liberals worship the EU superstate

By Nile Gardiner

Across Europe, faith in the European Project is eroding. Even in Germany, for decades the powerhouse of EU integration, more than 70 percent of the public have "little", "low" or "no confidence" in the single currency according to a recent Allensbach Institute poll. The European financial crisis has been a painful shattering of illusions for Eurofederalists from Paris and Berlin to Rome and Madrid, and across the continent Euroscepticism is on the rise.

But in the United States left-wing elites continue to cling to the idea of a European superstate and the holy grail of ever-closer union within the EU. In fact some of the most zealous support for European fiscal and political integration anywhere in the world can be found in Washington and New York. And nowhere is this misguided thinking stronger than on the pages of The New York Times, which last week published an editorial that frankly could have been penned by Jacques Delors. For the Times, the break up of the Eurozone, or even the EU itself, would be unthinkable, not least because it would allow individual nation states to reassert their national sovereignty after decades of being told what to do by unelected elites in Brussels.

In the view of the Times:

European leaders have at last begun edging, haltingly and reluctantly, toward the only realistic solution to the continent’s debt and banking crises: refinancing unpayable government debts and reinforcing weakened banks. If their monetary and political union is to survive, all members must start acting more like a union and less like a collection of jealous sovereign states… If things get bad enough, the euro zone could fracture, and that could lead to the fracturing of the entire European Union.

What explains the American Left’s foolhardy love affair with the European Project? As I’ve noted before, President Obama and his administration are firmly committed supporters of political and economic integration in Europe, as are the East Coast liberal elites that back them. There are three key reasons for this approach.

Firstly, Obama and his supporters are quintessentially European in outlook. They share the Big Government mentality of the Eurocrats who have been driving the EU project for decades. They are happy to see the United States adopt European-style policies that emphasise the central role of the state, while increasing regulation of the free market. As Daniel Hannan noted in his excellent pamphlet for Encounter’s Broadside Series, "Why America Must Not Follow Europe", “Obama would verbalize his ideology using the same vocabulary that Eurocrats do… In other words, President Obama wants to make the U.S. more like the EU.”

Secondly, American liberals admire the supranational nature of the European Union, the erosion of the power of the nation state, and the pooling of national sovereignty. They believe that unrestrained sovereignty is a dangerous concept, not only within Europe but for the United States too. They actively push for America’s freedom to manoeuvre to be harnessed by the United Nations and a host of international treaties, from the Treaty of Rome (International Criminal Court) to New START and the Law of the Sea. They admire the sacrifice of national sovereignty taking place across Europe, as well as Brussels’ emphasis on deferring to international institutions. For these gilded elites, the projection of American power must be firmly constrained by a liberal internationalism that elevates supranationalism over the national state.

Lastly, American liberals cling to the myth that a unified Europe will actually reduce  the burdens of global leadership on the United States, especially in the area of defence spending. The Obama administration has actively backed the evolution of a European defence identity, which in reality threatens the future of the NATO alliance and undercuts the independence of national militaries across Europe. This of course is a grand exercise in futility. While Europe marches down the path of defence integration, military spending among EU members of NATO has dramatically fallen, a point powerfully made by former US Defense Secretary Bill Gates in his farewell speech in Brussels. Which proves the point, that a federal EU is not just bad for Europe, but bad for the United States as well.

Lady Thatcher famously remarked in her book Statecraft “that such an unnecessary and irrational project as building a European superstate was ever embarked upon will seem in future years to be perhaps the greatest folly of the modern era”. She was absolutely right. Her words should be heeded by the White House as well as its fellow travellers at the New York Times.

The EU project is going down in flames as the worst excesses of European profligacy are being copied in the United States – out-of-control government spending, spiraling budget deficits, rising unemployment, anti-business regulations, and high taxation. There is something rather pathetic about American liberals desperately clinging to a distinctly top down anti-market approach that has spectacularly failed in Europe, and is now dragging America down too. On both sides of the Atlantic, the grandiose Big Government vision of the Left is collapsing in turmoil and disarray. The New York Times may still embrace the Europeanisation of the US economy, but as the polls increasingly show, the American people themselves are firmly rejecting it.

Fascism economics

Ominous Parallels

by Walter E. Williams

People are beginning to compare Barack Obama's administration to the failed administration of Jimmy Carter, but a better comparison is to the Roosevelt administration of the 1930s and '40s. Let's look at it with the help of a publication from the Mackinac Center for Public Policy and the Foundation for Economic Education titled Great Myths of the Great Depression, by Dr. Lawrence Reed.

During the first year of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, he called for increasing federal spending to $10 billion while revenues were only $3 billion. Between 1933 and 1936, government expenditures rose by more than 83 percent. Federal debt skyrocketed by 73 percent. Roosevelt signed off on legislation that raised the top income tax rate to 79 percent and then later to 90 percent. Hillsdale College economics historian and professor Burt Folsom, author of "New Deal or Raw Deal?", notes that in 1941, Roosevelt even proposed a 99.5 percent marginal tax rate on all incomes more than $100,000. When a top adviser questioned the idea, Roosevelt replied, "Why not?"

Roosevelt had other ideas for the economy, including the National Recovery Act. Dr. Reed says: "The economic impact of the NRA was immediate and powerful. In the five months leading up to the act's passage, signs of recovery were evident: factory employment and payrolls had increased by 23 and 35 percent, respectively. Then came the NRA, shortening hours of work, raising wages arbitrarily and imposing other new costs on enterprise. In the six months after the law took effect, industrial production dropped 25 percent."

Blacks were especially hard hit by the NRA. Black spokesmen and the black press often referred to the NRA as the "Negro Run Around," Negroes Rarely Allowed," "Negroes Ruined Again," "Negroes Robbed Again," "No Roosevelt Again" and the "Negro Removal Act." Fortunately, the courts ruled the NRA unconstitutional. As a result, unemployment fell to 14 percent in 1936 and lower by 1937.

Roosevelt had more plans for the economy, namely the National Labor Relations Act, better known as the "Wagner Act." This was a payoff to labor unions, and with these new powers, labor unions went on a militant organizing frenzy that included threats, boycotts, strikes, seizures of plants, widespread violence and other acts that pushed productivity down sharply and unemployment up dramatically. In 1938, Roosevelt's New Deal produced the nation's first depression within a depression. The stock market crashed again, losing nearly 50 percent of its value between August 1937 and March 1938, and unemployment climbed back to 20 percent. Columnist Walter Lippmann wrote in March 1938 that "with almost no important exception every measure (Roosevelt) has been interested in for the past five months has been to reduce or discourage the production of wealth."

Roosevelt's agenda was not without its international admirers. The chief Nazi newspaper, Volkischer Beobachter, repeatedly praised "Roosevelt's adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies" and "the development toward an authoritarian state" based on the "demand that collective good be put before individual self-interest." Roosevelt himself called Benito Mussolini "admirable" and professed that he was "deeply impressed by what he (had) accomplished."

FDR's very own treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, saw the folly of the New Deal, writing: "We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. ... We have never made good on our promises. ... I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started ... and an enormous debt to boot!" The bottom line is that Roosevelt's New Deal policies turned what would have been a three- or four-year sharp downturn into a 16-year affair.

The 1930s depression was caused by and aggravated by acts of government, and so was the current financial mess that we're in. Do we want to repeat history by listening to those who created the calamity? That's like calling on an arsonist to help put out a fire.

Gatherings of more than three people

San Juan Capistrano Fines Family for Reading Bible without Permit

By Tim Cavanaugh

The city of San Juan Capistrano, California is laying heavy fines on a local couple for hosting semi-regular bible readings in their home. From the Los Angeles CBS affiliate: 

Homeowners Chuck and Stephanie Fromm, of San Juan Capistrano, were fined $300 earlier this month for holding what city officials called “a regular gathering of more than three people”.

That type of meeting would require a conditional use permit as defined by the city, according to Pacific Justice Institute (PJI), the couple’s legal representation.

The Fromms also reportedly face subsequent fines of $500 per meeting for any further “religious gatherings” in their home, according to PJI…

After city officials rejected the Fromms’ appeal, PJI, which represents other Bible study participants, will appeal the decision to the California Superior Court in Orange County…

Neighbors have written letters to the city in support of the Fromms, whom they said have not caused any disturbances with the meetings, according to PJI.

The city attorney says the meetings have attracted “up to 50 people.” He claims the meetings are held Sunday mornings and Thursday afternoons, which would mean gross revenue of $1,000 a week for a city where the utilities agencies alone run at a deficit more than a third the size of their total budget, and whose finances are being subject to lengthy and expensive audits. 

Here is a handy timeline [pdf] of the city’s campaign against the Fromms’ bible readings at chuckfromm.net. 

Pacific Justice Institute president Brad Dacus notes the irony of the city’s violation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious expression in a city that was founded as a mission by Junipero Serra and is best known for a quasi-religious legend about cliff swallows. “In a city so rich with religious history and tradition, this is particularly egregious,” Dacus says in a PJI statement. “An informal gathering in a home cannot be treated with suspicion by the government, or worse than any other gathering of friends, just because it is religious. We cannot allow this to happen in America, and we will fight as long and as hard as it takes to restore this group’s religious freedom.”