Middle East

Obama and Israel

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Dan Senor provides a useful summary of Obama’s attitudes and policies toward that country. Excerpts:

”¢ February 2008: When running for president, then-Sen. Obama told an audience in Cleveland: “There is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you’re anti-Israel.”

”¢ July 2009: Mr. Obama hosted American Jewish leaders at the White House, reportedly telling them that he sought to put “daylight” between America and Israel…In the same meeting with Jewish leaders, Mr. Obama told the group that Israel would need “to engage in serious self-reflection.” This statement stunned the Americans in attendance: Israeli society is many things, but lacking in self-reflection isn’t one of them. It’s impossible to envision the president delivering a similar lecture to Muslim leaders.

”¢ March 2010: During Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to Israel, a Jerusalem municipal office announced plans for new construction in a part of Jerusalem. The president launched an unprecedented weeks-long offensive against Israel. Mr. Biden very publicly departed Israel…Moments after Mr. Biden concluded his visit to the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority held a ceremony to honor Dalal Mughrabi, who led one of the deadliest Palestinian terror attacks in history: the so-called Coastal Road Massacre that killed 38, including 13 children and an American. The Obama administration was silent. But that same day, on ABC, Mr. Axelrod called Israel’s planned construction of apartments in its own capital an “insult” and an “affront” to the United States.

”¢ May 2011: The State Department issued a press release declaring that the department’s No. 2 official, James Steinberg, would be visiting “Israel, Jerusalem, and the West Bank.” In other words, Jerusalem is not part of Israel.

Read the whole thing; indeed, you might want to bookmark it for future reference.

Also: Governor/presidential candidate Rick Perry says errors by the Obama administration have encouraged the Palestinians to take backward steps away from peace, and Caroline Glick writes about the Palestinian obsession. Both links via Stuart Schneiderman, who finds the thinking of the Obama-Clinton foreign policy team, and the establishment leftist media as represented by the New York Times, to be so bizarre as to amount to mental illness.

“We’re going to rush the hijackers.”

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Two years ago I wrote this:

The only part of the American national security establishment that successfully defended America on 9/11 was the portion of the reserve militia on board Flight 93, acting without orders, without hierarchy, without uniforms or weapons, by spontaneous organization and action.

The lesson I derived:

Bottom-up, inductive, spontaneous self-organization is the essence of America.

After a decade I can say we have wasted a decade failing to learn from that lesson.

We had better do better over the next decade.

“Are you guys ready? Let’s roll.”

A minute by minute narrative of Flight 93, done as tweets today, is here. Scroll from the bottom. Very much worth reading.

My recollection of the day was in a comment here, written on September 11, 2004 — below the fold. It is funny how after ten years I had forgotten some of the details I had remembered three years later. You can say “we will never forget” but your brain fades away, and you forget whether you want to or not.

The weather this morning was exactly like the day ten years ago: Clear, warm, blue skies.

God bless America.

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Humanitarian Intervention in the Mesozoic Era

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Lukewarm:

Whatever may be the traditional sympathy of our countrymen as individuals with a people who seem to be struggling for larger autonomy and greater freedom, deepened, as such sympathy naturally must be, in behalf of our neighbors, yet the plain duty of their Government is to observe in good faith the recognized obligations of international relationship. The performance of this duty should not be made more difficult by a disregard on the part of our citizens of the obligations growing out of their allegiance to their country, which should restrain them from violating as individuals the neutrality which the nation of which they are members is bound to observe in its relations to friendly sovereign states. Though neither the warmth of our people’s sympathy with the Cuban insurgents, nor our loss and material damage consequent upon the futile endeavors thus far made to restore peace and order, nor any shock our humane sensibilities may have received from the cruelties which appear to especially characterize this sanguinary and fiercely conducted war, have in the least shaken the determination of the Government to honestly fulfill every international obligation, yet it is to be earnestly hoped on every ground that the devastation of armed conflict may speedily be stayed and order and quiet restored to the distracted island, bringing in their train the activity and thrift of peaceful pursuits.

Warm:

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Our Electricity Future (a bleak version)

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A recent Bloomberg / Businessweek article on Pakistan provided a pithy summary of a possible energy future for the US in an article titled “Convoys and Patdowns: A day in the office in Pakistan”.  The article describes the robberies, violence and general chaos that a business manager faces daily in that country.  However, this part might be surprising to readers that would think the Taliban would be a managers’ top concern:

Political violence is not National Foods’ worst problem.  “The biggest problem by far is energy”… Demand for electricity in Pakistan is three times supply.  President Asif Ali Zardari is trying to attract independent power producers to Pakistan and has big plans to build hydroelectric plants.  Companies cannot wait.  “We have created a mix of power we get from the grid, and what we can generate using our gas and diesel generators.”  Many factory floor, office and bathroom lights are kept off to compensate.  Ali often visits the powerhouse, a room at the plant that contains huge German-made diesel generators.  Scarcity of fuel is a frequent worry.  Bigger companies like Lucky Cement don’t rely on the national grid at all.  It started generating its own power in 1996 and can produce 150 megawatts from its plants.

Karachi’s residents have taken to the streets this summer… to protest outages lasting days at a time.  “In the morning I assess my workers”… “If I find someone is stressed out because he hasn’t slept all night without electricity… I have to change his shift and give him easier work”.

Electricity is something that most Americans took for granted as reliable and available for a reasonable price for many years.  After California’s disastrous “de-regulation” experiments in 2000-1 (check wikipedia where they have a pretty good summary under “California Electricity Crisis“), the citizens of that state at least woke up to the fact that the machinery that delivered reliable and reasonably priced electricity was falling to pieces.

The core of the issue is that to meet future DEMAND for electricity, you have to procure appropriate SUPPLY, and then BRING it to the customer.  Given our “NIMBY” culture, and difficult regulatory regime, there has been little incentive to develop new “baseload” generating capacity to procure supplies for the future.  In addition, a lack of investment in new transmission lines, which are needed to bring supply to the customer, limits our ability to tap new sources of electrical generation and there is little financial incentive to devise a solution to this issue.  As a result, we have a long-simmering problem that will come to a head in various guises over the next 20 or so years.

One more subtle issue, that is little discussed, is that electricity started as a public monopoly, meaning that one company provided you generation, transmission and distribution of power and you paid that company a single payment for doing all those services.  While there are many problems with this model (inefficiency and lack of innovation), there were positive elements, mainly that it worked and provided a reliable service to everyone for a reasonable price.

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