A friend reminds me of two key points regarding Gaza, which Jimmy Carter, Mary Robinson, and their like-minded Israel bashers routinely ignore. First, Israel doesn’t surround Gaza. Why no anger directed against Egypt? If, as Carter asserts, all sorts of basic supplies are not getting into Gaza, why isn’t the border between those two countries the route of choice? It is only the Jewish state — the victim of Gaza violence — that is hounded to open the border.

Second, there seems to be no recognition of the progress on the ground in the West Bank. Fewer checkpoints and more economic development — both the result of Israel’s willingness to cooperate with and assist Palestinians in improving their daily lives — entirely escapes Carter’s and the administration’s notice.

One can’t help but conclude that the object here is not to improve the actual condition of Palestinians but to paint Israel as the villain. Carter’s been at that for some time now. Let’s hope the administration breaks the habit before more damage is done to our relationship with Israel.

It’s not May, but the Atlantic’s bloggers seem to think it’s Cinco de Mayo—and I’m in the piñata. In recent days, three of them—Andrew Sullivan, James Gibney, and James Fallows—have taken whacks at me. But this piñata hits back.

Herewith my replies to their ill-advised and ill-tempered animadversions:

1. Andrew escalates our dispute over the interrogation of captured terrorists with this jaw-dropping claim:

The neoconservatives need to be made to own Abu Ghraib. It was their signal achievement, the crowning symbol of an ideology of raw force as the instrument of pure power—even against a single defenseless individual in a windowless room, strapped to a board for a session of pure terror.

Lynndie England was a neocon? Who knew? Until now, her affiliation with the American Enterprise Institute, COMMENTARY, and the Weekly Standard has been carefully concealed. Leave it to Andrew to uncover the news that others miss.

If you take his claims seriously, you could argue with equal justification that the Left should “be made to own” 9/11, the Cambodian genocide, and numerous other horrors that came about because of American nonintervention. But that is an insulting and morally obtuse argument, since the only people who can be made to “own” wrongdoing are those who perpetrate it. Read More

Eli Lake and Sara Carter at the Washington Times have uncovered another development concerning the embattled CIA. This comes on the heels, of course, of the string of humiliations and intra-administration struggles lost by Leon Panetta’s agency (e.g., release of the enhanced interrogation memos, re-investigation of CIA operatives, loss of responsibility for high-value target interrogations). Chief among these has been the nonstop attacks from the Democrats in Congress, who have accused the CIA of “lying” to them.

Lake and Carter report:

Besieged by leaks of several closely held secrets, the CIA has asked the Justice Department to examine what it regards as the criminal disclosure of a secret program to kill foreign terrorist leaders abroad, The Washington Times has learned.

Two U.S. intelligence officials, who spoke on the condition that they not be named because of the sensitivity of the case, said the leak investigation involved a program that CIA Director Leon E. Panetta told Congress about in June and that surfaced in news reports just a month later.

[. . .]

One element of the new leak investigation involves a New York Times story last month that said the secret program employed the security contractor Xe — formerly known as Blackwater. The plan was never put into effect — and Mr. Panetta canceled it as soon as he learned of it, according to the CIA.

But the disclosure has had other consequences: Al Qaeda has placed Xe’s chief executive, Eric Prince, on its own version of a most-wanted list, said Mark Corallo, a spokesman for the contractor.

So the CIA is now striking back, one supposes, having had enough of leaking congressmen who feel free to listen to briefings and then run to the media to continue their assault on the agency. And one can delight in the thought of an investigation in which members of Congress are the prime suspects in the irresponsible leaking of confidential material. (Lake and Carter recall the Valerie Plame matter and the outrage over “outing” those working in our intelligence community.)

But before we get our hopes up, this is Eric Holder’s Justice Department — the gang that reached out from Washington, we are told, to end the Bill Richardson investigation, dismissed the Black Panther voter-intimidation case, and went to war with the CIA in all the incidents listed above. Isn’t there someone else who can do this? No, unfortunately. This is the price one pays for a politicized Justice Department — we are stuck with a department, and its political appointees, that possesses enormous and far-reaching power, upon whom other agencies and departments of government must rely and whose motives are entirely suspect.

I, for one, am not overflowing with confidence that Holder will set loose the hounds, uncover the culprits regardless of party and position, and press for vigorous prosecution of those who leaked classified secrets and have apparently endangered Eric Prince’s life. Call me cynical, but I think their resources and energy are focused elsewhere.

Over at National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru worries that conservatives are gloating prematurely at the failure of the $787 billion stimulus package to produce economic growth or jobs. What, he asks, if they do next year? Isn’t the Right setting itself up to seem like the skunk at the garden party if and when things turn around? Shouldn’t a different argument be deployed?

Perhaps. But it probably doesn’t matter very much what people on the Right say about this. If there is a roaring recovery next year, Obama will benefit; if, on the other hand, the rise from recession is slow and ungainly and not especially productive, as was the case with the recovery from the short recession of 2001, then Obama and the Democrats will suffer mightily. What will matter over the next two elections when it comes to the economy is whether the public feels as though the hand on the tiller guiding the country through the economic crisis is steady and knowing or haphazard and incompetent. Spin won’t help anyone very much.

Jimmy Carter brings us his report, fresh from his Middle East visit with his fellow ”Elders,” including the Medal of Freedom prize-winning duo of Desmond Tutu and Mary Robinson. Carter and crew go to the Middle East and see “despair.”

Not the despair of Jews in Israel who would like to live in peace with their neighbors and have tried repeatedly to give the Palestinians their own state. Not the despair of victims of Hamas violence or of honor killings. Not the despair of the Palestinian people who would like a government free from corruption. Not the despair of Jews who find it incomprehensible that teaching the Holocaust is considered to be a human-rights violation by Hamas. Not the despair of Israel and its neighbors who are contemplating a nuclear-armed Iran and a timid U.S. response. And certainly not the despair that Israelis must feel as a U.S. administration renounces past obligations and delights in picking a fight with its ally.

No, all Carter sees and all he writes about (I know, you’ll be shocked) is the “despair that settlement expansion is continuing apace.” And he divines that Israel is bent on a one-state solution, aiming to “colonize” East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Using unmistakable Holocaust terminology, he terms Gaza a “ghetto.” How perfectly Carter-esque. And Robinson-esque. (Anyone in the White House still think that Medal of Freedom thing was a grand idea?)

In his account, the terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians from Gaza get no mention, so readers are left to wonder why it is that traffic doesn’t flow freely between Gaza and Israel. And in Carter’s view, one supposes, the Israelis must be awfully clever to mask their plot to dominate the Palestinians with repeated offers of statehood. How sneaky of the Jews to have repeatedly given up land for “peace” and dismantled their own settlements when all they really want is to “colonize.”

Well this is pretty much par for the Carter course. But really, how different is this from the administration’s Middle East outlook? The same obsession with settlements that animates Carter seems to dictate all that Obama and George Mitchell say and do these days with regard to the Middle East. The same Carter-esque refusal to recount accurately the history of the Middle East, let alone America’s own agreements, permeates Obama’s rhetoric. The same muteness grips the Obama administration when it comes to Palestinian rhetoric. It’s almost enough to fill one with despair.

The New York Times lets on:

The unemployment rate surged to 9.7 percent in August, signaling that joblessness and financial anxiety were likely to endure in millions of American homes for many months. The Labor Department’s latest employment report, released Friday, added weight to a growing belief that, at least technically, the economy had already escaped the grip of recession. Though 216,000 net jobs vanished in August, the losses continued to moderate from their worst numbers of the year. Yet the report also lent credence to a deepening consensus that, even as the economy resumes expansion, the recovery was likely to be weak, prompting most companies to hold back from aggressive hiring.

[. . .]

Such an outcome would confront the Obama administration with a potentially nettlesome political problem heading into next year’s midterm elections. After unleashing $787 billion in government spending to stimulate economic growth, and after bailing out financial institutions and the auto industry, the unemployment rate exceeds worst-case projections envisioned by the administration early this year.

And while voters may not blame the president or his party (despite their ample role in fomenting the housing crisis) for the recession, they are likely to, and with good reason, hold him responsible for an anemic recovery. Why? Because he has utterly ignored or rejected proposals to promote private-sector job growth and instead set out on a course to burden, tax, regulate, and hound American employers. There is nothing in the array of Obama policy choices to encourage job growth and much to stymie it.

The Times story neatly avoids the reasons for the “jobless recovery.” But others are not. James Sherk of Heritage makes a compelling case that the problem is not persistent layoffs but a drop in job creation. The labor market simply can’t absorb new workers entering the labor force. That slowdown in job creation, he says, is in large part attributable to “enormous increases in federal spending on traditional liberal priorities, such as for government-run health care, [which] raise the prospects of vastly higher taxes or rapidly rising inflation.”

He explains:

The federal deficit is expected to approach $2 trillion this year, and to remain well above $1 trillion for many years to come, doubling the national debt in just five years. This situation is not sustainable, but businesses can only guess how the federal government will restore order to its fiscal house, knowing full well that successful businesses make an attractive tax target.

In the face of such a threatening environment, it is not surprising that companies are likely to make only the most critical investments. In addition, the credit crunch has made credit less available to entrepreneurs who want to start new businesses, thereby adding to the shortfall in business investment and business hiring.

Gross private investment in equipment and software—a good measure of business investment spending—has fallen by a full 20 percent since the recession began. As long as business investment remains low and entrepreneurs hold back from starting new enterprises, job creation will remain low—and unemployment, high.

Couple that with the prospect that employers may be hit with higher energy costs, a cap-and-trade regulatory scheme, and health-care mandates and one can understand that a hiring paralysis may become a fixture in the economy, absent a substantial change in the administration’s approach to economic recovery. If the president and his advisers think we can have a recovery while they attack the private sector and seek a vast expansion of government, they are in for a rude awakening. It turns out we need those private-sector employers. Who knew?

Fred Kagan sets out the strategic case for the war in Afghanistan in a must-read piece in the Wall Street Journal. He makes clear that the task at hand ”will be difficult” but is “no fool’s errand.” He does not shy away from examining the errors of the past, but his focus is on why we must persist in waging an increasingly unpopular war.

He explains:

Critics of the war have suggested we should draw down our troops and force Pakistan to play a larger role in eliminating radical extremists. American concerns about al Qaeda and Taliban operating from Pakistani bases have led to the conventional wisdom that Pakistan matters to the U.S. because of what it could do to help—or hurt—in Afghanistan. The conventional wisdom is wrong as usual.

Pakistan is important because it is a country of 180 million Muslims with nuclear weapons and multiple terrorist groups engaged in a mini-arms race and periodic military encounters with India—the world’s most populous state and one of America’s most important economic and strategic partners. Pakistan has made remarkable progress over the last year in its efforts against Islamist insurgent groups that threatened to destroy it. But the fight against those groups takes place on both sides of the border. The debate over whether to commit the resources necessary to succeed in Afghanistan must recognize the extreme danger that a withdrawal or failure in Afghanistan would pose to the stability of Pakistan.

Kagan effectively demolishes the case that we can credibly fight the war on terror or hope to maintain a stable Pakistan (“a country of 180 million Muslims with nuclear weapons and multiple terrorist groups engaged in a mini-arms race and periodic military encounters with India—the world’s most populous state and one of America’s most important economic and strategic partners”) without a successful outcome in Afghanistan.

He concludes:

Pakistan’s stability cannot be secured solely within its borders any more than can Afghanistan’s. Militant Islam can be defeated only by waging a proper counterinsurgency campaign on both sides of the border.

The critics of the war have an obligation to step forward with a credible alternative for waging that war or with a scenario by which we could avoid a calamity in Pakistan without victory in Afghanistan. I have yet to hear those arguments made. And it seems Secretary of Defense Gates and the president are not hearing them either. Let’s hope that now that they understand the case for the war, they also have the will to see it through. In that effort, Kagan’s argument will be essential to defanging the critics—who would rather retreat and worry about the consequences another day.

Whatever happened to “nuance”? “Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s unequivocal proclamation that all settlement activity must stop is an uncharacteristic display of rigidity from an administration that, on other issues, is sensitive to nuance and advocates for dialogue and accommodation. Expropriating private Palestinian land to build a new settlement is not the same as adding a bedroom for a new baby in an existing community. The administration’s absolutist position is a no-win proposition, leaving no room for negotiation.” Well, it does leave room for Obama to retreat and embarrass himself in the region, which is what George Mitchell is trying desperately to avoid and/or disguise.

And what do you know, but Bibi and the White House are at odds (still? again?) about settlement-building. So I suppose all those “on the verge of agreement on settlements” stories were just spin. It seems that publicly (and privately), hollering at Israel didn’t prove to be a winning strategy. Maybe next they will try some “smart” diplomacy.

Virginia gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell ribs his opponent Creigh Deeds: “His whole campaign over the last month has been based on former presidents, former governors, and a 20-year-old thesis. That’s his platform. . . . He pledged three weeks ago in the debate that he’d never been a guy to talk about social issues. And now, for the last three weeks, that’s all he wants to talk about. . . . If that’s what he wants to do, then I think that’s a winning formula for me.” Ouch.

With Van Jones’s background, how did he get through the FBI background check and White House vetting?

From Politico: “The fate of health care reform may top the political worries of Democrats at the moment, but the economy could prove the issue that really hurts the party in the 2010 midterm elections.” Hmm. Perhaps if job creation was the top worry for Democrats, they might be in better shape for 2010.

Hillary Clinton rules out free and fair elections in Honduras. Elliott Abrams observes: “The Obama administration’s weak-kneed support of human rights in places like Egypt and China being obvious, the policy in Honduras appears to reflect not so much enthusiasm for democracy as a ‘no enemies to the Left’ view of Latin America. One could laugh at the foolishness of this policy were it not for the six and half million Hondurans, fighting poverty, fighting Chavez and Zelaya and the effort to turn their political system into another Venezuela–and now, fighting Uncle Sam.” And this is the gang that bestows legitimacy on Ahmadinejad, mind you.

The Washington Post editors aren’t any better than Clinton — blithely asserting that the Honduran congress and supreme court’s removal of Zelaya was a “breach of democratic order.”

And while we are on the subject of embarrassing foreign policy performances, Jim Webb’s in Burma is worth noting.

With unemployment at 9.7 percent and the nonstimulus plan sitting on hundreds of billions of unspent dollars, the Wall Street Journal‘s editors suggest: “If the Administration really wants to fire up private job creation, how about taking the remaining $400 billion or more and using it to lower business taxes? The unspent stimulus is enough for a two-year down payment on repealing the U.S. corporate income tax, which studies show is a job and wage-increase killer.” And, they add, killing card check, ObamaCare, and cap-and-trade couldn’t hurt either.