China Confidential
Foreign Reporting and Analysis Since April 2005
Friday, August 22, 2008
Vexing Questions About the Mysterious Mr. Obama
Dateline USA....
The blogosphere is buzzing. But the Obama campaign is keeping silent, refusing to answer some of the most vexing questions about the background and identity of The Candidate of Change.
Was Barack Obama born in the United States? Is the Obama birth certificate that was leaked to a left-wing website authentic?
What is his legal name? Is it Barack Hussein Obama II, the name on the leaked birth certificate, or Barack Obama, Jr., or Barack Obama, or Barry Soetoro?
Is Obama a dual or a triple citizen? Is he now or has he ever been an Indonesian citizen and/or a Kenyan citizen?
Obama traveled to Pakistan as a college student in the 1980s. Did he use an Indonesian passport or a Kenyan passport instead of a US passport to enter Pakistan?
Obama was born a Muslim according to Islamic religious law, which traces a person's religious identity through the father. And a seemingly authentic Indonesian school registration certificate lists Obama's religion as Muslim (and his citizenship as Indonesian). Did he practice Islam as a child, as his Indonesian friends and classmates have said? Did Obama ever formally convert to Christianity? Is he an apostate according to Islamic religious law?
Obama's cousin, Kenyan Prime Minister and opposition leader Raila Odinga, has allied himself with Islamists seeking to impose Islamic religious law on parts of Kenya. Does Obama approve of this alliance? How close is he to his cousin? Why did Obama campaign for his cousin during a visit to Kenya?
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Attack Iran Now Before it is Too Late
Foreign Confidential....
The Iranian issue boils down to intentions and timing. At a minimum, Iran intends to destroy Israel and drive the United States from the Middle East; and time is workingfor, not against, the nuclear-arming, oil-rich, Islamist nation.
In fact, the US took way too long to end the Iranian Islamist threat--30 years too long, to be exact. Washington should never have allowed the Islamists to come to power in Iran in the first place; the craven Carter administration should never have betrayed Iran's Shah, a staunch US ally and modernizing monarch. Not only have three decades of US appeasement and accommodation of Islamist Iran and Islamism in general failed to prevent war; the disastrous policy has made war inevitable--on Iran's terms. By now, this should be obvious to everyone who follows international relations--even to the pro-appeasement Democratic party leadership and their European friends.
Accent on should be. Unfortunately for the US and Israel, the appeasers are working overtime to protect Iran; and the enemy is taking maximum advantage of the opportunity. The terrorist-sponsoring, turbaned tyranny is playing with words in order to play for time, using every stalling tactic and diplomatic maneuver in its playbook to sustain and stretch out the pointless negotiations over its menacing uranium enrichment program. The strategy is working; the regime may actually be only months away from a breakthrough that will allow it to produce nuclear bombs and warheads.
To be fair, there is more to the story than Democratic stupidity and weakness. Iran has benefitted enormously from a bipartisan US tendency to see Muslim (and Arab) moderates where none really exist. There are many moderates in Iran; but they have no power. Among the powers that be in Iran, there are only different degrees of Islamist extremism.
The situation recalls Nazi Germany. Almost up until the end of World War II, there were members of the foreign policy establishments of the US and Great Britain who naively (or perfidiously) pressed for a negotiated peace with supposed Nazi moderates. There were no moderates, of course, at least, not in any meaningful sense of the word. Belief in their existence was a dangerous delusion, one that US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and their top advisers and military commanders thankfully resisted. Satisfied with nothing less than total victory, the Allies won the war, delivering mass death to the genocidal Nazis and their Axis partners until they were utterly destroyed and defeated.
Similarly, today, there are influential people in the US who call for patience and dialogue with the Islamist devil. (Liberals love to dialogue.) The presumptive Democratic Presidential candidate, Barack Obama, is audacious enough to use the oxymoronic term, "aggressive diplomacy," offering to meet unconditionally with Iran's Hitlerian, Holocaust-denying maniac-in-chief, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Obama is worse than dangerously delusional regarding Iran; his approach could constitute a fatal error, because Iran, in addition to developing nuclear weapons, seeks an arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles to add to its already frighteningly formidable arsenal of medium- and long-range ballistic missiles, and the stockpiles of chemical and biological and chemical weapons the regime has developed and has also acquired from its anti-American, secular, Arab ally, Syria.
The latter country is also an ally of Russia, which makes the situation even more serious. There are ominous reports of Russian warships and nuclear submarines heading toward Syria, and credible reports that Moscow plans to station nuclear missiles in the country to threaten the US and Israel. Flush with newly minted petrodollars, eager to push back against the US for its expansion of NATO and support for former Soviet satellites and republics, resurgent Russia is overreaching beyond its near abroad, or sphere of influence, and is seemingly bent on overthrowing the international status quo. It is taking foreign policy risks not seen since the Stalinist era.
Nobody can comfortably predict how the new superpower struggle will play out; but the winners could be Moscow, Tehran, and Damascus (and Iran's Islamist Lebanese proxy and Syrian ally, Hezbollah, which is bristling with an estimated 40,000 rockets). The US and Israel could end up as losers; and the losses could be catastrophic. Israel, which is already within range of Iranian, Syrian, and Hezbollah missiles, is a "one-bomb country" in nuclear terms. US bases across the Middle East could come under devastating Iranian bombardment. And the US homeland could eventually be hit by Iranian nuclear missiles. In addition to working on ICBMs, Iran, with North Korean assistance, has been testing sea-based missile launch systems--i.e. concealed systems for firing ballistic missiles from cargo ships. There is no known defense against this threat to US coastal cities.
On the other side of the equation, the US has staggering military capabilities; Israel's air force is the still the strongest in the region; and Israel is a significant nuclear power. But Israel's nuclear deterrent would be neutralized by Iran's acquisition of atomic arms and the installation of Russian nuclear missiles in Syria. Again, little Israel, unlike Iran, is a one-bomb country.
So now is the time for Israel and the US to swiftly and decisively attack Iran. If the US won't go along, Israel will have to do it alone, and use any and all means necessary to protect its citizens.
-Andre Pachter
Copyright 2008
Friday, 22 August 2008
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