WoW!!

WoW - the Watchers Council- it's the oldest, longest running cyber comte d'guere ensembe in existence - started online in 1912 by Sirs Jacky Fisher and Winston Churchill themselves - an eclective collective of cats both cruel and benign with their ability to put steel on target (figuratively - natch) on a wide variety of topictry across American, Allied, Frenemy and Enemy concerns, memes, delights and discourse.

Every week these cats hook up each other with hot hits and big phazed cookies to peruse and then vote on their individual fancy catchers.

Thusly sans further adieu (or a don"t) 

Council Winners 

• *First place with 2 2/3 votes!–Hillary Clinton: You’ll Be Able To See It From There
• Second place *t* with 1 2/3 votes –Bookworm Room – The 40th anniversary of the raid on Entebbe
• Second place *t* with 1 2/3 votes – Joshuapundit–When Justice Just Is Not
• Third place with 1 vote –Puma By Design – Marxist Private School in NYC Teaches White Children That They Are Born Racist.
• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes –The Glittering Eye –The Collapse of the Technocratic World Order
• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes –VA Right! – #Binary. Why I’m Blocking #NeverTrump and Anti Trump ‘Friends’ on Facebook
• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes –GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD – Intervention Pendulum

Non-Council Winners

• First place with 2 1/3 votes! –Kurt Schlichter – You Owe Them Nothing – Not Respect, Not Loyalty, Not Obedience submitted by Joshuapundit
• Second place *t* with 1 1/3 votes –Michael Walsh/PJ Media – The Day the Rule of Law Died submitted by The Glittering Eye
• Second place *t* with 1 1/3 votes –Wolf Howling–Hillary, The FBI & A Travesty Of Justicesubmitted by Bookworm Room
• Third place with 1 vote –NRO –Washington’s Hollow Men submitted by Stately McDaniel Manor
• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes –Bearing Arms –Democrats looking to gut our Bill of Rightssubmitted by The Daley Gator
• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes – Brigitte Gabriel – (video)Religion of Peace: A Brief History of Islam submitted by The Watcher
• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes –Glenn Reynolds/USA Today – About that Clinton-Lynch accidental meeting submitted by The Watcher (hat tip, Puma By Design)

See you next week!

 

Self Inflicted

Oh, the Ottomans!

For years, Ankara was focused on Assad instead of the jihadist networks operating on its soil. Now those cells are focused on destroying Turkey.

The Islamic State has waged a yearlong military campaign in Turkey that includes suicide bombings, unguided rockets fired from Syria into Turkish border towns, and the assassination of Syrian journalists living there. The June 28 attack on Istanbul’s main airport by three non-Turkish suicide bombers that left 44 people dead and over 200 people injured is its latest blow in its war against Turkey. It was the 10th Islamic State-linked bomb attack, a spree that claimed the lives of 233 people since January 2015.

Despite Ankara’s efforts, the Islamic State retains the ability to continue its terror attacks – and has developed a strategy designed to destabilize the country and silence its enemies. 

The Islamic State’s goals are to undermine the Turkish economy, increase ethnic and political polarization in the country, assassinate Syrian voices critical of the group, and punish Turkey for supporting Arab opposition groups hostile to it. This strategy is not a response to a single event — like recent Islamic State losses or Turkey’s outreach to Israel — but rather a carefully conceived plan to terrorize the Turkish population and destabilize the country.

The Islamic State’s network in Turkey is built on an older and well-established network of Turkish Salafists. A small subset of this population has links to international jihad and, for about three years after the beginning of Syria’s civil war, operated relatively openly in numerous Turkish cities despite being under surveillance by Turkish intelligence for suspected links to al Qaeda.

Turkey has few options left to escalate its war against the Islamic State, other than using its ground forces to take territory from the group. But Ankara has made it clear that it’s not prepared to commit ground forces in Syria, so it will be left to work through proxies. This suggests that Turkey’s next steps will be more of the same: police raids, near-daily shelling of Islamic State targets in northern Aleppo, continued support for the anti-Islamic State coalition, and greater flexibility about the timetable for the departure of Assad in a potential U.S.- and Russian-backed Syrian peace agreement.

For Turkey, the fight against the Islamic State will continue long after Raqqa is liberated and the group is pushed from its border. The average birth year of Turkish Islamic State fighters is 1990, according to data this author collected. This means that the average Islamic State fighter was just 20 when the war in Syria started. Many of those not killed during the conflict will return to Turkey, with potentially devastating effects for the country’s domestic peace.

Warsaw Summit

NATO's Warsaw Summit is fixing to kick off!

The North Atlantic alliance has over the years experienced identity crises of two different kinds. The first stems from worry that the organization has outlived its usefulness. This form of self-doubt appeared most recently at NATO’s Lisbon summit in 2010, and again at its Chicago meeting in 2012. With memories of the Cold War receding and the “reset” with Russia still going strong (then-President Dmitri Medvedev actually came to Lisbon), the 2010 communiqué found Europe stable, successful, and at peace. Who needed an alliance?

A second kind of identity crisis is all about efficacy. It takes hold when threats are real, but NATO seems too diverse, too divided, and too disorganized to achieve its goals. Anxiety of this type was in evidence at the Wales summit of 2014. Russia had seized Crimea and sent military personnel to support separatism in eastern Ukraine, so no one doubted that NATO was necessary. The only question was whether it could fashion an effective response.

 At the upcoming Warsaw summit, which begins on July 8, some will say the alliance has put identity crises behind it. The meeting is a chance for NATO leaders to review the pledges made at Wales and to endorse new plans for implementing them. Given the alliance’s record of the last two years, members have every reason to pat themselves on the back.


Yet amid justified self-congratulation, doubts and divisions will surface at this summit. Some may even detect a third type of identity crisis, one that makes NATO seem, more than anything else, irrelevant to today’s big concerns.  The alliance, after all, has been on the sidelines of efforts to cope with refugees or to roll back the self-proclaimed Islamic State. NATO’s mission in Afghanistan remains troubled (and to many, futile). Britain’s vote to leave the European Union—certain to be the main topic of corridor conversation in Warsaw—will only complicate Western decision-making.

Concerns about relevance will be unavoidable when the leaders of the alliance gather, but these should not derail summit participants from highly relevant problems that they need to, and can, address.  NATO is not fully united in responding to the core European security concerns that brought it into being almost seventy years ago. The alliance needs better solutions to the problem of burden-sharing, and a more sustainable strategy for managing tensions with Russia.

 Whenever NATO rearms, it has to expect pushback from Moscow. Russia can test the alliance’s commitment to firmer new policies in various ways—through military countermeasures of its own, loud warnings that NATO is pushing Europe toward war, and offers and inducements that try to peel off the more nervous (or cynical) Western governments.

The Quartet

Another fixture (yay) of the Palestine Forever Quest bears the nom d'guerr "Quartet"

Check their latest bit...

The Middle East Quartet has just issued its first report on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and peace efforts, and briefed the Security Council yesterday. The UN’s report on the report begins this way:

Continuing violence, terrorism and incitement, settlement expansion, and the Palestinian Authority’s lack of control of Gaza are hurting the Middle East peace process, the United Nations envoy today said summarizing the first ever report by the diplomatic Quartet – comprising the United Nations, Russia, the United States and the European Union – to the Security Council.
“The main objective of this report is not about assigning blame,” Nickolay Mladenov, Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, told the 15-member council.
“It focuses on the major threats to achieving a negotiated peace and offers recommendations on the way forward.”

The Quartet was created way back in 2002 by Colin Powell, and had managed to go for 14 years without issuing a report. (I was a participant from 2002 to 2008, joining the Russian Quartet representative, the UN representative, and at every meeting a large group of Europeans–representing the EU Council, the EU Commission, the EU foreign minister, and so on. Videos of the EU delegation to the Quartet might have enlarged considerably the Brexit vote in the UK.)
This report actually has some very good aspects, but in the end does not manage to go beyond the conventional wisdom.
The report contains a powerful denunciation of terrorism, and a strong discussion of “incitement,” meaning the ways the Palestinian authorities glorify terror and the murder of Israelis. Here is part of that section:

Incitement to Violence. Palestinians who commit terrorist attacks are often glorified publicly as “heroic martyrs.” Many widely circulated images depict individuals committing terrorist acts with slogans encouraging violence. The spreading of incitement to violence on social media has gained momentum since October 2015, and is particularly affecting the youth….

Some members of Fatah have publicly supported attacks and their perpetrators, as well as encouraged violent confrontation. In the midst of this recent wave of violence, a senior Fatah official referred to perpetrators as “heroes and a crown on the head of every Palestinian.” Fatah social media has shown attackers superimposed next to Palestinian leaders following terrorist attacks.

The Palestinian Authority leadership has repeatedly made statements expressing opposition to violence against civilians and senior officials have publicly maintained a commitment to non-violent resistance. Regrettably, however, Palestinian leaders have not consistently and clearly condemned specific terrorist attacks. And streets, squares and schools have been named after Palestinians who have committed acts of terrorism.

Ever recall seeing as candid a statement about Palestinian incitement in any UN document before?

The report also occasionally includes a sensible statement that, if pursued, might lead somewhere. Here’s an example:

The Quartet stresses that while a permanent status agreement that ends the conflict can only be achieved through direct bilateral negotiations, important progress can be made now towards advancing the two-state solution on the ground.

In English (which is not exactly the language in use at the UN) this sentence can be translated thus: the negotiations are going nowhere and everyone knows it, so let’s concentrate on pragmatic steps that might actually be taken. Were the Quartet, and the EU and United States, to do this, Palestinians and Israelis would be better off. In fact the main problem with this report is that it is all about what’s “hurting the peace process,” when in fact there is no peace process. There hasn’t been one since 2008, when PLO chairman Mahmoud Abbas rejected the offer from Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, and 2009, when the Obama administration set a total construction freeze as a precondition for direct negotiations.

The report continues an old pattern of equating morally the construction of a home and the murder of an Israeli civilian. It does this in several ways. The very first sentence quoted above shows this: the problems are violence and terror and settlement expansion, you see. I build a bedroom, you murder a child in her bed; we are in the eyes of the Quartet apparently equal obstacles to “the peace process.” It is perhaps unfortunate for the Quartet but gives a deep insight into what is really preventing peace that the report was presented the day the following happened:

Hallel Yaffa Ariel, a 13-year-old American citizen, was stabbed to death while she was in her bed in Israel. According to the State Department, a 17-year-old Palestinian assailant allegedly broke into her home in the West Bank and killed her before he was shot by security guards.

There was another attack, same day, near Hebron, that killed a father and injured his wife and children in their car, which came the day after an attack in Netanya…and on and on it goes. It should be possible for the Quartet and for UN bodies to express opposition to settlement expansion without equating it with terrorism and murder. The “peace process” will go nowhere until such terror stops, and until the Palestinian Authority insists on what the Quartet correctly demands: an end to the incitement of and reward for murder.

Intervention Pendulum

One thing that's noted when chatting up older cats, is the concept that everything moves like a pendulum. 

Reckon that applies to Interventionism as well?

American voters are fickle. They watch their presidents plunge into ill-advised wars, and then select successors who promise to bring the troops home. And they watch their presidents approach crises with caution, and then vote for candidates promising to restore American power.

44’s term in office, said Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, was marked by the pendulum swinging toward caution. “Much of his administration was a conscious reaction what he saw of his predecessor of trying to do much,” he said. “Seeing the dangers of doing too much, he opted to do less, and I think what historians will see is that he opted to do too little in places.”

He spoke at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic. He was joined by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, and by James Steinberg, who served as deputy secretary of state under HRC, and now teaches at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School.

Steinberg agreed that 44 had tried to change course, but offered a more charitable read of the administration’s foreign policy. “The United States stepping back—not because it wanted to step back but to encourage others to play a larger role,” wasn’t in itself the issue, he said. “The problem was that others didn’t step up to the plate. The theory of the case required others to step up to the plate ... and what we’re seeing, especially in the Middle East is that that just hasn’t happened.”

Instead, 44 has been a “reluctant sheriff” as Haass put it. “It was an intellectual and political overreaction to his predecessor.” Steinberg concurred that in his aversion to overextension and unilateralism, 44 had lost sight of the necessity of trying. “42 used to say, ‘I don’t know if we’re going to succeed, but I want to be caught trying,’” he said.

The metaphor of the swinging pendulum suggests not just the constant changes, but also the apparent inability of American democracy to produce a stable consensus.

If HRC moves into the Oval Office next year, she may push the pendulum back toward a more aggressive, engaged foreign policy. She understands the risks, Steinberg argued, but compared to 44, “she maybe has more confidence in the capacity of the United States to act in a way that will do good.”

Her Republican rival, though, feels rather differently. Politicians, said Haass, need to explain to the public “why isolationism and various forms of protectionism aren’t solutions, just the opposite.”

Later Tuesday, though, Donald Trump took to the airwaves, to offer a campaign speech touting the virtues of protectionism. Instead of helping the pendulum swing back, it seems, a Trump administration might push it in a whole new direction.

Born On The 4th Of July

4 July 1776 fired off a crazy rocking rolling ride that hasn't stopped 'stirring things up' on a global scale.

Advancing arrogance into an art form with a remarkable relentless risque commitment to liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, and laissez-faire values. 

America differs qualitatively from all other nations, because of her unique origins, nat'l credo, historical evolution, and distinctive political and religious institutions.

Great Satan is magically especial because she was a country of immigrants and the first modern democracy. 

Loud, proud and rowdy - early America forecast future stuff with a provocative lingo that still fits today. "Don't Tread On Me!" "Liberty Or Death", "Live Free Or Die" 

Great Satan's superiority of the American xperiment is reflected in the perception among Americans of America’s role in the world. That American foreign policy is based on moral principles is a consistent theme in the American hot diplopolititary gossip – a phenomenon recognized even by those who are skeptic of such an assessment. 

This inclination to do right has been virtually unique among the nations of the world - and for this very reason - America has been totally misunderstood. How could a nation so rich, so successful actually, really be so unselfish and so caring?

Unconvincing (and either historically igno - or deceitfully dishonest - either term will do) critics cry Great Satan must have darker motives! America must be seeking imperium - to dominate everyone else, suck up all the oil, to trade and rob blind for America's selfish purposes. 

People from more grasping, less idealistic societies find it nigh impossible to accept that America honestly believes that giving everyone opportunity is the real roadmap for abundance and happiness everywhere - not merely in the magical Great Satan.

Americans honestly believe that securing other people's freedom is actually like the best guarantee that America can keep her own.

Great Satan does not want to dominate the world. Americans want to live in peace and hope other people will too.

Great Satan will go out into the world, redress errors, stop uncool unacceptable behaviour, to first challenge, then annihilate threats to our liberty.

Creative destruction is Great Satan's middle name. It is her natural function, for she is the one truly revolutionary country in the world for more than 2 centuries. 

She does it automatically, and that is precisely why creeps and tyrants hate her guts, and are driven to attack her. An enormous advantage, despots fear her, and oppressed peoples want what she offers: freedom. 

Amazingly, some suspect states, illegit leaders and some people have not yet comprehended that America's primary intention is to preserve and keep our own land and liberty and all it's prosperity and that America will do anything and go anywhere to make it happen.

Great Satan built the modern world.

And She knows her way around.

Joyeuex Anniversarie America!

WoW!!

WoW - the Watchers Council- it's the oldest, longest running cyber comte d'guere ensembe in existence - started online in 1912 by Sirs Jacky Fisher and Winston Churchill themselves - an eclective collective of cats both cruel and benign with their ability to put steel on target (figuratively - natch) on a wide variety of topictry across American, Allied, Frenemy and Enemy concerns, memes, delights and discourse.

Every week these cats hook up each other with hot hits and big phazed cookies to peruse and then vote on their individual fancy catchers.

Thusly sans further adieu (or a don"t) 

Council Winners

• *First place with 3 votes!–Joshuapundit–Brexit – The Triumph Of Freedom Over Tyranny
• Second place *t* with 1 1/3 votes –Bookworm Room – George Will’s clarifying stance
• Second place *t* with 1 1/3 votes –Puma By Design – For Progressives, Compassion for Victims of Islamic Terrorist Attacks is Not an Option
• Third place with 1 vote –The Razor – Keep Calm And Carry On
• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes –The Glittering Eye –Britons Vote to Leave European Union
• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes –GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD – Fallujah’s forever war
• Fifth place *t* with 1/3 vote –VA Right! – So, Did Anyone Fall for the Fake ‘Gun Control’ Votes?
• Fifth place *t* with 1/3 vote –Stately McDaniel Manor – The Freddie Gray Case, Update 35.7.2: None Are So Blind…
• Fifth place *t* with 1/3 vote –Angry White Dude – George Will Says He’s No Longer A Republican – Yes He’s A Perfect Republican

Non-Council Winners

• First place with 2 1/3 votes! –Seraphic Secret – How To Kill An IslamoNazi submitted by The Watcher
• Second place with 2 votes – Free Range International– Shoot Back submitted by Bookworm Room
• Third place with 1 1/3 votes –David Goldman (Spengler) – A Pax Sinica in the Middle East, Redux submitted by Joshuapundit
• Fourth place with 1 vote –Foreign Policy – Angela Merkel Doesn’t Have A Brexit Plan Either submitted by GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 votes –Corey Robin – Neera and Me: Two Theses about the American Ruling Class and One About Neera Tanden submitted by The Glittering Eye
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 votes –The Volokh Conspiracy –Chief Idaho federal prosecutor warns: “The spread of false information or inflammatory or threatening statements … may violate federal law” submitted by Stately McDaniel Manor
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote –The Federalist –8 Best Quotes From Thomas’s Texas Abortion Dissent submitted by The Daley Gator
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote –John Hindraker/Powerline – Trump’s Declaration of Independence submitted by The Watcher

See you next week!