The Weekend Web
Last week, the Winograd Committee released its final report about Israel’s embarrassing defeat in the Second Lebanon War of 2006. Officials in Ehud Olmert’s office and at Hezbollah headquarters were delighted with the final assessment.
Hezbollah spokesman Hussein Rahal said, “The report confirms what Hezbollah was saying all along: Israel failed completely in achieving its goals and the Israeli army suffered a military defeat at the hands of Hezbollah.” It proves the “resistance won,” said former Hezbollah Water and Energy Minister Muhammad Fneish. “The report confirms that the Israelis failed in the war and that Hezbollah won, and it especially confirms (the success of) the military outlook that (Hezbollah) employed through which it established supremacy on the (battle) field,” he said.
The report, however, stopped short of assigning blame for the defeat on Olmert, which enabled the hugely unpopular prime minister to survive politically for yet another day. On Wednesday, the bbc reported that the prime minister’s office was “optimistic” and “satisfied” with the final report. Jacob Galanti, Olmert’s spokesman, said the prime minister’s office was “breathing a sigh of relief.” Haaretzdescribed Olmert’s reaction to the report as “lifting the moral stigma from me.”
Kadima’s coalition partner in the Knesset, led by Ehud Barak, also welcomed the report’s blame-free analysis. Last spring, when campaigning for his present position as defense minister, Barak said, “Only a leadership that enjoys the deep faith of the public can lead Israel in this current crisis.” He vowed then to push for Olmert’s resignation, even if it meant pulling Labor out of the coalition.
At a press conference in Jerusalem this morning, Barak said he would remain in the coalition because of the tough challenges facing Israel. The Associated Press, however, said the decision to stay was politically motivated:
If Barak had pulled his Labor Party’s 19-member faction out of the coalition, Olmert would have been stripped of his parliamentary majority and likely forced to move up elections, currently scheduled for November 2010. His coalition now controls 67 of parliament’s 120 seats.But with Labor trailing badly in public opinion polls, Barak apparently decided his party’s political fortunes—and his own—would be better served by remaining in the government. Barak hopes to reclaim the premiership he lost in 2001 elections, but polls would hand the race to hawkish opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu of the hard-line Likud Party if balloting were held today.
Prime Minister Olmert will be remembered for his uncanny ability to survive political crises. As David Horovitz, editor of the Jerusalem Post, recently pointed out, it’s a shame the Olmert government doesn’t employ its survival skills for the benefit of the rest of the country.
Peace in Our Time
If elected president of the United States, Barack Obama says he wants to “organize a summit in the Muslim world, with all the heads of state, to have an honest discussion about ways to bridge the gap that grows every day between Muslims and the West.” In an interview with a French magazine last week, Obama said, “I want to ask them to join our fight against terrorism. We must also listen to their concerns.”
Obama told a Daily Telegraphreporter why he has an advantage over other presidential candidates when it comes to foreign relations:
As somebody who myself lived overseas [in Indonesia] for a time, the world would see me as a different kind of president, somebody who could see the world through their eyes.
And so if I go to a poor country to talk about how the United States and that poor country can cooperate I’d do so with the credibility of somebody who has a grandmother who lives in a poor village in Africa.
If I convened a meeting with Muslim leaders around the world to discuss how they can align themselves against terrorism … I’d do so with the credibility of someone who has lived in a Muslim country. All these things can make a difference.
Incidentally, the National Journalrecently anointed Senator Obama as the most liberal member of Congress, based on his voting record in 2007.
Putting Iran Back on the Hook?
The Economist’s new cover story examines how the U.S.’s recent National Intelligence Estimate let Iran off the hook for its nuclear program, and why Iran must be put back on that hook. It begins,
Who would have thought that a friendless theocracy with a Holocaust-denying president, which hangs teenagers in public and stones women to death, could run diplomatic circles around America and its European allies? But Iran is doing just that. And it is doing so largely because of an extraordinary own goal by America’s spies [speaking of the nie] ….
As we covered in Friday’s column, it appears the U.S. has suddenly grown comfortable with allowing Iran to continue its uranium enrichment. The Economist makes a couple of worthy points on the consequences of this soft strategy:
It doesn’t take a fevered brain to assume that if Iran’s ayatollahs get their hands on the bomb, the world could be in for some nasty surprises. …
We need this for electricity, says Iran. But it could fuel a bomb. And once a country can produce such fuel, putting it in a warhead is relatively easy. …
One obvious danger is that a nuclear-armed Iran, or one suspected of being able to weaponize at will, could set off a chain reaction that turns Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, even Turkey rapidly nuclear too. America and the Soviet Union, with mostly only their own cold war to worry about, had plenty of brushes with catastrophe. Multiplying Middle Eastern nuclear rivalries would drive up exponentially the risk that someone could miscalculate—with dreadful consequences.
Amazingly, the article concludes by speculating how more sanctions against Iran just might solve the problem. You certainly can’t fault the West for a lack of optimism.
Incidentally, one of our readers, Pauline O’Leary, noted that “if one studies U.S.-Middle East policies of recent years … the result of it all was to embolden and strengthen Iran. In view of this, I am stumped as to the motive of why, since this will lead to catastrophic global repercussions. Any ideas? I refuse to believe that common prattle that it’s just that Bush is stupid. There seems to be some clandestine plan to this.”
Good question. The evidence, however, really doesn’t support the existence of a clandestine plan by the U.S. administration to benefit Iran. The specific foreign-policy initiatives that have helped Iran each have strong rationales on their own terms for other reasons, and Iran’s rise has occurred according to the law of unintended consequences. After 9/11, it seems the U.S. initially went after Afghanistan and then Iraq as a means of strengthening its position against Iran—but the circumstances that followed didn’t flow according to its projections, and now it is reduced to trying to make the best of a bad situation. The war would have unfolded much differently had the U.S. started with Iran—but there were many reasons (chiefly Iran’s alliances with nations such as Russia) that made that an unsavory option, and that informed its hope that it could achieve the same ends through indirect means.
The strengthening of Iran has chiefly been an outgrowth of a foreign policy based on the flawed idea that incentives other than force are enough to counter the extremist ideology motivating Iranian leaders. And that idea remains stubbornly in place, both at the White House and at the Economist. And, we would guess, in the minds of a presidential candidate who believes his efforts at reaching consensus with Islamic nations would find more success since he lived in a Muslim country.
Beyond that, however, it so happens that events, as they have unfolded, have aligned perfectly according to the biblically prophesied outline of end-time events, and thus they clearly exhibit evidence of providential design. Most of the content of our booklet The King of the South was written about 13 years ago, and comparing our projections at that time with the way things have happened is a remarkable study.
Mazar Revises Her Reading of Seal Inscription
A black stone seal found in in Jerusalem in mid-January is inscribed with a different Hebrew name than previously thought. Archaeologist Eilat Mazar revised her analysis recently in Biblical Archaeology Review (bar):
I accept the suggestion made by Peter van der Veen and followed by many other scholars to read Sh-l-m-t. Actually, I love it. For the time being, this reading is preferable to my reading of t-m-h or h-m-t. This is an opportunity also to thank the many scholars who took part in the various blogs contributing their knowledge on the subject.
Soon after the original announcement, which we reported on here, Peter van der Veen suggested that Mazar read the inscription the wrong way. According tobar,
He and other critics suggested that the seal actually bears four letters (shin, lamed, mem and tav) and that the correct reading is “Shlomit,” which itself may be a name mentioned in the Bible. Mazar has now acknowledged that the seal should indeed be read as “Shlomit.” Her comments and those of two of her critics can be found here; we invite other experts to share their viewpoints with us.
If the new reading is correct, Baptist Presssays, “scholars believe it could refer to Shelomith, a man mentioned in Ezra 8:10 who also returned from Babylon to Jerusalem, or to Shelomith, the daughter of Zerubbabel mentioned in 1 Chronicles 3:19.”
The seal, which Dr. Mazar described as “magnificent,” is elliptical, measuring only 2.1 by 1.8 centimeters. On the surface is an engraved scene of two bearded priests standing on either side of an incense altar with their hands raised forward in a position of worship. On top of the altar appears a crescent moon, the symbol of the god Sin, the chief Babylonian god. Under this scene is the Hebrew inscription.
OD in America
In the wake of publicity caused by Heath Ledger’s drug overdose a couple weeks ago, the Times in London has some shocking statistics about America’s culture of addiction:
These days, drugs sold in urban clubs are often mixtures of legally prescribed antidepressants, which can act as serotonin-boosting “uppers” on a nondepressed brain. Such mishandled drugs kill 20,000 Americans a year, nearly twice as many as 10 years ago, a rise driven by youthful recreational misuse.
By comparison, 17,000 Americans die from overdoses of illegal drugs. The day after Ledger died the White House cancelled the launch of a publicity campaign designed to warn parents about prescription-drug abuse, out of “sensitivity” towards the actor’s death. Critics said that if the New York coroner were to reveal that prescription drugs were involved in Ledger’s death then the White House might not have helped its own cause.
No Longer the World’s Economic Powerhouse
Columnist Trudy Rubin makes an important comparison between this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and previous meetings:
What a difference a year makes. Davos 2008 has laid bare a world in which no superpower seems to be in charge. The unipolar American moment is deemed over, in part a casualty of the Bush administration’s political and economic policies, in larger part the result of global economic changes that are shifting wealth elsewhere.
But we have not entered a multipolar world: China and India, though on the rise, aren’t ready to take the global lead, nor can Europe do so. The consensus at Davos seems to be that we now live in a “nonpolar” world, with America too strong to stand on the sidelines, but too weak to implement its agenda alone.
At the Telegraph, Edmund Conway makes a similar point about what a difference one year makes. In “U.S. recession will dwarf dotcom crash,” Conway wrote,
The views of Stephen Roach, one of the world’s leading economists, now heading the Asian wing of Morgan Stanley, would have seemed outrageous at last year’s World Economic Forum.
It is a sign of the times that they are now close to the consensus. This year’s event has been dominated by discussions of the stock market slump on both sides of the Atlantic, the Federal Reserve’s emergency interest rate cut and the SocGen fraud disaster.
But underlying everything has been the silent truth that the US is facing a very possible recession, and is fast having to adapt to a far less enjoyable economic climate.
“We have, as relatively sophisticated, well-developed economies, gotten hooked on credit as never before,” said Roach, speaking about the UK and U.S. “If we had been running our economies the old-fashioned way, for example, where saving and consumption were funded by income, maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess we are in now.”
Sarkozy’s Popularity Plummets
Over the weekend, French President Nicolas Sarkozy married his model girlfriend. The two met 11 weeks ago, not long after Sarkozy divorced his second wife. During the whirlwind romance, Sarkozy has seen his approval ratings nosedive:
The president’s ratings started to fall last autumn and took a hammering at the end of the year following his high-profile romance with Italian supermodel-turned-singer Carla Bruni.
Voters complained that the twice-divorced president was focusing too much on his love life and not enough on the problems facing France—notably widespread concerns that purchasing power is eroding in the euro zone’s second economy.
Fatherlessness: Neglected on the Political Agenda
Presidential candidates from both parties tell us that the health of America’s children occupies a special place in their hearts. But despite the promises of better healthcare or improved education for America’s kids, not a single candidate is making a fuss about one of the most important keys to healthy children: making sure they have a relationship with their father.
“Social science data is crystal clear,” says Peter Cove in the New York Sun. “Children raised by both a mother and a father have dramatically better prospects.” This issue doesn’t lack the potential for political traction: “There’s an epidemic of what might be called ‘father absence’ in the very states that are about to hold primary elections.”
And the facts speak for themselves:
Children born to single mothers suffer greater instances of infant mortality, low birth weight, and delayed cognitive development. Compared with those born to two parents, they are at increased risk for abuse, run away from home more often, battle more mental health deficiencies, and are up to five times more likely to commit suicide.
As adolescence sets in, the stakes rise and the ramifications of social dysfunction begin to materialize. Children without a father in their life, regardless of racial and socioeconomic background, are far more likely to engage in criminal activity than their peers in two-parent homes. Children cared for by a single parent are up to 10 times more likely to use drugs and 20 times more likely to spend time in prison than those reared in a traditional family setting.
Fatherlessness is reaching crisis proportions in states across the nation, explains Cove, such as Michigan, South Carolina, Florida, “yet not one of the presidential contenders has pushed the connection between fatherless children and social dysfunction to the forefront, despite the indisputable need for new innovations and for action.”
This dearth of fathers is crippling America’s cities, and the solution lies in restoring the role of the father in families. But this cannot happen “without leaders willing to do something about the correlation between a father absence’s and social dysfunction.”
Cove is correct: There is a profoundly strong connection between the role of the father and a healthy family. The truth is, a calculated and earnest war is being waged against fatherhood. You can read The Conspiracy Against Fatherhood to learn more about this.
Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle
Feminists are about to achieve a long-held dream: being able to reproduce without any need for a man. The Courier-Mailreported Friday that scientists can now turn bone marrow into sperm.
Scientists are ready to turn female bone marrow into sperm, cutting men out of the process of creating life.
The breakthrough paves the way for lesbian couples to have children that are biologically their own.
Gay men could follow suit by using the technique to make eggs from male bone marrow.
Whereas God gifts to the married couple the awesome, even God-like power to create new life through their union, people instead choose dead unions and then look to unnatural means of generating that life. Whereas God intends life to begin with an act of love, science enables us to start it with the squeeze of a syringe. Whereas God intends children to grow up with the authoritative and loving influence of both a man and a woman, each fulfilling a specific role, bound and committed to one another and to the offspring they produce together, people want to bring children up within whatever “family” concoction suits their self-interest. And, cut loose from moral moorings, guided only by their own reason, they have convinced themselves the children will grow up to be just as healthy for it.
Functioning Democracy?
Democracy is flourishing in Russia, as the race to choose a new president started yesterday. But wait. The frontrunner, Dmitri Medvedev—Vladimir Putin’s handpicked successor—has declined to publicly debate his opponents. The Christian Science Monitorreports:
“These elections are really just an afterthought in a political system where the main issue of who will succeed Putin has already been decided,” says Viktor Kremeniuk, deputy director of the official Institute of USA-Canada Studies in Moscow. “What’s left is just a performance to convince the world that there’s a functioning democracy in Russia.”
Er … consider us not convinced.
Elsewhere on the Web
The bbcgives an excellent snapshot of the U.S. economy and its overall impact on the world economy.
In other economic news, read about the impact of China’s inflation on America’s economy here and U.S. job losses in January here.
Over here, the leader of Israel’s intelligence agency gives a grim assessment on the impact of the Egypt-Gaza border dispute. He says Hamas is winning public support among Palestinians over its rival Fatah faction.
And Finally …
According to a report in Al Jazeera yesterday, Iran has discovered a huge gas field off its coast in the Persian Gulf. Already sitting on the second-largest supply of natural gas in the world, behind Russia, this new find will add an additional 11 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves.
Added to this, Iran insists it desperately needs its high-cost, uranium enrichment program—not for weapons, mind you—but energy. By this time next year, when Iran expects its enrichment program to be generating electricity, the Islamic Republic should have enough energy resources to light up the entire country like a glow stick.
