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Bashar al-Assad speaks in Damascus last week

Recently the NY Times reported that the Assad regime had commenced mixing the ingredients to produce Sarin gas and loading it into 500-pound bombs.

But not to worry (for a while), said the Times, thanks to the intrepid Barack Obama and his international friends:

What followed next, officials said, was a remarkable show of international cooperation over a civil war in which the United States, Arab states, Russia and China have almost never agreed on a common course of action.

The combination of a public warning by Mr. Obama and more sharply worded private messages sent to the Syrian leader and his military commanders through Russia and others, including Iraq, Turkey and possibly Jordan, stopped the chemical mixing and the bomb preparation. A week later Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said the worst fears were over — for the time being.

Well, actually not, because the article also strongly implies that the process went on for a week before Assad, obviously shaking in his boots over the “sharply worded” warnings, stopped it.

Now today it is reported that US officials admit that there is no way to prevent Assad from using the weapons that were prepared:

Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged that it will be nearly impossible to prevent the Syrian government from using its chemical weapons, so the US must rely on deterrence and continue warning Syria that using them would be unacceptable.

“The act of preventing the use of chemical weapons would be almost unachievable,” Dempsey said during a Pentagon press conference. “You would have to have such clarity of intelligence, you know, persistent surveillance, you’d have to actually see it before it happened, and that’s — that’s unlikely, to be sure.”

All that would be necessary would be to load the filled bombs onto aircraft, which could be done in a matter of minutes or hours. The threat that he would use these weapons provides Assad with a good insurance policy against foreign intervention, freeing him to unleash the full force of his large conventional arsenal against rebels.

It also helps that some of the extremist rebel organizations are less palatable to the US and European nations that are providing limited support to the rebels than the Butcher of Damascus himself.

In a recent speech, Assad affirmed that he had no intention of stepping down. It is not unimaginable that he can pull it off.

It’s doubtful that any of the likely replacements for the Assad regime would be better actors. And the chaos that might reign before the succession is settled could permit weapons to fall into the hands of Hizballah or other terrorist groups.

This is actually the most dangerous possibility. It’s generally thought that Israel warned its neighbors that the use of any form of weapons of mass destruction — nuclear, chemical or biological — would be met with massive retaliation, presumably nuclear. Egypt and Syria both had chemical weapons capability in 1973, as did Saddam Hussein during the Gulf war. These were not used, and the restraint was not due to humanitarian feelings. It is not clear to what extent Hizballah could be deterred in this way — and certainly al-Qaeda could not.

I’m sure that the West and Israel would welcome the replacement of Assad by a liberal, democratic, social-media-savvy regime. But that isn’t going to happen.Whomever wins will most likely slaughter their former opponents, despite the outrage in the West.

It could be that the best outcome for everyone except his enemies would be the survival of Assad.

Technorati Tags: Syria, chemical weapons

Egyptian F-16’s

David P. Goldman (‘Spengler’) has been chronicling the decline and impending collapse of the Egyptian economy since the end of the Mubarak regime. With the tourism industry decimated, natural gas sales to Israel and Jordan halted by endemic terrorism, crime rampant, etc., Egypt’s foreign currency reserves will soon be gone. Agricultural production is down, and even in good times, Egypt does not produce enough food to feed its 83 million people.

When the money runs out, either Egypt will receive massive aid from other nations, or Egyptians will face starvation. Last month, Goldman wrote,

• The Food Industries Association warned Nov. 27 that lack of foreign exchange to purchase food commodities may reduce food imports by 40% during the next several months. Egypt imports half its total food consumption. Upper Egypt already is suffering a drop in food supplies (I presume other than state-subsidized bread) by 40%. Banks are refusing to  provide financing for food imports because importers are already deeply in arrears.
• The Misr Beni Suef Cement company shut five plants due to a natural gas shortage.
• An epidemic of bird flu threatens to destroy Egypt’s chicken population because of a lack of natural gas to heat poultry farms.
• Egypt’s government electricity company warned that the provision of power is in danger because government agencies are 15 billion Egyptian pounds (US $2.5 billion) in arrears on their electricity bills.
• Gas and diesel supplies at filling stations are down 70% from normal levels since President Mohammed Morsi’s constitutional declarations.
• Shortage of fertilizer has cut agricultural exports by 10%, according to the Agricultural Export Council, and it is likely that overall production has fallen by a similar margin.

In thirty-five years of following debt crises in emerging economies, I have never seen anything like this. Latin American economies suffered from hyperinflation during the 1970s and 1980s, but no-one went hungry, because the economies in question all exported food, while Egypt imports half its food. The difference between Egypt and a banana republic is — the bananas.

Egypt is not the only Middle Eastern country facing a crisis — according to Goldman, all of the non-oil-producing Arab countries (e.g., Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, Yemen) are in trouble. It doesn’t help that rising demand for food from the more functional economies in East Asia has pushed up prices.

While Islamists like to say that “Islam is the solution,” radical Islam is precisely the opposite. Because of its negative effects on women, Christians, the educated middle classes, secular education in general, etc. — not to mention the disruptions caused by violent extremists — Islamism is death to economic success.

Naturally, one ‘solution’ to a problem caused by the incompetence of Muslims is to attack Israel and the Jews. Essam el-Erian, an adviser to President Morsi, recently announced that Jews of Egyptian descent living in Israel should give up their property to Palestinian ‘refugees’ and return to Egypt, since Israel was about to be destroyed.

Unfortunately for him, el-Erian forgot that Egyptians hate Jews even more than they hate Israel, and was forced to resign after the Islamic Jihad organization complained that the re-introduction of Jews would “rot the Egyptian economy” [they should be so lucky as to have Jewish businessmen!] and that Shari’a requires Muslims to kill Jews.

If that isn’t surreal enough, what is the Obama Administration doing in the face of the imminent collapse of the largest and historically most important and powerful state in the Arab world, now ruled by an anti-Western and anti-Semitic radical Islamic regime (which it helped bring to power)?

Why, giving them advanced F-16 aircraft, of course.

Technorati Tags: Egypt

Billionaire mathematician Bill Benter and wife Vivian

It shouldn’t come to any of us as a surprise that, like any political campaign, getting yourself confirmed as Secretary of Defense takes big bucks for advertising, lobbying, PR, etc.

So who is funding the ‘campaign’ of Chuck Hagel, whom Jennifer Rubin called “the most anti-Israel nominee in recent memory (in either party)?”

Josh Rogin tells us:

…without White House assistance before Monday’s official nomination and without a staff of his own, Hagel was ill-equipped to fight the onslaught of negative publicity coming from his many critics, and his critics were able to set the initial frame and tone of the coming confirmation debate.

But over the last two weeks, Hagel’s friends in the Democratic political world have come to his aid, principally by rounding up senior former officials to write supportive op-eds and funding an advertising effort to spread the world that Hagel does in fact have bipartisan support.

The Cable has learned that a large chunk of that pro-Hagel money is coming from one Democratic donor, gambling legend Bill Benter, who is working with the Podesta Group, a Washington lobbying firm, to support pro-Hagel advertising.

Benter is the shadowy mathematician with CIA and Arab connections who figured out how to beat the odds at Hong Kong’s Happy Valley race track, and funneled more than $800,000 through an ‘associate’, the even shadowier Connie Esdicul, into the up-and coming J Street organization in 2010.

J Street, if you have forgotten, is the fake “pro-Israel” lobbying group which has consistently worked against Israel’s interests in Washington — also with Arab connections — all the while claiming that they are doing it for Israel’s own good.

Just like, er, Chuck Hagel. In fact J Street supports Hagel, and its positions on Iranian sanctions, Hamas, etc., almost precisely agree with his. Which, surprisingly enough, are the same as those of George Soros, another big J Street funder, and of President Barack Obama.

This is one of those times that I wish the antisemites were right, and that there was actually a semi-covert, powerful and well-funded Jewish lobby forcing the captive US (“Zionist-occupied”) government to do its bidding.

Instead, there is a Jewish community sharply divided on many political issues — and a large part of that community has decided that if it comes down to a choice between Israel and what it calls ‘progressive values’, they’ll choose the latter.

And this is alongside a semi-covert, powerful and well-funded anti-Israel lobby, which is not at all divided about what it wants.

Technorati Tags: Chuck Hagel, Bill Benter, J Street, Israel

It’s now almost certain that the president is going to nominate Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense. An announcement is expected tomorrow or Tuesday.

Just like when the plan was to appoint Arabist Chas Freeman to a sensitive intelligence post, the strategy has been to leak the planned appointment, then respond to opposition by ‘Israelifying’ the objections, and ‘Jewifying’ the opponents.

In other words, administration surrogates are doing their best to make the public think that objections to Hagel are all related to his anti-Israel politics (don’t just ask me — ask Iranian Press TV), and that opponents to his nomination are doing the bidding of the ‘Jewish Lobby’ (as Hagel himself called it).

Freeman’s Saudi and Chinese connections did him in. He wasn’t a member of the Senate who could expect to receive many votes out of collegial courtesy. The administration saw the handwriting on the wall and didn’t push it.

But this time the calculations are that Hagel can make it. This is despite the fact that many Senators will vote against him because his positions on issues of national security and foreign policy are far to the left of the mainstream for that body. What can you say about someone who opposed economic sanctions on Iran and a resolution calling Hizballah a “terrorist organization,” and suggested that the US president negotiate with Hamas?

It’s not as though there aren’t other good candidates, including some who are much more experienced in the details of running the complicated defense establishment, such as the highly competent Michelle Flournoy.

Unfortunately, the administration has succeeded in making the issue of Hagel all about Israel and Jews, rather than about a potential Secretary of Defense with little practical experience who seems to think that a nuclear Iran is acceptable. One wonders if the president himself views it this way, and sees the nomination as a way to punish and humiliate Israel (and perhaps the “Jewish Lobby”).

That would be really, really stupid, a classic case of allowing the anti-Israeli tail to wag the dog of real American interests.

Technorati Tags: Chuck Hagel

5 minutes and 48 seconds on the bigotry of low expectations:

Technorati Tags: Palestinians, Israel, Islam, racism, Pat Condell