International Affairs

Watching the escalation of fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza this week, the words of God as recorded in Deuteronomy 30:19 continue to run through my head: “I call heaven and earth as my witnesses against you right now: I have set life and death, blessing and curse before you. Now choose life — so that you and your descendants will live.”
 
What the world is witnessing in Gaza is the stark contrast between Israel, a nation and a people that choose life, and Hamas, a bloodthirsty terrorist organization that celebrates and embraces death. 

A hundred dead on the ground in Gaza in events that will shake the foundations of diplomacy worldwide, but the big reports this week are on the rise and fall of the Twinkie. Does anyone under 30 even know what a Twinkie is? Possibly a monument to Twinkie — a giant Twinkie by Claes Oldenberg perhaps, or something thrown together on the National Mall by Frank Gehry — will appear; Twinkie as a remembrance to the rise and decline of the American Century.

Since Monday night's debate, I've heard scores of Romney supporters express disappointment and surprise that Mitt Romney did not hammer away at President Obama on growing scandal regarding the attacks in Benghazi that killed Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans.
 
But it likely wasn't a Romney gaffe — Romney's near-silence on Benghazi was on purpose.

It’s the final presidential debate on American foreign policy tonight and you can expect Iran’s nuclear program to come up.

But there’s an equally topical and important issue that is extremely unlikely to be discussed by President Obama and Mitt Romney in the context of Iran: the 2012 Helsinki conference on a WMD-free zone in the Middle East. This conference, planned since May 2010 under a consensus decision at the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference, would bring Iran and Israel to the table for the first time to discuss nuclear disarmament in a region threatened by a nuclear arms race.

More than a month after the 9/11 al Qaeda attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya, which left the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans dead, we are still no closer to knowing who knew what and when, and who should be accountable.

President Obama, speaking after Hillary Clinton took responsibility for the State Department’s security lapse at the Benghazi Consulate, said quite clearly last night that the buck stops at the Oval Office. Yet by refusing to answer a question from an undecided voter during the presidential debate with Republican nominee Mitt Romney at Hofstra University, the president muddied the waters still further. The questioner wanted to know: Who was it who denied enhanced security, and why?

The media are partially to blame for allowing the Obama administration to get away with a narrative that was so clearly ridiculous. The Muhammad movie on YouTube was clearly a pretext for violence. Evidence was apparently known to elements within the administration within the first couple of days that indicated it was a terrorist attack, but the Obama administration purposefully denied that and blamed the violence on the Muhammad movie.

The instinctual inclination to apologize for the movie and offending Muslims and to focus public statements on the movie are indicative of the administration’s tendency to apologize for America.

As a proud, patriotic American, I am embarrassed by the calls that are being made for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice to resign. Not even a month after the murder of our ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans, many are politicizing their deaths rather than honoring their service — hardly the behavior that one would or should expect from the citizens of the nation that leads the free world.

An extraordinary wave of change continues to sweep across the Middle East and North Africa. It is a heady time for many who wish to cast off their chains of repression and deprivation and usher in a new age of freedom and democracy. But unless such developments ultimately occur in the context of virtue-driven changes, it is all too easy to reproduce old patterns and replace the current strongman or dictator with another or an oligarchy of exploiters.

I thought that was a pretty effective and well-crafted speech that President Obama delivered just now to the U.N. General Assembly on the perils of political extremism.

In the middle of the presidential campaign, it wasn’t a campaign speech, apart from the strong words on Iran, whose leadership was warned that time is “not unlimited” and that the United States will “do what we must” to stop Iran gaining a nuclear weapon.

But on the “politics of anger,” it was an interesting plea for tolerance. He won’t have done himself any favors with his Republican rival for invoking Gandhi.

Luckily for President Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, Afghanistan is not a burning issue on which the November election will be decided.

But while Americans look the other way, U.S. strategy is in disarray. Consider the treatment of Britain, whose defense secretary was only informed at the eleventh hour of Sunday night’s decision to curb joint patrols with Afghan military and police forces after 51 insider killings of NATO soldiers this year. The whole thing smacks of improvisation.