Conservatively Speaking

When you are having a horrendously bad day and think that your problems are insurmountable…..

JUST REMEMBER:

SOMEWHERE OUT THERE, THERE IS A MR. PELOSI.

 Obama has not yet decided whether his historic speech reaching out to Islam will be delivered on June 4 from a lecture hall at Al Azhar University in Cairo or its main mosque. If it is the second, his address will take place in the presence of Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, the Sunni Muslim world’s greatest religious authority. In any event, Al Azhar is the most eminent school of Islamic learning in the world and the US president therefore expects its impact to far outweigh his first address to Muslims from Istanbul.

 His arrival from a meeting with Saudi King Abdullah in Riyadh on June 3 is planned to add extra weight to Obama’s dramatic outreach to Islam, since the king officiates as Custodian of the Holy Places to Islam.

Radical Muslims will therefore have all the more reason for rejecting it.

 Giant transports have been landing at Cairo airport, unloading a fleet of armored vehicles, White House helicopters, counter-terror weapons and the vanguard of the 3,000 Secret Service officers backed by CIA and FBI personnel who will secure the US president during his stay in Egypt. Cairo will soon be in turmoil as forces are deployed from a command center at the American Embassy to control sections of downtown Cairo, with guard posts on the Nile River’s banks, the international airport, main railway terminals and approaches to the city.

 Some 30,000 Egyptian security personnel including army units stationed in Cairo have been placed on special duty until the American president leaves. Their names and those of the welcoming party at Al Azhar University were submitted to the US presidential security center.

 Obama is due to land in Cairo Thursday at 10 a.m., drive to the Abidin Palace to meet President Hosni Mubarak and proceed from there to Azhar University. His convoy will be escorted by vehicles equipped with sensors for detecting firearms and explosives and covered by Marine helicopters overhead.

Until the last minute, Obama’s routes to the university have been withheld from Egyptian security authorities as a safeguard against leaks to hostile elements.

 All of this is playing out against a background of souring relations with Israel bordering on open hostility as Obama continues to withhold military equipment the Jewish state seems critical.

The notorious late-term abortion provider was shot and killed at his church in Wichita, Kan. on Sunday morning. Tiller was shot as he served as an usher during Sunday morning services at Reformation Lutheran Church. Monnat said Tiller’s wife, Jeanne, was in the choir at the time of the shooting.

The clinic run by the 67-year-old doctor has repeatedly been the site of protests for about two decades. .A protester shot Tiller in both arms in 1993, and his clinic was bombed in 1985. Capt. Brent Allred said police were looking for a gunman who fled in a 1993 light blue Ford Taurus registered in Merriam.

The Pentagon’s semi-secret strategy for countering the rise of a hostile China is contained in a secret defense policy document described publicly by the U.S. Pacific Command leader to reporters last year.

Adm. Timothy Keating, PACOM commander, told reporters the Defense Policy Guidance is the basis for the U.S. buildup of forces in the Pacific.

Asked if the Chinese were monitoring the U.S. buildup, Keating replied: “I kind of hope they do. [Laughter]. We’ve got a number of B-2s in Guam now. I’m hoping they notice. We’re doing our best to make sure they do. We want them to understand that we’re going to continue to course around the Pacific in ways apparent and maybe not quite so apparent, but we’re going to utilize all the arrows in our quiver, if you will, and B-2s in Guam, continuous bomber presence writ larger in Guam and elsewhere. We’ve been told to do it by Defense Policy Guidance, and we’re most assuredly doing it.”

No other details of the Guidance are available. However, a 1992 version of the Defense Policy Guidance stated that U.S. military strategy is to prevent the emergence of a rival superpower. Such emergence “is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.”

Many dismiss the so-called hedge strategy as not being clearly enunciated, since it is counter to the neoliberal posture toward China advanced by Harvard scholar Joseph Nye in the 1970s, which holds that a policy treating China as a threat would become a self-fulfilling prophecy and itself create a threat.

However, that notion is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain, given China’s growing military strength and forward leaning strategy. A strategy that has even suggested a partition of the Pacific with the U. S.

North Korea’s Krazy Kim (NKKK) complicates things with an policy of nuclear armed unpredictability. Perhaps the most ironic position on NKKK is South Korea’s description that it is no yet a nuclear power as if changing a title matters most.

A retired Air Force colonel with decades of experience as a flight instructor gave one of his students a hands-on lesson in a key principle of flying: Don’t run out of gas. Al Uhalt of Colorado Springs made a bumpy but safe landing in a field Thursday when the single-engine Aviat Husky he and a student were flying ran out of fuel near the end of a 45-minute lesson.

An Al Qaeda’s top dog Abu Omar Al Baghdadi, captured on April 23 and identified as the leader of the Al Qaida-aligned Islamic State of Iraq, said AQI has been the funded from Egypt as well as Iraq’s neighbors, including Syria.

“The external sources are from some associations based in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria as well as some people who bring money to Iraq,” Al Baghdadi said. “There are also internal sources derived from theft, extortion as well as that stolen from the salaries of employees.”

Al Baghdadi provided the information in a video confession released on May 19. The U.S. military, denied access to the detainee, has refused to confirm the identity of Al Baghdadi.

Iraqi officials said Al Baghdadi has identified the groups and individuals that fund AQI. They said much of the information, particularly funding from Syria, has been confirmed by other AQI detainees.

Officials said U.S. Central Command, responsible for U.S. military operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, has determined that a revived Al Qaida poses a threat to the six Gulf Cooperation Council states as well as neighboring Iraq and Yemen. They said Al Qaida, flushed with success in Afghanistan, has sought to expand its presence throughout the Gulf

In the video, Al Baghdadi, not his real name, said he was born in 1969 in Iraq’s Diyala province. He said he joined Al Qaida in 2005 and formed the Islamic State of Iraq a year later. The Islamic State of Iraq has denied that Al Baghdadi was captured.

Al Baghdadi, whose real name was not disclosed, said Al Qaida maintained links to the Baath Party and the Iraqi Islamic Party. He claimed responsibility for the bombing of the Shi’ite shrine in Samara in 2006, saying the attack was ordered by the late AQI chief Abu Mussib Al Zarqawi.

Al Qaida and Iraq’s Baath Party also coordinate operations, Al Baghdadi said. He said Baath Party operatives loyal to the late President Saddam Hussein have been responsible for the relay of orders and some funding to Al Qaida.

“The relationship is unified, and instructions for the Baath and Al Qaida from abroad arrive together,” Al Baghdadi said. “There are people connected to the Baath Party who coordinate this.”

Al Baghdadi said the Islamic State of Iraq operates throughout Iraq. He said each region contains a separate leadership.

“The Cabinet is comprised by region,” Al Baghdadi said. “Each region has its own ministers, and each minister has his own speciality.”

In a related story Egypt’s Interior Ministry said Al Qaida has been recruiting and directing operational cells in Egypt. The ministry said the Al Qaida cell targeted Cairo as well as Western tourists and energy facilities

An Ohio man arrested for mowing unkempt grass at a public park said he just wanted to make his city look nice. John Hamilton said he took control of the situation because the grass in Sandusky’s Central Park was about a foot high. According to a police report, a witness said Hamilton was blowing grass onto the sidewalk and shredding trash in the park that had not been picked up.

One of the first cases Sotomayor rules on should she be confirmed as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court could be a American Civil Liberties Union 2001 suit demanding that a seven-foot cross erected in the California desert in 1934 commemorating sacrifices endured by our soldiers in World War I be taken down.

In 1934, a gritty prospector named J. Riley Bembry gathered a couple of his fellow World War I veterans at Sunrise Rock. Together they erected a simple wooden  cross  in honor of their fallen comrades. The memorial has been privately maintained ever since….

A wrinkle developed in 1994, when the federal government declared the surrounding area a national preserve. With the cross now located on newly public land, .the ACLU demanded that the National Park Service tear down the cross.

The creation of this World War I monument was part of a 1930s medical program to help World War I veterans recover from “shellshock”. Physicians treating them thought that their work in the desert heat would be therapeutic. In 2004 the Ninth U.S. Court of Appeals agreed with the ACLU, but veterans groups objected - thus the case’s journey to the U. S. Supreme Court.

Now it would seem to that the cross is a historic monument that need not be subject to contemporary fashions in thought, to wit, the fashion of hunting down religious symbols and eliminating them from government property. The cross simply represents the feelings of soldiers from a bygone era. There are religious symbols on public display from the past elsewhere. For instance, there are religious symbols on the Supreme Court building. carved in the Court’s chamber of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments from God. There may even be a picture of God up there. Viewing the 1934 cross today might give curious Americans a sense of what our country was like back in those days before the ACLU was spreading goodwill around the country by harassing people of faith.

Yet that is not the way the battleaxes at the ACLU see it. One of its lawyers, Peter Eliasberg, told the Washington Times, and as reported in American Spectator “For us to choose the principal symbol of one religion that says Jesus is the Son of God and He is divine and say that is an appropriate way to reflect the sacrifice of people who don’t believe that is excluding by its very nature.” Well, “we” did not choose the symbol. Veterans from what was once called the Great War did, apparently with the consent of their physicians. This is an interesting historic memorial that the ACLU would deny us.

Veterans groups that are opposing the removal of the cross disagree with Eliasberg. Their members argue that the cross represents the “Fallen Soldier Battle Cross.” That is a rifle and crossed bayonet that is driven into the ground to honor a fallen comrade. Will the ACLU oppose this too? Jim Sims, of the Military Order of the Purple Heart, told the Times the controversy is “about thousands of veteran memorials and monuments around the country. This is about the issue of honoring veterans.”

It is trendy in our noisy public discourse to see “the right” being accused of injecting religion into politics. Actually very often “the right” or more specifically “the Christian right” is merely defending settled manifestations of religion that go back decades in our history, occasionally centuries. As I see it the ACLU would have us rewrite American history, eliminating all references to God, the Bible, and other such artifacts. Of course, for people of faith these artifacts are reminders of faith. So maybe the ACLU could begin a campaign to disallow people of faith from lapsing into prayer in front of such reminders. Possibly the ACLU’s next campaign will be to eliminate religious symbols from public buildings, starting with the Supreme Court. As Luigi noticed, some Americanos are too disputatious.

In 2007 the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with removing the cross saying, “Carving out a tiny parcel of property in the midst of this vast Preserve - like a donut (sic) hole with the cross atop it - will do nothing to minimize the impermissible government endorsement,” the opinion said. The 9^th Circuit is the most overturned Appeals panel in US history. One of its justices Eisenberg notoriously said when ask about the repeated rejections of his and the panels decision, “They can’t catch everything.”

Obama risky policy includes nuclear armed Iran and North Korea, and will spark profliferation and arms race that could destabalize globe.

“We will not stand idly by as North Korea builds the capability to wreak destruction on any target in the region or on us,” US defense secretary Robert Gates said in a speech Saturday, May 30, at the annual Asian security conference in Singapore. But he insisted the next step in negating Pyongyang’s ambitions would be political, not military and called for stronger sanctions against internationally censured North Korea and Iran.

 he first round of Security Council sanctions were ineffectual; Pyongyang conducted its nuclear test Monday May 25 regardless, and is reportedly preparing the test-fire of a second long-range missile in defiance of international condemnation.

While the US maintains 250,000 military personnel in the region and will continue as a “resident power,” the US defense secretary said its role is changing. He told delegates from 20 Asian and European nations to take more effective action jointly and rely less on America. He urged more US-Chinese cooperation.

North Korea has a million-strong army, with thousands of tanks and artillery pieces close enough to the border to have the South Korean capital of Seoul within range. Despite a sharp technological advantage for the South the weight of such numbers would mean Seoul would fall in the early hours or days of a war.

 In his speech, Ma Xiaotian, deputy chief of general staff of China’s People’s Liberation Army, said: “We are resolutely opposed to nuclear proliferation. Our view is that the Korean peninsula should move towards denuclearization.” The Chinese general added: “Our hope is that all parties concerned will remain cool-headed and take measures to address the problem.”

Clearly, no military response is contemplated for now against North Korea, although Pyongyang has threatened military action against the South after Seoul’s decision to join a US-led Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) under which North Korean ships could be stopped and searched.

As for proliferation, Gates insisted that the “transfer of nuclear weapons or material by North Korea to states or non-state entities would be considered a grave threat to the United States and our allies.”

Yet he, like other administration officials, was careful to avoid mentioning North Korea’s blatant nuclear and missile transfers to Iran going back years. Therefore it is easy to speculate that as VP Biden said,  Get used to a nuclear armed Iran, and now by implication North Korea.

  DEBKAfile’s military sources stress that the overlap between the two extends to their nuclear timetables and posture of defiance in the face of international condemnation. North Korea and Iran match one another step for step, learning for one another’s experience and mistakes.

 DEBKAfile’s Washington sources affirm that Obama is preparing America and the world to accept the necessity of living with a nuclear-armed North Korea, as the world’s ninth nuclear power.

 An unnamed US official said: “This is a whole new ballgame and it’s a whole lot deeper and darker and scarier.” He added: …It’s a bit like when you get out a pair of binoculars and you get it just right. It has brought into crystalline focus what North Korea’s intentions are - that they do mean to develop this capability.”

 This perception will be hardest of all for North Korea’s neighbors, especially South Korea and Japan, to live with. Their response may well be a nuclear race, mirrored by the Middle East’s skeptical reaction to the Obama policy of halting Iran’s progress toward a nuclear bomb by talk.

Israel’s leader, prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, defense minister Ehud Barak and foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman are taking advantage of the long Shavuoth Festival weekend to withhold comment on the position taking shape in Washington with regard to a North Korea’s nuclear attainments and its possible implications for Iran’s program.

DEBKAfile’s defense sources affirm that Tehran took note and is encouraged by Obama’s  inaction when North Korea launched its long-range Taepodong-2 missile on April 5 even though the Americans knew an underground nuclear test was on the way. Iran will be even more encouraged by Washington’s “political” response to the nuclear test itself to go forward with preparations for its own test.