Conservatively Speaking

A day after Osama bin Laden said “Obama is planting the seeds of Muslim hatred for America” Obama spoke at Cairo University before a hand-picked audience of 3,000.  In a self-evident statement Obama said America has never been nor ever will be at war with Islam” which avoids World War I when the Ottoman Empire along side the Kaiser’s Germany against the U. S. and allies He said he had ended the use of torture and ordered Guantanamo closed within a year. Prior to travelling to the Middle East Obama peculiarly declared America a major Muslim country.  Which it is not having perhaps a 1.5% Muslim population. Pecularly Obama vehemently denied his Muslim heritage even declaring his father an atheist during last year’s election campaign. Both statements that have invited ridicule.

Following Obama’s speech White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said “the United State is no longer losing the P. R. war” seemingly acknowledging the speech was in fact a P. R. ploy at least in his mind.

Coincident to Obama’s speech Osama bin Laden issued  another audiotape saying, as the Quaran does, it  would be wrong for Muslims to befriend unbelieving infidels -  Christians and Jews. For his part Obama read passages from the Quaran, Talmud and Bible obviously avoided such inflammatory passages referred to by bin Laden.

Shaun Hannity responded on ABC’s Good Morning America by asking why Obama did not point out it was the US who liberated Muslims in Kuwaiti, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Somali and other Muslims as well as feeding the starving in Darfur. “It seemed like a political speech to me.”

The authoritative Middleeast new source Debkafile issued a statement saying, “Obama stressed the need for mutual respect and tolerance among the world’s faiths, denigrated al Qaeda and extremism, said the US “does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements,” will respect all elected peaceful governments provided they respect their peoples, and called for universal human and women’s rights to be upheld. His much awaited speech to more than a billion Muslims which quoted extensively from the Koran, but also the Bible and the Talmud, won cheers from the hand selected 3,000 strong audience in Cairo University’s Great Hall Thursday, June 4.

 Along with a declaration that US bonds with Israel are unbreakable, President Obama demanded that Israel and the Palestinians uphold their obligations to the roadmap. “America will align its policies with those who seek peace - Israelis, Palestinians or Arabs,” he declared and promised to personally pursue the goal of peace and security for breaking the Israel-Palestinian stalemate. Palestinians must be allowed to live a normal life in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, he said, but they must abandon violence.

Rockets on sleeping children or bombs killing old people on a bus are intolerable, but the US does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements and Israel must recognize the Palestinian right to the dignity of a state of their own but so must the Arab world recognize Israel.

It should not exploit the Middle East conflict to distract their peoples from their problems. Privately, he said,, many Arabs recognize that Israel will not go away, just as many Israelis recognize the Palestinians right to a state. America will align its policies those who seek peace, Israelis, Palestinians or Arabs. “Jerusalem must be the lasting home for all faiths, all the children of Abraham.”

Obama began his speech by saying: “I have come to Cairo to seek a new beginning of mutual respect between America and Muslims: Salaam Aleikum.” America and Islam are not mutually exclusive; they share common principles.” Muslims have enriched America in many fields.

But no one should tolerate al Qaeda which killed members of all faiths, most of all Muslims, Obama stressed. America went to war to pursue al Qaeda after it ruthlessly murdered more than 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11. The United States is not fighting Islam in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but extremists who violate the Koranic injunction against killing innocents. US troops will be out of Iraq by 2012, he pledged.

 He spoke frankly about the state of democracy, human and women’s rights and education, with obvious implications for Muslim nations and governments.

 From Egypt, the US president flies to Europe for two days during which he will visit Dresden and pay his respects at the site of the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald. From Germany he travels to Normandy to attend D-Day anniversary ceremonies.

 Obama’s speech was translated by the White House into 12 languages and released on Twitter and the internet.

I’m learning a lot about “The Tonight Show.” ” The Tonight Show” first aired in 1954. It was a simpler time, when Americans actually watched NBC.- Obrien

 ”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.

The 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.

Tomorrow is President Ronald Reagan’s birthday (1912-2004).

A USA Today pie chart shows the $546,688 per American family federal debt including: $284,286 for Medicare; $160,126 for Social Security; $54,537 in interest payments; $29,694 for military retirement; $15,851 for civil service retirement, and $2,172 for other costs. Of course this does not count any costs for Obama’s profligate spending and not a dime for his proposed nationalized health care plan. Some project a $1,000,000 per household share within 20 years.

Saturday is the anniversary of the 1944 allied invasion of Nazi Europe at Normandy.

As Obama sets off to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Europe he excoriated Israel and will avoid Israel and had harsh words for the Jewish state as he prepared to leave the U. S. A grimly determined and realistic Israel released an analysis that it could survive a massive Iranian nuclear strike, according to report by a Russian physicist.

The study, based on Israeli and U.S. data, said Israel could survive an attack of as many as 80 atomic bombs. Israeli casualties, the study said, could be significantly reduced through construction of bomb shelters and dispersal of population.

“The atomic bomb does not mean doomsday,” Yehoshua Sokol, author of the report, said. “Simple things like bomb shelters and dispersal of the population would help significantly.”

The report, presented on May 24 to the MilTech-2009 exhibition and conference, marked the first open study of the repercussions of a nuclear attack on Israel as well as recommendations to reduce casualties.

The report, presented to the Defense Ministry and the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, was assisted by Israeli government engineers and scientists, including from the Soreq Nuclear Research Center, regarded as the Israeli equivalent of the Livermore National Laboratory in the United States.

“If we build a system that stresses the construction of protected rooms [within homes and office buildings] then we could eliminate 75 percent of the casualties,” Sokol said. “It’s as if we had intercepted 75 percent of the incoming [nuclear] missiles.”

Sokol has been a member of the Academic Forum for Nuclear Awareness and a staffer at Falcon Analytics, based in Ashkelon. A Russian-born physicist, Sokol has lectured and presented studies on a range of defense issues, including the utility of laser weapons.

Titled “Nuclear Threat: The New Challenge to Missile Defense Systems,” the report examined a nuclear strike on Tel Aviv, Israel’s commercial center. The study drafted a scenario of an attack by a 15 kiloton atomic bomb, similar to that dropped by the United States on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945.

One atomic bomb dropped on Tel Aviv would result in 6,000 casualties if residents in the affected area were in protected rooms, the study said. Without protection, 25,000 people were expected to die.

The study said 7,000 people would be killed if an atomic bomb fell on the Israeli city of Ramle, east of Tel Aviv and with less population density. About 1,000 people would be killed in an atom bomb that struck Israeli communities in Western Samaria in the northern West Bank. In both cases, the study envisioned that the population would not be protected.

The worst scenario was of an attack on Israel by 80 atomic bombs. The study envisioned 75,000 casualties with a population protected by bomb shelters, and 300,000 dead should Israel take no precautions.

The Israeli study came in the wake of Iranian warnings that the Jewish state could not survive even one atomic bomb. Several Israeli defense analysts have expressed the sense of futility in trying to defend against an Iranian nuclear strike.

“If the Iranians are not rational [and fire a nuclear missile toward Israel] then we should go home, pack up and get out of here,” Reuven Pedatzur, academic director for the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Strategic Dialogue, said.

Sokol, citing survivors from Hiroshima, said the lethality radius from an atomic bomb could be no more than 150 meters. As a result, he said, a nuclear attack on Tel Aviv would probably spare most of its residential and office towers.

“To knock out Aziereli [tallest building in Tel Aviv] or any other big building, you would need a direct or near direct hit by an atomic bomb,” Sokol said.

The report, referring to the U.S. atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, played down the prospect of massive casualties from nuclear radiation. Sokol, citing U.S. data, said fewer than 1,000 people died from cancer in the two Japanese cities from 1958 to 1998. About 100,000 people were killed in the combined U.S. nuclear attacks.

As a result, Sokol said, the most likely nuclear scenario was of an electro-magnetic pulse attack on Israel. This would mean the firing of a nuclear weapon that would explode at least 30 kilometers in altitude and knock out the electronic and electrical grid of the Jewish state. The report called on Israel to upgrade its infrastructure.

“Infrastructure could be hardened against an EMP attack at a cost increase of one to five percent if done at the stage of development,” the report said.

In a related story Iraq’s Kurdistan has sought to downplay reports of a potential military alliance with Israel.

The autonomous Kurdish region in Iraq said it would not allow any foreign operations without permission from Iraq and the United States. Officials said the U.S. military would protect Iraqi air space from any intrusion, including that of Israel. But, the Kurds are urging the US to stay in its territory to help it defend itself.