Author: Andrew Sullivan

What President Palin’s Foreign Policy Would Look Like

GAZADavidSilverman:Getty In a phrase: AIPAC’s foreign policy, with Cheney’s torture regime in place, to back it up. She has already stated that she wants more Israeli settlements and more Israelis in the West Bank, and is now hinting that she would also like a full-scale war with Iran:

WALLACE: How hard do you think President Obama would be to defeat in 2012? PALIN: It depends on a few things, say he played — I got this from Buchanan — say he played the war card. Say he decided to declare war on Iran or decide to really come out and do whatever he could to support Israel–which I would like him to do. That changes the dynamics of what we can assume will happen between now and three years. Because I think if the election were today, Obama would not be elected. WALLACE: You’re not suggesting that Obama would cynically play the war card?

PALIN: I’m not suggesting that, I’m saying if he did, things would dramatically change if he decided to toughen up and do all that he can to secure our nation and secure our allies. I think people would shift their thinking a bit.

When she was first asked about foreign policy – before she was Kristolized by Randy Scheuneman – she said she wanted an exit plan for Iraq and had only heard about the “surge” “on the news.” Now she is a paid-up neocon fanatic. Notice that in her view, Obama is not actually supporting Israel at the moment.

And yet Israel pre-emptively tried to kill Obama’s attempt to reach out to the Muslim world by the brutal, polarizing Gaza campaign, has adamantly refused to freeze all settlements on the West Bank, and has done its usual brilliant job of lobbying the US Congress to prevent any leverage over the country. In Jerusalem, recently, two US senators, John McCain and Joe Lieberman, openly told the Israelis that they had the power to prevent Obama from conducting foreign policy with respect to Israel, if it conflicted with the  agenda of the Israeli government. Obama’s clearest failure, in fact, in his first year is in trying to budge Israel from its suicidal path.

Notice also that the only “tough” position for Palin is war and the threat of war. And remember this statement from earlier this year:

I believe that the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expanded upon, because that population of Israel is, is going to grow. More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead. And I don’t think that the Obama administration has any right to tell Israel that the Jewish settlements cannot expand.

The American president has no right to pressure Israel to advance America’s interests. No right! No wonder Kristol is so in love. 

(Photo: Gaza under Israeli aerial bombardment a year ago. By David Silverman/Getty)

Totten On “The Hurt Locker”

I've mentioned this remarkable movie before and found it by far the best film on our current war – the "Deer Hunter" for the Iraq war. Now, Michael Totten gives it his endorsement, and his opinion is worth much more than mine, because he's been there and seen that. It's now available on Blu-Ray.

While you're at his site, if you can spare some dough in these straitened times, show him some money love. (Hat tip: Jeff.)

Sin As An Evasion Of Time

Time

"The commonplace that no civilization can last forever contains an essential truth: time is the enemy of civilization. And in the last analysis we humans are on the side of time, not of civilization. Time must finally be allowed to have its way with civilization. Hope is willingness to entrust our lives to time…

Sin is evasion of time. In giving way to nostalgia, for example, we flee from time into the past. Evading time is accomplished mainly, however, by constructing worlds — orders of life in which everything has its assigned place, and all events are foreknown if not willed. There are personal worlds, occupied perhaps by only a single individual; and there is also 'the world,' the surrounding order of society, treated as objectively knowable, humanly controllable, and morally final. A world is always a kind of fortress against time.

Sin, as I have tried to show, is in essence worldliness, whether in proud mastery of a world, in distracted abandonment of oneself to someone else's world, or, as is almost always the case, a subtle mixture of these. To entrust your life to time, however, is to acknowledge the impermanence and imperfection of all worlds.

It is to dwell within the situation in which time has placed you, suffering and doing what you must, in the faith that by submitting to the demands of time you are submitting to the demands of God, the Lord of time," – Glenn Tinder, The Fabric of Hope: An Essay

Grains Of War

Rob Lyons reviews Tom Standage’s An Edible History of Humanity. Standage's description of his own work:

The use of food as a weapon or war is timeless, but the large-scale military conflicts of the 18th and 19th centuries elevated it a new level. Food played an important role in determining the outcome of the two wars that defined the United States of America: the Revolutionary War of the 1770-80s and the Civil War of the 1860s.

In Europe, meanwhile, Napoleon’s rise and fall was intimately connected with his ability to feed his vast armies. The mechanisation of warfare in the 20th century meant that for the first time in history, feeding machines with fuel and ammunition became a more important consideration than feeding soldiers. But food then took on a new role, as an ideological weapon, during the Cold War between capitalism and communism, and ultimately helped to determine the outcome of the conflict. And in modern times food has become a battlefield for other issues, including trade, development and globalisation.