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Where Trump’s and Bibi’s Interests Clash
April 12, 2019 by Patrick J. Buchanan
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While a U.S. war with Iran may be what Bibi wants, it is not what America wants or needs.

On Monday, President Donald Trump designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization, the first time the United States has designated part of another nation’s government as such a threat.
Iran’s Supreme National Security Council responded by declaring U.S. Central Command a terrorist group.
With 5,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and 2,000 in Syria, often in proximity to Iranian units, this inches America closer to war.
Why did we do it? What benefit did the U.S. derive?
How do we now negotiate with the IRGC on missile tests?
Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu took credit for Trump’s decision, tweeting, “Once again you are keeping the world safe from Iran aggression and terrorism. … Thank you for accepting another important request of mine.”
Previous “requests” to which Trump acceded include moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, declaring Jerusalem Israel’s eternal capital, closing the Palestinian consulate and cutting off aid, and U.S. recognition of the Golan Heights, captured from Syria in 1967, as sovereign Israeli territory.
What Bibi wants, Bibi gets.
One hopes his future requests will not include a demand that we cease dithering and deliver the same “shock and awe” to Iran that George W. Bush delivered to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
With Bibi’s election win Tuesday, his fifth, the secret Mideast peace plan Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has been laboring on these last two years is likely to be unveiled.
Yet it is hard to see how Jared’s baby is not stillborn.
Bibi is not going to accept a Palestinian right of return to Israel, or a sharing of the Holy City with a Palestinian state ruled by a successor of Yasser Arafat. And as Bibi fought Ariel Sharon’s withdrawal of the 8,000 Jєωιѕн settlers from Gaza, he is not going to order the removal of tens of thousands of Jєωιѕн settlers from homes on the West Bank.
Indeed, on the eve of his reelection Tuesday, Bibi promised Israelis he would begin the annexation of Jєωιѕн settlements on the West Bank.
As for Trump, he is the most popular man in Israel. And he is not going to force Bibi to do what Bibi does not want to do and thereby imperil his major political gains in the U.S. Jєωιѕн community.
Given the indulgence of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party for BDS, the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement, and the divisions among Democrats over Netanyahu’s expansionism, the president’s pro-Israel stance has proven a political winner for the GOP.
But while a U.S. war with Iran may be what Bibi wants, it is not what America wants or needs.
Consider what 20 years of U.S. wars in the Mideast have cost this country, as China has stayed out of the region and pushed its power and influence into Asia, Africa and Europe.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban have regained control of more territory than they have held since 2001, and they are negotiating with the Americans for a withdrawal of our remaining 14,000 troops.
Cost of the Afghan war: 2,400 U.S. dead, 32,000 wounded, $1 trillion sunk, and the U.S. on the precipice of a potential strategic defeat.
So dreadful has become the five-year Yemeni cινιℓ ωαr between Iran-backed Houthi rebels and the Saudi-backed regime they ousted that the U.S. House and Senate have invoked the War Powers Act and directed Trump to terminate U.S. assistance for the Saudi intervention.
In Libya, where a U.S.-led NATO intervention overthrew Colonel Gadhafi in 2011, a renegade general now controls two-thirds of the country and is mounting an assault on Tripoli. U.S. soldiers and diplomats fled the capital last week.
In Syria, President Bashar Assad, with the support of Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, defeated the U.S. backed-rebels years ago.
The Syrian Kurdish militia we partnered with to crush ISIS have been designated as terrorists by the Turks, who promise to annihilate the Kurds if they try to return to homes along the Turkish border.
As for Turkey itself, President Erdogan says he will take delivery this summer of a Russian-made S-400 air and missile defense system.
Go through with that, says the U.S., and we cancel your order for 100 F-35s. The justified U.S. fear: Russia’s S-400 system will be tested against America’s most advanced fifth-generation fighter, the F-35.
If Turkey does not cancel the S-400, a NATO crisis appears imminent.
In Iraq, where 5,000 U.S. troops remain, the government has both pro-U.S. and pro-Iran elements in Baghdad, and mutual designation of the IRGC and CENT-COM as terrorist organizations can only present hellish problems for America’s soldiers and diplomats still in that country.
Bottom line: Though Bibi and John Bolton may want war with Iran, U.S. national interests, based on the awful experience of two decades, and Trump’s political interests, dictate that he not start any more wars.
Not a single Middle East war this century has gone as we planned or hoped.

https://buchanan.org/blog/where-trumps-and-bibis-interests-clash-136842

Mayor Pete and the Crackup of Christianity
April 15, 2019 by Patrick J. Buchanan

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Buttigieg declared his candidacy Sunday, and his bid ensures that America’s deepening moral divide will be front and center in 2020…

“(T)here is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” said Hamlet, who thereby raised some crucial questions:
Is moral truth subjective? Does it change with changing times and changing attitudes? Or is there a higher law, a permanent law, God’s law, immutable and eternal, to which man’s law should conform?
Are, for example, the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament, Christian teaching and natural law unchangeable and applicable to all men at all times? Or can some of the 10 be consigned to the dumpster of antiquated moral prohibitions?
This question has been brought straight into the presidential primaries by Pete Buttigieg, breakout star of the spring of 2019.
“Mayor Pete” is proudly gαy and living happily with his husband.
He says God made him the way he is, and he is living the life God intended for him. Raising the same-sex marriage issue himself, the mayor defiantly taunted Mike Pence:
“Yes, Mr. Vice President … it has moved me closer to God. … That’s the thing I wish the Mike Pences of the world would understand: That if you have a problem with who I am, your quarrel is not with me. …Your quarrel, sir, is with my creator.”
Buttigieg declared his candidacy Sunday, and his bid ensures that America’s deepening moral divide will be front and center in 2020.
Our culture wars will not be ending anytime soon.
This weekend, General Social Survey data revealed that Americans who profess to have “no religion,” 23.1%, now exceed Catholics, our largest religion with 23%, and Evangelicals at 22.5%. And the “nones” have grown by 266% since 1991.
As for the mainstream Protestant congregations, together, they are not half as numerous as those Americans who profess no religion.
Added to our racial and ethnic diversity, America is growing more diverse religiously, de-Christianizing with all deliberate speed.

We are becoming another people, and a post-Christian America appears to be our destiny well before the end of this century.
Consider what has changed already.
In the 19th century, blasphemy was a crime.
In the Roaring ’20s the “vices” of booze and gambling were outlawed. Now they are major sources of state revenue.
Divorce was a rarity. Now half of all marriages are dissolved.
After the sɛҳuąƖ revolution of the ’60s, births out of wedlock rocketed to where 40 percent of all children are born without a father in the home, as are half of Hispanics and 70 percent of all black children.
Pornography, which used to bring a prison term, today dominates cable TV. Marijuana, once a social scourge, is the hot new product. And Sen. Kamala hαɾɾιs wants prostitution legalized.
In the lifetime of many Americans, ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖity and abortion were still scandalous crimes. They are now cherished constitutional rights.
Yet, Mayor Pete’s assertion — that God made him gαy, and God intended that he live his life this way, and that this life is moral and good — is another milestone on the road to a new America.
For what Buttigieg is saying is that either God changes his moral law to conform to the changing behavior of mankind or that, for 2,000 years, Christian preaching and practice toward ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖs has been bigoted, injurious and morally indefensible.
If Pete is right, since the time of Christ, Christians have ostracized and persecuted gαys simply for being and behaving as God intended.
And if that is true, what is the defense of Christianity?
Already, among a good slice of America, especially the young, the West is guilty of centuries of racism, imperialism, colonialism, slavery, sexism, ethnic cleansing, religious persecution and cultural genocide against indigenous peoples.
Now, according to Mayor Pete’s logic, the West is also guilty of centuries of hateful homophobia toward people living as God made them and intended them to live.
What does this portend for 2020?
While Democrats defend Mayor Pete’s same-sex marriage as moral, they will also insist that women’s “reproductive rights” remain sacrosanct, and that unborn infants, 60 million of whom have been killed in the womb since Roe v. Wade in 1973, still have no rights at all, not even the right to life.
How does a nation so divided ever come together again?
How can a nation, many of whose elites are so ashamed of its history and heritage and deplorable other half — as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic … and bigoted” — credibly claim to be a shining city on a hill or a light unto the nations?
America is today as powerful, prosperous and free as any nation the world has ever seen. And we have used that wealth and freedom to create a culture and a society many of our own people and much of the world now see as dissolute and decadent.
Post-Christian America, in many ways, is beginning to mirror what we were once taught that the pre-Christian Roman Empire looked like.
Indeed, if the mayor’s lifestyle is moral, Christianity got it wrong for 20 centuries.

https://buchanan.org/blog/mayor-pete-and-the-crackup-of-christianity-136855#more-136855