Security

Democrats generally and liberals in particular can’t understand what the noise from Benghazi is about, though they’re willing to concede that the deaths of the American ambassador and three colleagues was a shame and maybe even a tragedy. The families of the dead deserve the nation’s thoughts, and even the prayers of the guns-and-religion clingers, and if any of the families can find condolences in mass-produced clichés they’re welcome. But whatever bad happened in Benghazi was a bureaucratic failure and the word at the White House is that bureaucrats can fix it.

Republicans generally and conservatives in particular can’t figure out why the ambassador and his three luckless colleagues were allowed to twist slowly, slowly in the toxic smoke of the burning consulate, and can’t understand why everyone else is not as outraged as they are. How much is a human life reckoned to be worth?

The left, which weighs everything on the scales of political expediency, can’t understand why American “special operations” standing by in Tripoli were so eager to fly to the rescue. Liberals and lefties can’t understand why, after being told to stand down, the soldiers were “furious,” as Gregory Hicks, the No. 2 diplomat in Benghazi, eloquently described them in his testimony to the House committee inquiring into the episode. The ambassador and his colleagues died pleading for help that never came because the president’s men and women were too surprised, too timid, too frightened to send it. “None of us should ever have to experience what we went through in Tripoli and Benghazi,” Mr. Hicks told the panel.

Ordinary Americans have thrilled with pride to the stories of blood and flesh spent to attempt the rescue of the helpless, whether the exploits of the famous 7th Cavalry riding through heat and choking dust to save the settlers and their families on the plains, or George S. Patton’s Third Army racing through ice and snow to relieve the 101st Airborne at Bastogne at Christmas 1944, or the Marines’ fighting retreat from the Chosin Reservoir in similarly frozen Korea in the winter of 1950. Soldiers throughout the nation’s history have redeemed the promise that no one will be left behind. The retreat from the reservoir, though not a triumph of arms, is rightly regarded as a special moment in the history of the Marine Corps. The photographs and newsreel footage of the Marines bringing out their wounded and frozen dead, stacked on their tanks, are iconic reminders of the debt fighting men owe to each other. Somebody tried.

The besieged defenders of Bastogne owed their rescue to Patton, often reckless and always spoiling for a fight. The Americans were trapped at Bastogne, having been ambushed by the Germans in a last attempt to force a negotiated surrender. They seemed on the lip of success. Patton promised the skeptical Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme allied commander in Europe, that he could turn his three divisions around overnight and fight their way more than a hundred miles to the rescue: “The kraut’s got his head stuck in a meat grinder, and this time I’ve got hold of the handle.” Ike gave the word, Patton gave the order, and Bastogne was soon relieved. Thousands of Americans were saved and the Germans never again mounted a sustained offensive. Somebody tried.

This is the lesson of the fighting spirit that seems no longer prized in certain precincts in Washington. There’s no evidence that this White House appreciates courage, reckless or otherwise, and the can-do spirit that saves causes otherwise lost. Barack Obama prefers to lead from behind. He’ll take the credit if everything works out OK - and if nothing good works out, he’ll make a nice speech (though lately even his gifts of gab have departed from him). He’s willing to mock the guns-and-religion clingers and still hasn’t figured out where the nation’s enemies are.

Hillary Clinton, celebrated at the Clinton White House for throwing lamps and for her contempt for anyone in uniform, has always had trouble recognizing enemies, too. (She thought it was the vast right-wing media conspiracy.)

Maybe we can’t blame these folks. It’s in the DNA. But a nation won’t long survive inability to recognize enemies and indifference to incompetence. It has to defend itself from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Let the investigations begin.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

The Democrats are getting the usual help from the correspondents and pundits who haven’t recovered from the bite of the tsetse fly. They don’t want to be awakened until it’s all over and it’s safe to go on to more exciting things, like budget hearings, elections in Lower Slobbovia and the environmental whine of the day. The New York Times reduced the Benghazi hearings to an antiseptic blip for the personnel file with its headline: “Envoy Testifies/Libya Questions/Led to Demotion.” A demotion is not what Benghazi is about, as the man demoted would agree.

The Benghazi panel set out to ask big questions, one still unanswered and one with an answer now clear enough. The first was why the diplomatic post in Benghazi was allowed to be an unguarded fort among hostile Apaches, the second was why the Obama administration was so persistent with its lies in the days after the attack.

Jay Carney, the president’s press agent, repeated the official White House view Wednesday that it’s all “politics.” Which of course it is, but not in the way Mr. Carney wants everyone to think it is. “Politics” is to Washington what “sex” is to a bordello; what would you expect to find in either place? Benghazi is not politics, but criminal incompetence and worse.

The House hearings on Wednesday produced no smoking gun, to employ another popular capital cliché, but added heartbreaking detail to the astonishing story of a smoking consulate and how the lives of an American diplomat and three of his colleagues were weighed by a cynical White House against the requirements of a close-fought presidential campaign. The ambassador and his men lost. Once lost, an ambassador can be replaced. The State Department is full of replacements. A political campaign once lost is done and gone.

Gregory Hicks, the No. 2 man in the American embassy in Tripoli, gave riveting detail – some of the sleepy journalists finally forced to cover the story were riveted awake – about how the ambassador was left twisting slowly, slowly in the poisonous smoke of the burning consulate. American special operations teams were enraged when they were told they couldn’t fly to the rescue. It was too far, senior officials said, and the rescuers would get there too late. There was no point in trying; the embassy would send an inspection team after breakfast the following morning.

The rescue teams were “furious,” Mr. Hicks testified, and couldn’t understand why they were told to stand down. “None of us should ever have to experience what we went through in Tripoli and Benghazi,” he said.

These riveting details would have given the lie to the campaign assurances of President Obama that everything was OK in the Middle East, that he had personally destroyed al Qaeda. The war on terror was over. It was back to “re-setting” relations with a warmer, friendlier Islam. No one understood this better than the campaign mavens at the White House, for whom the only national security concerns were to get their man a second term. Nothing and nobody else mattered.

That’s why they put out the absurd story that nobody in Libya, including the Libyans, believed: The attack on the consulate was caused by an “anti-Muslim” video that nobody had seen. Faithful if excited Muslims had been provoked by evil infidels in the U.S.A. The president and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave us lectures about religious tolerance, expressed in the usual empty condolences (“our thoughts and prayers are with the families of the dead”) and then they dispatched Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to flood the television channels with carefully contrived disinformation.

This is a very different White House than any the country ever had before. We’ve left Americans to die before, when there was no alternative. The defenders at Wake Island and Corregidor were left to the tender mercies of the enemy, but no president before this one left Americans to die, begging for help, just to save an election. Benghazi was a brutal betrayal, writ large with the blood of innocents. The perfidy of the guilty, including any someone who may be dreaming up a campaign for 2016, won’t be forgotten.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

The four whistleblowing witnesses scheduled to testify to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee are said to be eager to tell a story far different from the various accounts, all confused and all contradictory, peddled by the Obama administration. Someone at the White House should have remembered that old Washington chestnut, as true now as ever, that “it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.” Smarter men than even Barack Obama, wiser women than even Hillary Clinton, have paid dearly for lapses of convenient memory. (The crime was bad, too.)

Mark Thompson, the ex-Marine who is now the deputy co-ordinator for operations in the State Department’s counterterrorism bureau, is expected to testify that Mrs. Clinton tried to cut the bureau out of the loop when Ambassador Chris Stevens was pleading for help from Benghazi. The administration was preoccupied in the midst of a presidential re-election campaign and cries for help at a consulate surrounded by radical Islamic killers was not something the White House thought was fit to hear. The war on terror was over.

Mr. Thompson’s lawyer, the pugnacious Joe diGenova, says his client has been subjected to threats and intimidation from his superiors at the State Department, but they all deny that and insist that everything everybody else says are fibs, stretchers and “full growed lies.” That’s what superiors always say (and once in a while they’re right). Mrs. Clinton convened an internal review board to look into such allegations and several coats of whitewash were duly applied, but the facts are still showing through. “You should have seen what [Mrs. Clinton] tried to do to us that night,” a second official in the State Department’s counterterrorism bureau told his colleagues in October.

Emails and documents from the State Department, the CIA and the National Security Administration, published in the current edition of the Weekly Standard magazine, reveal that officials of those agencies tried to delete all references to the involvement of al Qaeda in the talking points, and identify Victoria Nuland, spokeswoman for the State Department, as complaining that the revisions did not go far enough to satisfy “my building’s leadership.” The leadership of the “building,” and no doubt the people in it, wanted all evidence of al Qaeda involvement, not only in the attack on Americans in Benghazi, but in attacks on other Western target, removed from the “talking points.”

Rep. Darrell Issa of California, the Republican who will chair this week’s hearings, told “Face the Nation” interviewers Sunday that both the CIA and Gregory Hicks, the deputy chief of mission in Libya when the ambassador and three colleagues were slain, knew at once that the Americans were under attack, not under protest.

Mr. Hicks watched the Sunday talk shows after the attacks on the consulate in September and was astonished by the claims of Susan Rice, the ambassador to the U.N., in five appearances, contradicting the emphatic assertion of the president of Libya that he had “no doubt” that the attacks were the work of terrorists, not mere community activists. “The net impact of what has transpired is that the spokeswoman of the most powerful country in the world has basically said the president of Libya is either a liar or doesn’t know what he’s talking about. My jaw hit the floor as I watched this,” he told investigators for the House committee. “I’ve never been as embarrassed in my life, in my career, [as I was] on that day.” He is expected to repeat that to the committee this week.

All politicians are interested most in what happens to them. It’s the bipartisan reality of how things work. But the Obama White House, perhaps unique in our times, plays partisan politics 24/7. Bubba, for all his sins, frequently interrupted politics for a roll in the White House hay and gave us a little comic relief. If Hillary isn’t paying attention to the politics of 2016 she isn’t the player we all think she is.

It was easy for her to take the long view when Chris Stevens was pleading for his life, but she may pay yet for forgetting the Bard’s warning in Hamlet (Act 2, Scene 2) that “murder, though it have no tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ.”

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

We’ve made a considerable investment in blood and money in Afghanistan. The changes that all the sacrifice bought are mostly cosmetic, and we’re learning that cosmetic changes last about as long on an 8th-century culture as lipstick on a pig. Tribal warfare is the national sport and the gross national product, insofar as anyone can find it big enough to measure, consists mostly of refugees and asylum-seekers. Coffin-makers do a good business but almost nobody else does.

This is the land that hope and change forgot, and President Obama is determined to bring most American troops home, or at least to send them to another semi-hopeless place. The alternative to doing nothing may be even more dreadful, but the depth of American frustration in Afghanistan is measured in two U.S. audits that spell out why a world policeman’s lot is not a happy one. Not in the Middle East, anyway.

The first internal audit, uncovered by the Washington Guardian, an aggressive Web newspaper (washingtonguardian.com), concludes that the Afghan military, despite years of expensive American tutoring and training, is only “marginally capable of repelling attacks from the Islamist extremists who antagonize large parts of the country.”

The Afghan National Army still has weak command and control capabilities, and only succeeds on the battlefield with American and allied assistance. “Assistance” usually means the Afghans step back and let the Americans and the allies do the heavy lifting - when they’re not doing the dying. The Afghans can sometimes steer the car in a wobbly more or less straight line, but only as long as daddy’s there to accelerate, brake and supervise.

“In its present state of development and given the threat environment,” the Defense Department inspector general concluded, “we found the [Afghan] command, control and coordination system to be marginally sufficient to respond effectively to insurgent attacks . . . and to conduct effectively other short-term offensive operations.” Translated from government-speak, the inspector general concludes that this is the army that can barely shoot straight when it shoots at all.

It’s not altogether the fault of the men in the ranks. One high-ranking U.S. officer who has worked directly with Afghan forces tells the Guardian that even after meeting basic levels of competence, the Afghan soldier’s efforts are undermined by corruption in the government of President Hamid Karzai. “If the Afghan soldier doesn’t get paid when he’s supposed to, he will either leave or get recruited by the enemy.” The pay from the enemy may not be better or even more forthcoming, but looting opportunities are more abundant. Men in the highest ranks of the government do it, so why not the dogface soldiers?

This hasn’t been a happy spring in Afghanistan. In trying to impose the 21st century on the reluctant country, the Americans are building first-world hospitals that probably won’t be sustainable in the third world when Mr. Obama delivers on his promise to quit the battlefield. The Guardian reports that one of the two hospitals the Americans are building in eastern Afghanistan will be 12 times the size of the hospital it replaces, and annual maintenance costs will soar to $3.2 million. The other hospital now spends $98,000 annually on maintenance and will have to come up with $587,000 annually to maintain the replacement.

The U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, says it has been assured by the Afghan government there will be “no problem.” It’s not rocket science to figure out who the Afghans expect to pick up the check. The skeptical inspector general says USAID could make better use of the money available for the five hospitals the agency funds. Three of the five have no anesthesiologist, two have no obstetrician or gynecologist and one has no pediatrician. But the two new hospitals, built at a cost of $18.5 million, will by shiny and new.

Nation-building is for suckers, as we learn to considerable pain. It’s probably not possible to avoid trying to resolve the problems of others, but we should do it only when those problems, left unresolved, make trouble for us. And we shouldn’t expect to make good small-d democrats or small-r republicans out of those who prefer to live in the squalor of the 8th century. It’s important to keep great expectations realistic.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stood up to the enemy in Iraq, where he made an enviable combat record. But at the Pentagon, he appears to have fallen, not on his sword, but on a paperclip, attached to a point of religious doctrine.

When, 18 months ago, apologists for Islamic radicals complained that an instructor at the National Defense University, the military war college, was guilty of the sin of showing insufficient deference to radical Islam, the general first humiliated him, then cashiered him, to appease Muslim critics, some of them radical and no friends of the United States. Now the instructor has been rejected for battalion command and his promising Army career is effectively over.

Army Lt. Col. Matthew Dooley (a good Irish Catholic name), decorated for valor in Iraq, was an instruction leader at the Joint Forces Staff College in Washington, lecturing on the dangers of radical Islam, when he invited an authority on Islamic extremists to talk to his students about how the extremists operate. You might think that “knowing the enemy” is a good thing in senior Army officers. One passage in the materials used by a guest lecturer, former FBI agent John Guandolo, particularly enraged the critics:

“If Islam is so violent, why are there so many peaceful Muslims? This is similar to asking why there are so many Christians who are arrogant, angry and vindictive, if Christian doctrine requires humility, tolerance and forgiveness.” There were no protests from Christians, or Christian organizations. But one participant in the course complained to the Pentagon, and the witch hunt, led by the thoroughly frightened Gen. Dempsey, began.

Paperclip generals, more politician than warrior, naturally take their cues from the White House, and it’s reasonable to assume that the pressure from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was the prevailing pressure, intense and effective. President Obama bows low in the presence of Muslims, as we all know, and ordered effective cleansing of all references to Islamic terrorists. John Brennan, the hero of Benghazi and the new director of the CIA, insists there is no such thing as an “Islamic extremist.” The al Qaeda terrorists who blew up the World Trade Center had nothing to do with Islam, they were just terrorists trying to make a dishonest living. The Muslim major who shouted the Islamic battle cry, “Allahu Akbar” (“God is great!”) as he killed 13 and wounded 30 at Fort Hood, Texas, was guilty only of “workplace violence,” not “terrorism.” If he’s convicted of murder by court martial, he can apply for workmen’s compensation (and call John Brennan and Gen. Dempsey as supporting witnesses). Paperclip generals have sharp antennae and know who punches their tickets.

They know how to cover the part of their anatomy that most needs covering, too. Gen. Dempsey landed hard on Col. Dooley at a press conference, speaking as an academic and maybe even a theologian: “It’s totally objectionable,” he said of the colonel’s course work. “It was just totally objectionable, against our values, and it wasn’t academically sound. This wasn’t about, we’re pushing back on liberal thought. This was just objectionable, academically irresponsible.”

Such an emotional response was not quite what’s expected of a four-star general. A week later another general, only a two-star, was dispatched to blame the colonel for “institutional failure.” Gen. Dempsey’s spokesman, a Marine colonel, insisted his boss’ public denunciation of the “individual” had not poisoned the investigation. “[Col.] Dooley’s name is never even mentioned,” he told The Washington Times.

We can’t expect paperclip generals to show the fighting spirit of Stonewall Jackson or U.S. Grant, Blackjack Pershing or George S. Patton. They were men of their times and we’re stuck with our own times, and the men who populate the times. But the craven deference to the Islamic lobby, which often makes no distinctions between the millions of good Muslims and the bad Muslims, is a recipe for catastrophe.

The West in general and America in particular has shown remarkable patience and forbearance to the Muslims in our midst, according them, as we should, respect and a welcome into what we once called “the melting pot.” But somebody ought to instruct the paperclip generals that there’s an enemy out there in the dark, and it’s important to know who he is.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

Rep. Peter King of New York is a Republican member of the House Homeland Security Committee (a title right out of George Orwell’s literary fancy) and the House Intelligence Committee (“intelligence” in the House? Who knew?). He wants everybody put under suspicion, if not arrest. He prescribes more cameras, more dogs, more surveillance, more neighbor-to-neighbor snooping to deal with the terrorists. Even if you don’t see something, say something. Call the cops.

“For instance,” he told MSNBC in the wake of the Boston massacre, “merchants, if they’re selling any components that can be used for a bomb, everywhere from ball bearings to beauty products, they can all make bombs. They should notify police.”

Eyeliner alert!

Merchants and even other shoppers must be on the scout to help police nab anyone buying mascara, lipstick, cold cream, face powder, rouge, body lotion, eau de cologne and perfume. Helena Rubenstein, Max Factor and Cover Girl must be added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List at once.

Mr. King thinks the Boston massacre should lead to the installation of more and more cameras. “Privacy,” he says, “involves being in a private location. Being out in the street, there’s not an expectation of privacy. Anyone can look at you, can see you, can watch what you’re doing. A camera just makes it more sophisticated.”

Good citizenship requires good citizens to keep their window blinds open, to enable the camera to get a good view. When you get up in the middle of the night to visit the facilities, turn on the lights. The camera must get a good look.

Mr. King wants the cops to have “jammers” to disable cell phones, preventing terrorists from detonating “improvised explosive devices” by remote control: “I feel strongly that local police should have access to jammers. I believe they should have more co-operation with the military –- right now there are legal issues, as far as military being involved in this.” Ah, yes. Those pesky “legal issues” always get in the way of hysteria. But the great thing about hysteria is that it blows away impediments like a Constitution.

This is the theory of law enforcement lifted from a comic strip. Fearless Fosdick was the crack detective from Al Capp’s “Li’l Abner" who was assigned to find a can of poisoned pork and beans planted by evil-doers somewhere in the city, and he was dispatched to prevent an innocent shopper from buying the lethal beans. Fearless ranged through the supermarkets of the city, tipping his hat to anyone about to buy a can of beans, and drilling them through the heart with the assurance that “it’s nothing personal, ma’am.” Dozens died, but none by bean poisoning. If the federal cops get enough cameras, dogs, jammers and enough neighbors snooping on their neighbors, no one has to worry about poisoned beans or pressure cookers, ball bearings, nails, jars of mascara or cold cream.

Government by hysteria -– and insult -– is the order of the day. Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York says the U.S. Senate’s failure to pass “a watered-down, minimal gun safety bill is simply unacceptable.” Unacceptable? What could that mean? Like the rest of us, he has to accept decisions by Congress, unless he has something sinister in mind. Vice President Joe Biden was moved to tears, whether by emotion or regret that he was not packing his shotgun, it is hard to say. Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City says “the only silver lining is that we now know who refuses to stand with [us]. . . .” Sen. Dianne Feinstein demands that senators “show some guts” and vote the way she wants them to vote. “If anybody cares, vote at least to prospectively ban the manufacture, the sale, the importation of military-style assault weapons.” It does not occur to her that some of the senators, especially the Democrats who joined the Republicans, have indeed been showing “some guts,” and voted as their constituents want them to vote. Not everybody subscribes to “San Francisco values.”

President Obama, who talks a lot about civility, has the responsibility for calming his mob. Hysteria is no way to confront a crisis. People who disagree with the likes of Messrs Cuomo, Biden, Bloomberg, Mrs. Feinstein and their ilk may be just as intelligent, just as reasonable and just as honorable as they are. Maybe even more so.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times

Chuck Hagel, the new secretary of defense, postponed tests of a new intercontinental missile, scheduled for this week, because the United States doesn’t want to “exacerbate the crisis with North Korea.” The State Department, and now the Pentagon under Mr. Hagel, wants to project sobriety, dignity and reluctance to shout. The Pentagon can test the missile later.

No harm, no foul, and there’s obviously no urgency to get the new missile tested and installed in the American inventory. We’ve got a lot of missiles already. Lowering the decibel count is nearly always a good thing to do.

But if, as everybody in Washington agrees (for once), all the bombast and bluster coming from Pyongyang is just noise, meant only to play the blinksmanship game, it’s still important to make sure the noisemakers in North Korea don’t win that game, either. The North Koreans calibrate these things carefully, and measure the response closely.

All the sobriety, dignity and reluctance to raise the president’s voice has not so far impressed anyone in Pyongyang. Bill Clinton said the United States would not tolerate a nuclear North Korea. George W. Bush said the United States would not tolerate a nuclear North Korea. Barack Obama said the United States would not tolerate a nuclear North Korea.

Big talk, but now the United States is tolerating a nuclear North Korea, where lip-reading clearly frightens no one. Who can blame Kim, or whoever is pulling his strings, for thinking that Washington is prepared to tolerate a lot?

Anyone who understands anything about the Koreans knows they’re a tough-minded people, who respect an adversary who stands up tall and have little regard for someone who is easily pushed around – or even allows himself to appear to be pushed around. In 2006, when Pyongyang prepared to test an ICBM, two prominent Democrats, William Perry, a former defense secretary, and Ashton Carter, a Harvard (!) professor who is now the deputy defense secretary in the Obama administration, urged George W. to destroy the missile on its launch pad. He declined, the missile blew up less than a minute into the launch, and the North Koreans went back to work on both their missiles and a nuclear weapon. Counting on the missile blowing up every time is not necessarily a smart strategy.

The smart strategy this time, certain officials tell the New York Times, is something called “counterprovocation,” or immediate “response in kind,” to impress Pyongyang that Washington and Seoul mean business. Punishment will be swift, and in kind. Such responses can range from a strongly worded protest letter to the editor to unleashing an artillery barrage on a North Korean target.

Kim Jong-un – loosely translated to “Kim the young ’un” – toned down his imaginative and colorful threats over the weekend and Western analysts relaxed to ponder over who might be pulling his strings. British analysts who talked to the London Daily Telegraph suggest it’s Kim’s 66-year-old aunt, Kim Kyong-hui, and her husband, Jang Sung-taek, also 66. Miss Kim was the daughter of Kim il-Sung, regarded now as “the eternal president,” and she and her husband were recruited by the Kim Jong-un’s father to smooth the way for his ascent and to clean him up and make him presentable. Her husband is the vice chairman of the National Defense Commission and is the key link to North Korea’s patrons in Beijing.

\They appeared with the Supreme Leader last month at a session of the central committee of the Workers Party, aunt and uncle seated on each side of him, and led the applause when he promised to maintain nuclear weapons as “the nation’s life treasure.” Kim loosed the fiery rhetoric the following week. Auntie is thought to have ordered the photograph and video footage of her nephew firing a pistol during a target practice.

The aunt disappeared in 2003 and reappeared three years ago, appearing to be more powerful than ever. She is a four-star general in the people’s army, and owns, among other things, the only hamburger restaurant in Pyongyang (where the menu carefully avoids any suggestion of anything American, referring to the burger as “minced meat and bread”).

“Is this a crisis or a Kim-style kabuki?” asks Gordon Chang, author of a new book, “Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes on the World.” He thinks the world will get a hint next week, on the birthday of Eternal President Kim il-Sung, about whether the grandson’s regime is all bark and no bite. But crisis or kabuki, nobody’s any longer laughing. A clown with an A-bomb is nothing to laugh at.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

Kim, even with a large inventory of rusty sabers to rattle, at 29 or 30 still looks like a boy in his first pair of long pants, and with all their wealth and pelf the Kims, grandfather, father and son, should find either a better barber or a bigger bowl. It’s hard for anyone to take seriously a kid with a haircut that bad. (When the satirical newspaper Onion called him “the sexiest man alive,” thousands cheered.)

The North Koreans have a talent for making deadly mischief, blowing up civilian airliners, capturing gunboats, shelling South Korean offshore islands and once, in 1983, dispatching agents to Burma to plant three bombs that exploded and killed 17 visiting South Koreans, including 4 cabinet ministers. Their actual target, the president of South Korea, might have been killed, too, but his motorcade was delayed in traffic and he missed laying a ceremonial wreath. So the little dictator with the jarhead haircut is probably capable of starting a war.

Just what’s in the mind of the North Koreans is hard for outsiders to fathom. Tall tales and wild threats – Pyongyang regularly vows to turn the south into “a sea of fire” – seem to be the work of geeks and nuts, but the terror administered from the top is so pervasive that even officials who know better are afraid to let on they’re skeptical of the nine foolish things they have to repeat before breakfast. When Kim’s father, the late Kim Jong-il, picked up golf clubs for the first time, he shot 11 holes-in-one. His spokesman said he hoped to get the other seven holes on the next outing. Kim was not the first golfer to take an occasional mulligan and turn in an exaggerated scorecard, and no one in Pyongyang thought the story fanciful.

Tall tales, brash bloviation and idiotic insults, in fact, are Pyongyang’s only exports. Several years ago I was invited to take several editors and correspondents from The Washington Times to Pyongyang for an 11-day tour. We were entertained at a lavish dinner, with several choice cuts of mystery meat, on our last night in town. When it was time for the ritual exchange of toasts, our host, the foreign minister, delivered a 25-minute diatribe against the United States, laced with insult, contempt, disdain, calumny, scorn, insolence and taunt. In my return toast I told them that beautiful downtown Pyongyang reminded us of a popular American television program, “The Twilight Zone.” Then, since our hosts had abandoned the ritual of mutual toasts of the heads of state, I asked our hosts to join me in lifting a glass only “to the president of the United States.”

Bloviation or not, the rest of the world has to listen to Kim and act accordingly. Even the Chinese, the only friend Pyongyang has in the region, are telling him to put a sock in it. So are the Russians, who rarely miss an opportunity to needle whoever’s in the White House. Kim and his generals have a missile, the Taepodong, which would be capable of reaching Alaska and Hawaii, though it has a short and shaky history in flight tests. The Taepodong probably couldn’t reach Los Angeles, Washington or Austin, Texas, which Kim has said are his first targets of choice.

His missiles probably pack little punch, but Kim has other weapons that do. He has more than a million men under arms, with, according to Washington's estimates, 27 infantry divisions, 3,500 battle tanks, 10,000 heavy artillery pieces, 7,500 mortars, 10,000 surface to air missiles and 11,000 air-defense guns. His air force consists 605 combat aircraft, equipped mostly with old Russian MiGs, and the navy can go to sea with several hundred small ships of varying size. Everything is deployed close to the demilitarized zone, and Seoul is duly nervous to be within artillery range.

The south has a smaller inventory of nearly everything, but it nearly all works, with no shortage of spare parts and no worries about fuel. The north has few spare parts for its aging machines, and a scarcity of fuel. Best of all, it has America on call. To make this point, the Pentagon dispatched two F-22 Raptor stealth fighters to South Korea over the weekend. These are the most advanced fighter planes in the world, shaped like boomerangs with a profile dark and sinister against a cloudy sky, enough to make a boy playing with guns think twice about shooting out streetlights.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

“I hope I’m a better president now than when I first came into office,” he told reporters at one stop early in his trip. “I’m absolutely sure that there are a host of things that I could have done that would have been more deft and, you know, would have created better optics.”

Now if he’ll only turn from an obsession with “better optics” to the serious statecraft at hand, we can all breathe a little easier. Not a lot, but a little.

There’s no more crucial place to get a late education than in the Middle East, where graduate schools abound in every nook in the brambles and crannies in the ancient rocks. This is one place where making crucial and momentous decisions on the fly risks not only disasters, but invites catastrophes. This is no place for “a man without a foreign policy,” as one commentator remarked, a man with only naïve aspirations who operates on the notion that a chaotic and perilous world can be changed by “the transformative power of a good speech, but no clear path to achieve anything.”

Perhaps the president burned a little midnight oil just in time. Vali Nasr, who was not so long ago a senior insider at the Obama White House, describes in his forthcoming book, “The Dispensable Nation,” how decisions have sometimes been made. On Afghanistan, for example, he says Obama policy-makers were determined not to make long-reaching strategic decisions but to satisfy shifting public opinion. These policy makers, according to an advance reading of Mr. Nasr’s book, comprised “a small cabal of relatively inexperienced White House advisers whose turf was strictly politics.”

Campaign politics Chicago style, where every problem can be solved with a favor or an expertly placed shiv, clearly doesn’t work in the Middle East. President Obama arrived in Jerusalem just when the strategic interests of the United States and the strategic concerns of Israel seemed to be on a collision course. The president has been concerned with spreading clichés and bromides, the prime minister with survival. The photographs of Mr. Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, unarmed and smiling, were staged to show everyone that despite their history of hostile relations, they could, too, get along without taking or giving a punch.

“To sensation-hungry journalists,” says Zalman Shoval, who twice served as Israeli ambassador to the United States and learned first-hand about the hunger of American journalists for sensations and irrelevancies, “the titillating relationship between Mr. Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu is a favorite topic.” He wrote in the Jerusalem Post, “Though personal chemistry does sometimes play a role in international relations – either positive, like that between Golda Maier and LBJ and Richard Nixon, or negative, such as at least intermittently between Yitzhak Shamir and Bush 41 – what really mattered then, and does now, are the respective diplomatic, strategic and often political, on both sides, interests.”

Or, as Lord Palmerston, the prime minister, explained to Queen Victoria when she asked who were England’s permanent friends, “England has no permanent friends, but permanent interests.”

Mr. Obama, making his first trip to Israel as president, had visited Arabia first, in 2009, bowing to kings and caliphs in the vain pursuit of “resetting” American relationships with Muslims. This time, he learned that the intractable problems of the Middle East require more than simple syrup. The president who imagines that his voice is the most reliable weapon in the American arsenal got tripped by his own tongue when he was called to account for the difference between what he said about settlements in 2009 and what he said about them this week in Israel.

Still basking in the bonhomie he enjoyed in Israel, he told Mr. Netanyahu that the Jewish settlements on the West Bank and in eastern Jerusalem were “not constructive or appropriate,” but did not say, as he did in 2009, that building the settlements must cease. When he got to Ramallah the next day for a joint press conference with Mahmoud Abbas, he quickly saw that the Palestinian leader remembered the difference. Abbas launched into a familiar diatribe, the usual history of the world since the Flood. The settlements, he said, were “a hurdle and ignoble” and must be dismantled before there can be real progress toward “peace,” meaning, no concessions, no return to the peace process.

The first lesson in Mr. Obama’s late education is that jaw, jaw may be better than war, war, but be careful to remember what you say, and where you said it.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

The app, the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promises, will feature “real-time updates, video, photographs and behind-the-scene glimpses of the visit,” with Web links to the prime minster’s office, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Now if only Mssrs Obama and Netanyahu actually do something worth talking about.

“Another day,” observes the Jerusalem Post, “another gimmick.” There’s lots to talk about, and both the president and the prime minister are practicing to give the other man an earful. Mr. Obama offered a hint or two last week when he called two dozen leaders of Jewish organizations in the United States to the White House for a briefing of sorts about what to expect.

The Jews, according to a description of the off-the-record session provided to Haaretz, the authoritative Jerusalem daily, asked the president for more “clarity” about what they could expect from him when push, always reluctant, comes to shove over Iran. Mr. Obama, with a clever rebuke of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told them that he doesn’t believe in “extra chest beating” over Iran. He reserves the “extra chest beating” for himself (usually about himself). He promised more clarity, more or less, “but that isn’t because we haven’t been clear.”

He’ll take no new peace plan to Israel, which is probably just as well because the landscape of the Middle East is littered with peace plans and exhortations about “the peace process,” which isn’t about peace, but process. The “peace process,” as a wise man observed, “is about peace in the way that processed cheese is about real cheese.”

The president, like certain presidents before him, is dedicated to the Velveeta approach. He’s aware that Israel “lives in a tough neighborhood” but both Israel and “the other side” have an obligation to continue processing peace. When someone at the White House table told him that he should emphasize the obvious to those who dream of killing all the Jews -- that Israel desires peace -- Mr. Obama agreed. Then he added the moral equivalence so beloved by the “friends” of Israel: “It’s more important what you actually do for peace.”

He could have told them to buy the world a Coke, which is, in fact, pretty much what he said, not necessarily in Hebrew or English, but in fluent boilerplate. He said he would tell the Israelis that the only way to achieve real security is through a peace agreement and a two-state solution. “Jaw jaw” is nearly always better than “war war,” as Winston Churchill said, but promising jaw jaw in perpetuity is not much of a negotiating tactic.

The “other side” understands that well. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei boasted not long ago that “I’m not a diplomat, I’m a revolutionary.” The mullahs, Ali Khamenei foremost among them, watched the confirmation hearings of the pathetic Chuck Hagel and the confused John Brennan and could easily speculate that the American appetite for endless jaw jaw would not likely be sated until the Islamic bomb was developed, built and deployed. Mr. Obama repeated to his White House briefing his boast that such a bomb would be prevented, not “contained,” as Mr. Hagel put it at his confirmation hearing. Mr. Hagel, of course, first told the hearing the president was in favor of containment -- then said it was a slip of his tongue. But slips are not allowed for such high-ranking tongues.

The president won’t hear more than polite applause from the Netanyahu government for his approach to dealing with Iran – speak softly and carry a Styrofoam stick – but there is an appetite for soft cheese, one found in surprising places.

Ami Ayalon, the former director of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency, touts his four-part plan to resolve the hostility that threatens the Zionist dream. Some of it sounds good to the war weary. He not only supports a two-state solution, but urges American support for the Palestinian bid at the United Nations for statehood, even including a “unity government” of Fatah and Hamas -- but only if the terrorists promise to behave themselves.

Mr. Obama, pressing for the elusive diplomatic solution to the Iranian threat to build the Islamic bomb, quotes the ancient Chinese military philosopher Sun Tzu: “Build a golden bridge for your opponent to retreat upon.” Nice work, if you could get the opponent to use such a bridge. The evil-doers in the Middle East would blow it up and pocket the gold.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.