In 1992, McFaul was the representative in Russia of the National Democratic Institute, a U.S. government-funded agency whose mission is to promote democracy abroad.

The NDI has been tied to color-coded or Orange revolutions such as those that dethroned regimes in Serbia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia and Lebanon. The project miscarried in Belarus.

The NDI is one of several agencies, dating to the 1980s, that were set up to subvert communist regimes. With the end of the Cold War, however, these agencies were not decommissioned, but recommissioned to serve as something of an American Comintern.

Where the old Comintern of Lenin sought to instigate communist revolutions across the West and its empires, post-Cold War America decided to promote democratic revolutions to remake the world in the image of late 20th century America.

In 2002, McFaul wrote a book: Russia's Unfinished Revolution.

Vladimir Putin's men are not unreasonably asking if he was sent to Moscow to finish that revolution. Putin has already accused Hillary Clinton of flashing the signal for street demonstrations to begin—to protest Russia's December's elections.

Nor is it surprising the Putin's people are suspicious of McFaul, who added to his problems by meeting with anti-Putin dissidents the day after he presented his credentials.

McFaul says this is part of his "dual-track engagement" with Russian society. Before leaving for Moscow, he told NPR's Morning Edition: "We're not going to get into the business of dictating (Russia's) path (to democracy). ... We're just going to support what we like to call 'universal values'—not American values, not Western values, universal values."

But what, exactly, are these "universal values"?

And who are we to impose them on other nations? Did Divine Providence assign us this mission? Who do we Americans think we are?

After all, we do not even agree ourselves on what is moral and immoral, good and evil. Indeed, our own deep disagreements on what is moral and what is not are at the root of the culture wars tearing this country apart.

In America, women have a constitutional right to an abortion. Scores of millions have availed themselves of that right since Roe v. Wade. Yet traditionalists of many faiths—Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Orthodox and Jewish—reject any such woman's right and regard it as a moral abomination.

Do homosexuals have a right to cohabit, form civil unions and marry?

In a few American states, yes; in others, no. But try to impose those values on nations of the Muslim and Third Worlds, where homosexuality is a moral outrage and even a capital offense, and our ambassadors will find themselves in physical peril.

Does McFaul believe democracy is a universally superior system of government? Yet our own founding fathers detested one-man, one-vote democracy. Democracy does not even get a mention in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights or the Federalist Papers.

The author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, believed society should be ruled by a "natural aristocracy" of "virtue and talent."

If the promotion of democracy is a mission of our diplomats, are we to subvert the monarchies of Morocco, Jordan, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia?

When we see how democracy empowered the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis in Egypt, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, does it even make sense to insist that it be embraced by nations where the populations are pervasively anti-American?

What is the universally right stand on capital punishment—the Rick Perry position in Texas or the Andrew Cuomo position in New York?

In the United States, all religions—Santeria, Wicca, Islam, Christianity—are to be treated equally and all kept out of the public square and the pubic schools. In a Muslim world that contains a fifth of mankind, Islam is the one true faith. Rival faiths have few or no rights.

Are we going to push the Islamic world to treat all religions equally?

We celebrate religious, racial and ethnic diversity. The Chinese, who persecute Uighurs, Tibetans, Christians and Falun Gong, detest that diversity and fear it will tear their country apart.

We believe in freedom of speech and the press.

Yet, in France, if you deny the Turks committed genocide against the Armenians in 1915, you are guilty of a crime, while in Turkey if you affirm that the Turks committed genocide, you have committed a crime. Should U.S. diplomats battle for repeal of both laws? Or mind our own business?

If America wishes to lead the world, let us do it by example, as we once did, not by hectoring every nation on earth to adopt the American way, which as of now, does not seem to be working all that well for Americans.

McFaul should stick to his diplomatic duties.

Jefferson had it right, "We wish not to meddle with the internal affairs of any country."

COPYRIGHT 2012 CREATORS.COM

So Rick Perry colorfully characterized the private equity firm Bain Capital, once run by Mitt Romney.

How did Bain prosper? Says Perry:

"These companies ... come in and loot the people's jobs, loot their pensions (and) loot their ability to take care of their families."

Behind this depiction is a 28-minute documentary, King of Bain, being aired in South Carolina by a super political action committee that supports Newt Gingrich and is financed by Vegas-Macau casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson.

The truth, however, turns out to be less colorful, as The Washington Post has awarded the documentary four Pinocchios for "manipulative interviews" and a "highly misleading portrayal of Romney's years at Bain Capital."

Seems that two of the companies Bain allegedly looted were not acquired until after Mitt left the firm, and the closure of a third plant in Gaffney, S.C., was no communal disaster.

No one in Gaffney, writes The New York Times, seems to recall the company, and the local paper did not even report its demise.

King of Bain is a hit piece, a malicious libel full of so many errors and lies that even Newt said it must be corrected or pulled down.

Yet if Romney is nominated, we will see this avenue of attack pursued by the Democrats. For populist assaults on capitalists and capitalism, dating back to William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech to the 1896 Democratic National Convention, have a long and venerable history.

Moreover, the hysteria of Beltway Republicans and their Chamber of Commerce allies over the Newt-Perry attacks on Mitt "the predator" and Mitt "the vulture capitalist" testifies to the power of the narrative and Republicans' fear of it. And they would do well to be fearful.

To many Americans, the period from the Civil War to World War I, when U.S. production grew from half of what Britain produced to twice what Britain produced, was a legendary era of growth and prosperity.

To others, however, this was the Gilded Age of Jim Fisk and James Gould, of robber barons and the Pullman strike, of the Haymarket Massacre and the Homestead strike at Carnegie Steel, where armed Pinkertons came up the river in barges to break the strike, only to be shot, disarmed and beaten by strikers and their families.

In 1904, Ida Tarbell wrote The History of the Standard Oil Company, painting oil magnate John D. Rockefeller as a capitalist without conscience, a "money-mad ... hypocrite." "Our national life is on every side distinctly poorer, uglier, meaner, for the kind of influence he exercises."

In 1906, Upton Sinclair penned The Jungle, a novel depicting the horrors of the stockyards and meat-packing plants of Chicago.

Teddy Roosevelt said of these reformers, "The men with the muck rakes are often indispensable to the well-being of society, but only if they know when to stop raking the muck."

Yet T.R. himself took up the role of trustbuster. When J.P. Morgan wrote to him to protest Justice Department moves against one of his trusts—"Just send your man to my man and we can fix it up"—T.R.'s man at Justice retorted, "We don't want to fix it up; we want to stop it."

Teddy Roosevelt savaged the "malefactors of great wealth," and his cousin Franklin would echo him on taking office, denouncing "the money changers ... in the temple of our civilization."

They hate me, exulted FDR, "and I welcome their hatred!" He went on to crush and almost wipe out the Republican Party in 1936.

At the end of the Reagan era, which the left had decried, Barbarians at the Gate was published, portraying the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts as a manifestation of colossal greed.

Michael Lewis—author of Liar's Poker, about the fall of Salomon Brothers, and The Big Short—has built a successful career describing the amorality at the apex of corporate America.

Today, President Barack Obama, with his Osawatomie, Kan., attack on "breathtaking greed," channeling T.R., seeks to insert himself in that populist tradition.

Undeniably, Americans cherish their economic freedom and respect the men who helped make America great, inventors such as Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison and industrialists such as Henry Ford.

But they do not revere the men who make millions and billions at the big casinos of capitalism. They do not admire a George Soros for winning his billion-dollar bet shorting the British pound.

They believe that a man's professional, as well as private, life should be guided by a conscience. And because they recoil from the teachings of Karl Marx does not mean they embrace the values of Ayn Rand.

Let-the-devil-take-the-hindmost capitalism, economic Darwinism, is neither conservatism nor Americanism.

Should Mitt Romney be nominated, he will need to make a national address defending his career at Bain Capital with the same conviction and passion with which he defended his faith in the campaign of 2008.

COPYRIGHT 2012 CREATORS.COM

Cordray's nomination had been blocked by a Senate filibuster. There was no way he was going to win approval in 2012.

Enraged Republicans denounced the appointment as an affront and a usurpation of power, for the Senate had not formally gone into recess.

The White House airily dismissed the Republican rage, saying no Senate business is being conducted during the Christmas-New Year break, and to argue that the Senate is still in session is a sham.

Obama seemed to delight in his Trumanesque contempt:

"I will not sit by while a minority in the Senate puts party ideology ahead of the people they were elected to serve. ... Not at this make-or-break moment for middle-class Americans."

Cordray's appointment will be contested in the courts. Yet it will likely stand, though it's in-your-face aspect added appreciably to the bad blood bubbling in this city.

The Obamaites seem not to care.

Indeed, from year-end reports out of Hawaii, this is the new Obama strategy. He has given up on working with Congress and intends to run a year-long campaign modeled on Harry Truman's 1948 demagogic assault on the "no-good, do-nothing 80th Congress"—the one that passed Taft-Hartley and enacted the Marshall Plan.

Details of the Obama strategy were spoon-fed to the Post and New York Times. The Times lead: "President Obama is heading into his re-election campaign with plans to step up his offensive against an unpopular Congress, concluding that he cannot pass any major legislation in 2012 because of Republican hostility to his agenda."

The Post lead: "President Obama has a New Year's resolution that will shape his re-election strategy at the dawn of 2012: Keep beating up on an unpopular Congress."

Once he gets a year's extension of the Social Security payroll tax cut, said White House deputy press secretary Josh Earnest, that is the last "must-do" item, "the president is no longer tied to Washington, D.C."

But if the president is about to barnstorm the nation savaging Congress for a full year, where does that leave the country?

If Obama will be proposing nothing to deal with the fiscal crisis—trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see—how does America avert the future that Italy faces? Italy's debt is 120 percent of gross domestic product; ours, at 100 percent of GDP, is not all that far behind.

The U.S. fiscal crisis can be simply summarized. Since 2009, the federal government has been spending 24 to 25 percent of gross domestic product, while tax collections have fallen to 15 percent. When his first four years end, Obama will have grown the debt by $6 trillion.

And if he is giving up on any solution in 2012, believing he can win re-election by vilifying the GOP as toadies to America's top 1 percent, who are icily indifferent to the middle class, what hope is there for any political cooperation, should Obama win?

As of today, Obama is running even with Mitt Romney. He has lost much of the enthusiasm of the young and the minorities that he had in 2008. College-educated whites who had hopes for him seem disillusioned.

Assuredly, he may still win. But should Obama win, how, after a campaign like the one he intends to conduct, does he unite the country?

How does he work with a Republican Party that will likely still hold the House and will have made gains in the Senate, after he has spent a year castigating that party?

And what happen to the nation if we have five more years of political gridlock?

If the president failed to broker a budget compromise with the GOP in 2011 and has given up on 2012, how does he work with a Republican House in 2013? How does he, in a second term, resolve this budget crisis when his bottom-line demand for higher taxes is poison to a party he has just trashed for 15 months as a tool of Wall Street?

Resolving our fiscal crisis seems today beyond the capacity of the U.S. government, as currently constituted. We appear to be in a crisis of the regime rooted in an irreconcilable ideological conflict between two parties of relatively equal strength.

Republicans who refused to raise taxes in 2011 are not going to agree to raise them in 2013 in response to a request from an Obama who defeated them by portraying them as the party of the 1 percent in 2012.

If Obama is re-elected, the crisis endures.

It will then be resolved when the world realizes that the U.S. deficit and debt are beyond the capacity of this U.S. government to bring under control.

At that point, the ratings agencies and world markets will begin to treat the U.S. debt the way they treat the debts of Italy and Spain.

COPYRIGHT 2012 CREATORS.COM

Particularly appropriate this Christmas season, and every Christmas lately, is Aesop's fable of "The Dog in the Manger."

The tale is about a dog who decides to take a nap in the manger. When the ox, who has worked all day, comes back to eat some straw, the dog barks loudly, threatens to bite him and drives him from his manger.

The lesson the fable teaches is that it is malicious and wicked to deny a fellow creature what you yourself do not want and cannot even enjoy.

What brings the fable to mind is this year's crop of Christmas-haters, whose numbers have grown since the days when it was only the village atheist or the ACLU pest who sought to kill Christmas.

The problem with these folks is not simply that they detest Christmas and what it represents, but that they must do their best, or worst, to ensure Christians do not enjoy the season and holy day they love.

As a Washington Times editorial relates, the number of anti-Christian bigots is growing, and their malevolence is out of the closet:

"In Leesburg, Va., a Santa-suit-clad skeleton was nailed to a cross. ... In Santa Monica, atheists were granted 18 of 21 plots in a public park allotted for holiday displays and ... erected signs mocking religion. In the Wisconsin statehouse, a sign informs visitors, 'Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.' A video that has gone viral on YouTube shows denizens of Occupy D.C. spewing gratuitous hatred of a couple who dared to appropriate a small patch of McPherson Square to set up a living Nativity scene."

People who indulge in such conduct invariably claim to be champions of the First Amendment, exercising their right of free speech to maintain a separation of church and state.

They are partly right. The First Amendment does protect what they are doing. But what they are doing is engaging in hate speech and anti-Christian bigotry. For what is the purpose of what they are about, if not to wound, offend, insult and mock fellow Americans celebrating the happiest day of their calendar year?

Consider what this day means to a believing Christian.

It is a time and a day set aside to celebrate the nativity, the birth of Christ, whom Christians believe to be the Son of God and their Savior who gave his life on the cross to redeem mankind and open the gates of heaven.

Even if a man disbelieves this, why would he interfere with or deny his fellow countrymen, three in four of whom still profess to be Christians, their right to celebrate in public this joyous occasion?

This mockery and hatred of Christmas testifies not only to the character of those who engage in it, it says something as well about who is winning the culture war for the soul of America.

Not long ago, the Supreme Court (1892) and three U.S. presidents—Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman and Jimmy Carter—all declared America to be a "Christian nation."

They did not mean that any particular denomination had been declared America's national religion—indeed, that was ruled out in the Constitution—but that we were predominantly a Christian people.

And so we were born.

Around 1790, America was 99 percent Protestant, 1 percent Catholic, with a few thousands Jews. The Irish immigration from 1845 to 1850 brought hundreds of thousands more Catholics to America. The Great Wave of immigration from 1890 to 1920 brought millions of Southern and Eastern Europeans, mostly Catholic and Jews. As late as 1990, 85 percent of all Americans described themselves as Christians.

And here one must pose a question.

How did America's Christians allow themselves to be dispossessed of a country their fathers had built for them?

How did America come to be a nation where not only have all Christian prayers, pageants, holidays and holy days been purged from all government schools and public institutions, but secularism has taken over those schools, while Christians are mocked at Christmas in ways that would be declared hate crimes were it done to other religious faiths or ethnic minorities?

Was it a manifestation of tolerance and maturity, or pusillanimity, that Christians allowed themselves to be robbed of their inheritance to a point where Barack Obama could assert without contradiction that we Americans "do not consider ourselves to be a Christian nation"?

What are these Christmas-bashers, though still a nominal minority, saying to Christians with their mockery and ridicule of the celebration of the birth of Christ?

"This isn't your country anymore. It is our country now."

The question for Christians is a simple one: Do they have what it takes to take America back?

COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM

On May 1, 2003, on the carrier Abraham Lincoln, the huge banner behind President George W. Bush proclaimed, "Mission Accomplished!"

That was eight years ago. And so, was the mission accomplished?

Two-thirds of all Americans have concluded the war was not worth it.

And reading the description of Iraq from the editorial page of the pro-war Washington Post, who can answer yes?

Al-Qaida continues to carry out terrorist attacks. Iranian-sponsored militias still operate, and a power struggle between Kurdish-ruled northern Iraq and Mr. Maliki's government goes on. More Iraqis worry that, after the U.S. troops depart this month, the sectarian bloodletting that ravaged the country between 2002 and 2007 will resume.

And not all the Americans are really coming home.

Some 16,000 will remain in the huge fortress that houses the U.S. embassy and in fortified consulates in Basra, Irbil and Kirkuk. All four sites will be self-sufficient, so U.S. personnel can stay clear of what The Wall Street Journal calls "the perilous security situation on Iraq's city streets."

In each diplomatic post, the State Department employees will be outnumbered by private security contractors, 5,000 of whom will provide for their protection and secure travel.

U.S. Ambassador James Jeffrey warns of the dangers that await U.S. diplomats who venture outside the compounds: "If we move out into the Iraqi economy, out into the Iraqi society in any significant way, it will be much harder to protect our people."

NBC reported this week that two five-vehicle convoys loaded with Blackwater security types were necessary to escort two U.S. teachers to a meeting in a Bagdad hotel.

What kind of victory did we win if, eight years after we ousted Saddam Hussein and helped install a democratic government, Americans in Iraq should fear for their lives?

Did we win the "hearts and minds" of the Iraqi people when they are burning American flags in Fallujah to celebrate our departure? Why was no parade held, so Iraqis could cheer departing Americans for having liberated them from the tyranny of Saddam?

What did we accomplish if hatred of America is so widespread our diplomats live in constant peril?

Neooconservative Fred Kagan writes that people who think all will be well after America leaves believe in a mirage.

The Obama administration lacks a vision and a strategy, and the regime in Baghdad lacks the assured capability of securing U.S. "core interests" in Iraq, he writes. Among these are ensuring that the state does not collapse, that civil war does not break out, that Iranian influence does not surge, that al-Qaida or Iranian militias do not establish sanctuaries.

Moreover, writes Kagan, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is "unwinding the multi-ethnic cross-sectarian Iraqi political settlement."

To Kagan, an enthusiast of the war, everything vital that we won in almost nine years of fighting is at risk.

But if we have no assurance that the disasters he lists will not occur, perhaps within months of our departure, what kind of victory is this?

What did we accomplish with a war whose costs in blood, Iraqi as well as American, and treasure were so high?

"We are leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people," President Obama told the troops at Fort Bragg.

Are we?

The Kurds are cutting deals with U.S. oil companies that Baghdad refuses to recognize, seeking to incorporate Kirkuk, and edging toward independence, which would cross a red line not only in Baghdad but Ankara.

Muslim pogroms have uprooted half the Christians, and half of these Christians have fled the country, many to Syria.

Maliki is moving against the Sunni Awakening warriors whom Gen. David Petraeus persuaded to fight al-Qaida in return for their being brought into the army.

The Sunnis sees themselves as dispossessed and marginalized in a country they have historically dominated. Al-Qaida continues to launch terror attacks on civilians to reignite sectarian war. And as the Americans head down the highway to Kuwait, Iran works to displace America as the dominant foreign influence in Baghdad.

That we were deceived into believing Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction ready to use, and that he was the man behind 9/11—that we were lied into war—is established fact.

But, equally astonishing, though Bush & Co. planned this war from Sept. 11, 2001, if not before, no one seems to have thought it through before launching it. For as John McCain said yesterday, as of 2007, "the war was nearly lost."

Yet the disaster that may still befall us in Iraq has not in the least inhibited the war hawks who, even now, are advancing identical arguments for a new war, on Iran, a country three times the size of Iraq.

COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM

More than that, Cameron has raised a banner for patriots everywhere fighting to retain their national independence.

With his no vote on fiscal union, Cameron declared to the EU: "British surrenders of sovereignty come to an end here. And Britain will deny Brussels any oversight authority of any national budgets or any right to sanction EU members."

The euro-skeptic right is understandably ecstatic.

"He Put Britain First," thundered the Daily Mail. "There is now a wonderful opportunity for Britain gradually to loosen itself from the shackles of a statist, over-regulated, anti-democratic, corrupt EU."

The Sun featured Cameron as Winston Churchill, flashing a wartime V-for-Victory sign over the banner headline: "Up Eurs—Bulldog PM Sticks up for Britain."

The British left, however, almost took to bed.

"Cameron Cuts U.K. Adrift," wailed the Guardian. "The EU Leaves Britain," moaned The Independent.

Coalition partner Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats went weak in the knees, claiming the prime minister had left Britain "isolated and marginalized ... hovering somewhere in the mid-Atlantic."

Yet one imagines that Britain will somehow survive.

And while he may have been unaware of the firestorm that would follow his decision, Cameron has exposed the backroom game that is going on in Europe. The Germans have seized on the crisis caused by the fiscal promiscuity of Club Med—Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal—to effect a giant leap forward into European fiscal and political union.

Berlin is basically offering the bankrupts a bribe, saying:

"All right, we will bail you out. But, in return, all 17 members of the eurozone shall accept revisions to the EU treaty under which they submit their budgets to Brussels. And if their deficits and/or debts exceed permissible limits, those nations will be sanctioned and fined.

The Germans are exploiting the crisis to impose their model on the eurozone today and all of Europe tomorrow.

Well, some may ask, since Germany is the most successful economy in Europe, why not impose that model?

Answer: For a nation to submit its budget for review by a higher authority, and accept the right of such an authority to alter that budget or punish that nation, is to cease in a fundamental way to be free.

Cameron may seem isolated, but he speaks for tens of millions outside Britain—Italians, Greeks and others fed up with the imposed austerity, North Europeans fed up with having to bail out Club Med deadbeats who do not work as hard or as long.

Nationalism is on the boil across Europe, and it is impossible to believe the leaders of those 26 EU countries, by cutting some deal with Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, can bind their countrymen forever to cede veto power over their future budgets to Brussels.

Will Greeks and Italians really accept a decade of austerity to pay off debts larger than the national economy, to banks and bondholders, for hundreds of billion of euros already spent?

Were Italy and Greece U.S. citizens rather than EU countries, both would long ago have declared bankruptcy, been forced to pay what they could, then been released from remaining obligations, while their creditors would have been forced to swallow their losses.

Moreover, there are pragmatic reasons for rejecting the German plan. Europe appears headed for stagnation or recession. Yet under the fiscal union scheme, virtually all eurozone nations would have to raise value-added and income taxes to balance budgets where the domestic welfare states consume almost all of the national economy.

Does raising taxes make sense in a recession? Would it not risk deepening the recession, raising debt-to-GDP ratios, forcing interest rates to rise to attract investors to new national bonds as old bonds came due?

All of this raises the larger question. Can the eurozone survive? And if it cannot, can the EU?

Given the hostile attitude of Greeks, Italians and many others to years of austerity to pay back debts, given the growing reluctance of the European Central Bank, Germany and Northern Europe to bailing out deadbeats, given the lack of resources available, are not defaults in the eurozone almost inevitable?

And if that happens, given the size of the debts, the result would be like the collapse of Lehman Brothers raised to the third power.

Trillions of euros of debt that appear today as assets on the balance sheets of giant banks and within the portfolios of millions of investors would vanish overnight.

Like the "fire bell in the night" Thomas Jefferson heard in 1820, a harbinger of civil war, Cameron's declaration that European fiscal and political union goes forward, only without Britain, may be a harbinger of the breakup that is coming.

And if the eurozone collapses, and the EU follows, what, then, is Europe—other than a geographic expression?

COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM

A day earlier, at dawn, carrier-based Japanese aircraft had launched a sneak attack devastating the U.S. battle fleet at Pearl Harbor.

Said ex-President Herbert Hoover, Republican statesman of the day, “We have only one job to do now, and that is to defeat Japan.”

But to friends, “the Chief” sent another message: “You and I know that this continuous putting pins in rattlesnakes finally got this country bit.”

Today, 70 years after Pearl Harbor, a remarkable secret history, written from 1943 to 1963, has come to light. It is Hoover’s explanation of what happened before, during and after the world war that may prove yet the death knell of the West.

Edited by historian George Nash, Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath is a searing indictment of FDR and the men around him as politicians who lied prodigiously about their desire to keep America out of war, even as they took one deliberate step after another to take us into war.

Yet the book is no polemic. The 50-page run-up to the war in the Pacific uses memoirs and documents from all sides to prove Hoover’s indictment. And perhaps the best way to show the power of this book is the way Hoover does it—chronologically, painstakingly, week by week.

Consider Japan’s situation in the summer of 1941. Bogged down in a four year war in China she could neither win nor end, having moved into French Indochina, Japan saw herself as near the end of her tether.

Inside the government was a powerful faction led by Prime Minister Prince Fumimaro Konoye that desperately did not want a war with the United States.

The “pro-Anglo-Saxon” camp included the navy, whose officers had fought alongside the U.S. and Royal navies in World War I, while the war party was centered on the army, Gen. Hideki Tojo and Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka, a bitter anti-American.

On July 18, 1941, Konoye ousted Matsuoka, replacing him with the “pro-Anglo-Saxon” Adm. Teijiro Toyoda.

The U.S. response: On July 25, we froze all Japanese assets in the United States, ending all exports and imports, and denying Japan the oil upon which the nation and empire depended.

Stunned, Konoye still pursued his peace policy by winning secret support from the navy and army to meet FDR on the U.S. side of the Pacific to hear and respond to U.S. demands.

U.S. Ambassador Joseph Grew implored Washington not to ignore Konoye’s offer, that the prince had convinced him an agreement could be reached on Japanese withdrawal from Indochina and South and Central China. Out of fear of Mao’s armies and Stalin’s Russia, Tokyo wanted to hold a buffer in North China.

On Aug. 28, Japan’s ambassador in Washington presented FDR a personal letter from Konoye imploring him to meet.

Tokyo begged us to keep Konoye’s offer secret, as the revelation of a Japanese prime minister’s offering to cross the Pacific to talk to an American president could imperil his government.

On Sept. 3, the Konoye letter was leaked to the Herald-Tribune.

On Sept. 6, Konoye met again at a three-hour dinner with Grew to tell him Japan now agreed with the four principles the Americans were demanding as the basis for peace. No response.

On Sept. 29, Grew sent what Hoover describes as a “prayer” to the president not to let this chance for peace pass by.

On Sept. 30, Grew wrote Washington, “Konoye’s warship is ready waiting to take him to Honolulu, Alaska or anyplace designated by the president.”

No response. On Oct. 16, Konoye’s cabinet fell.

In November, the U.S. intercepted two new offers from Tokyo: a Plan A for an end to the China war and occupation of Indochina and, if that were rejected, a Plan B, a modus vivendi where neither side would make any new move. When presented, these, too, were rejected out of hand.

At a Nov. 25 meeting of FDR’s war council, Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s notes speak of the prevailing consensus: “The question was how we should maneuver them (the Japanese) into ... firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.”

“We can wipe the Japanese off the map in three months,” wrote Navy Secretary Frank Knox.

As Grew had predicted, Japan, a “hara-kiri nation,” proved more likely to fling herself into national suicide for honor than to allow herself to be humiliated

Out of the war that arose from the refusal to meet Prince Konoye came scores of thousands of U.S. dead, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the fall of China to Mao Zedong, U.S. wars in Korea and Vietnam, and the rise of a new arrogant China that shows little respect for the great superpower of yesterday.

If you would know the history that made our world, spend a week with Mr. Hoover’s book.

COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM

Is a vote for Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich a vote for yet another unfunded war of choice, this time with a nation, Iran, three times as large and populous as Iraq?

Mitt says that if elected he will move carriers into the Persian Gulf and "prepare for war." Newt is even more hawkish. America should continue "taking out" Iran's nuclear scientists—i.e., assassinating them—but military action will probably be needed.

Newt is talking up uber-hawk John Bolton for secretary of state.

Rick Santorum has already called for U.S.-Israeli strikes: "Either we're going to stop them ... or take the long term consequences of having a nuclear Iran trying to wipe out the state of Israel."

But if Iran represents, as Bibi Netanyahu is forever reminding us, an "existential threat," why does not Israel itself, with hundreds of nuclear weapons, deal with it?

Bibi's inaction speaks louder than Bibi's words.

He wants the Americans to do it.

For the retired head of Mossad, Meir Dagan, calls attacking Iran "the stupidest thing I have ever heard of." He means stupid for Israel.

Why? Because an Israeli attack would be costly in planes and pilots, and only set back Iran's nuclear program. And such a pre-emptive strike would unify Iranians behind the regime.

Moreover, Israel would be inviting Tehran's ally Hezbollah to rain down rockets on Israel, igniting another of the bloody Lebanon wars that Israel was desperate to end the last time.

As for the United States, the only way we could eliminate Iran's nuclear program would be days of air and missile strikes.

Iran could retaliate by cutting off oil exports and mining the Strait of Hormuz, tripling the world price of oil, and hurling the European Union and United States into recession.

Iran could also turn Hezbollah loose on Americans in Lebanon and urge Shias to attack U.S. troops, diplomats and civilians in Bahrain, Iraq and Afghanistan, and here in the United States.

No one knows how this would end. A U.S.-Iran war could force us to march to Tehran to remove the Islamic regime and scour that huge country to ensure that it was shorn of weapons of mass destruction—for an Islamic regime that survived a U.S. war would be hellbent on acquiring the bomb to pay us back. Yet, we lack a large enough army to occupy Iran.

And why should thousands more Americans have to die or come home to be fitted for metal limbs so Israel can remain sole proprietor of a nuclear weapon from Morocco to Afghanistan?

And where is the hard evidence Iran is acquiring nukes?

The U.S. intelligence community declared in December 2007, with "high confidence," that Iran was no longer seeking nuclear weapons. It has never rescinded that declaration.

And there is no conclusive evidence in that media-hyped report last week from the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran is for certain building nuclear weapons. Indeed, that report was exposed as the work of incompetents within hours.

Relying on intelligence agencies, the IAEA said a top Russian nuclear weapons scientist had been instructing Iranians for years. The scientist turns out to be V.I. Danilenko, who has no expertise in nuclear weapons, but is a specialist in using conventional explosives to produce nanodiamonds for the manufacture of lubricants and rubber.

Are we being lied and stampeded into yet another war by the same propagandists who gave us the yellow-cake-from-Niger forgeries?

Bibi calls Mahmoud Ahmadinejad another Hitler and says we are all in 1939 again. But is this credible?

True, Ahmadinejad hosted a Holocaust conference featuring David Duke and said Israel should be wiped off the map, but he does not control Iran's military, has lost favor with the ayatollah, and has been threatened with impeachment. Ahmadinejad is a lame duck with less than two years left in his term. Is mighty Israel afraid of this man?

Told that the IAEA said Iran was actively pursuing nuclear weapons, Ahmadinejad laughed: "The Iranian nation is wise. It won't build two bombs against 20,000 (nuclear) bombs you (Americans) have."

Does he not have a point? How would an Iranian bomb secure Iran, when Israel's nuclear arsenal would be put on a hair trigger, and Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt would then rush to get their own bombs?

In that South Carolina debate, Ron Paul, the one person there proven right on Iraq, was given less than 90 seconds to speak.

Under the Constitution, said Paul, no president has the right to launch an unprovoked attack on Iran without congressional authorization.

Before America goes to war with Iran, let Congress, whose members are forever expressing their love for the Constitution, follow it, and vote on war with Iran. And before we go to the polls in 2012, let's find out if the GOP is becoming again the same old War Party that bankrupted the nation.

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In Nigeria, Boko Haram, which is Hausa for "Western education is sacrilege," massacred 63 people in a terror campaign to bring about sharia law. Seven churches were bombed.

Sunday, The New York Times reported that Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan are suffering "horrific abuse" following last year's pogrom.

Ethnic nationalism, what Albert Einstein dismissed as "the measles of mankind," and religious fanaticism are making headlines and history.

Welcome to the new world disorder.

What has this to do with us? Perhaps little, perhaps everything.

In three weeks of my radio-TV tour to promote The Suicide of a Superpower, no question has occurred more often than one about the chapter "The End of White America." Invariably, the question boils down to this:

Why should we care if white Americans become a minority? America, interviewers remind me, assimilated the immigrants of a century ago—Italians, Poles, Jews, Slavs—and we can do the same with peoples from the Third World.

And perhaps they are right. Perhaps the year 2050 will see an America as united as the America of Dwight Eisenhower and JFK.

Yet there are reasons to worry.

First, the great American Melting Pot has been rejected by our elites as cultural genocide, in favor of a multiculturalism that is failing in Europe. Second, what we are attempting has no precedent in human history.

We are attempting to convert a republic, European and Christian in its origins and character, into an egalitarian democracy of all the races, religions, cultures and tribes of planet Earth.

We are turning America into a gargantuan replica of the U.N. General Assembly, a continental conclave of the most disparate and diverse peoples in all of history, who will have no common faith, no common moral code, no common language and no common culture.

What, then, will hold us together? A Constitution over whose meaning we have fought for 50 years?

Consider the contrasts between the old and new immigration. Where the total of immigrants in the "Great Wave" from 1890 to 1920 numbered 15 to 20 million, today there are 40 million here.

In 1924, the United States declared a timeout on all immigration. But for almost half a century since 1965, there has been no timeout. One to 2 million more immigrants, legal and illegal, arrive every year.

Where the old immigrants all came from Europe, the new are overwhelmingly people of color. But America has never had the same success in assimilating peoples of color.

The Indians we fought for centuries live on reservations. And if we did not succeed with a few million Native Americans, what makes us think we will succeed in assimilating 135 million Hispanics who will be here in 2050, scores of millions of Indian ancestry?

We have encountered immense difficulty, including a civil war, to bring black Americans, who have been here longer than any immigrant group, into full participation in our society.

This was a failing that the last two generations have invested immense effort and enormous wealth to correct. But we cannot deny the difficulty of the problem when, 50 years after the civil rights revolution, one yet hears daily the accusation of "racist!" on our TV channels and in our political discourse.

Ought we not first solve the problem of fully integrating people of color, before bringing in tens of millions more?

Another factor is faith. After several generations, Catholics and Jews melded with the Protestant majority. But Muslims come from a civilization that has never accepted Christian equality.

The world's largest religion now, with 1.5 billion believers, Islam is growing in numbers, strength and militancy, even as Muslim fanatics engage in eradicating Christianity from Nigeria to Ethiopia to Sudan to Egypt to Iraq to Pakistan.

Is it wise to bring millions more into our country at such a time?

Will that advance national unity and social peace? Has it done so in the Turkish enclaves of Berlin, the banlieues of Paris, Londonistan or Moscow?

Here, again, are but a few of the differences between the old and new immigration:

Today's numbers are twice as large. Where the old immigration stopped after 30 years, ours never ends.

Where the old immigrants were Europeans, today's are Third World people who have never been fully assimilated by any Western country. Where those arrived from Christian nations, many of today's come from a civilization that battled Christianity for 1,000 years.

Where Western powers ruled the world in 1920, today the West is aging and dying, and much of the world is on fire with anti-white and anti-Western resentment of 500 years of European domination.

In 1920, Western people were nearly one-third of mankind. Today, Western man is down to one-sixth of the world's population, shrinking to one-eighth by 2050, and not a tenth by century's end.

When did the American people assent to our taking this risk with their republic?

COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM

"Providence," he writes, "has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion ... very similar in their manners and customs ..."

Are we still that "one united people" today? Or has America become what Klemens von Metternich called Italy: "a mere geographical expression"?

In Suicide of a Superpower, out this week, I argue that the America we grew up in is disintegrating, breaking apart along the fault lines of politics, race, ethnicity, culture and faith; that the centrifugal forces in society have now become the dominant forces.

Our politics are as poisonous as they have been in our lifetimes.

Sarah Palin was maligned as morally complicit in the murder attempt on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Terms like "terrorists" and "hostage-takers" are routinely used on Tea Party members who one congressman said want to see blacks "hanging on a tree."

Half a century after the civil rights revolution triumphed, the terms "racist" and "racism" are in daily use. We remain, said Eric Holder in calling us a "nation of cowards," as socially segregated as ever.

"Outside the workplace, the situation is even more bleak in that there is almost no significant interaction between us. On Saturdays and Sundays, America ... does not, in some ways, differ significantly from the country that existed some 50 years ago."

He is not altogether wrong in that. In California's prisons and among her proliferating ethnic gangs, a black-brown civil war has broken out.

Yet, by 2042, there will be 66 million black folks and 135 million Hispanics here, the latter concentrated in the states bordering Mexico.

What holds us together, then?

We are not now and will not then be "descended from common ancestors." We will consist of all the races, cultures, tribes and creeds of Earth—a multiracial, multicultural, multiethnic, multilingual stew of a nation that has never before existed, or survived. The parallels that come to mind are the Habsburg Empire that flew apart after World War I, and the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia that disintegrated after the Cold War.

No more will we all speak the same language. We will be bilingual and bi-national. Spanish radio and TV stations are already the fastest growing. In Los Angeles, half the people speak a language other than English in their own homes.

As for "professing the same religion," where 85 percent of Americans were Christians in 1990, that is down to 75 percent and plummeting. The old Christian churches—Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran and especially Episcopalian—are splitting, shrinking and dying.

Where three in four Catholics attended Sunday Mass in 1960, it is now one in four. One in three cradle Catholics has lost the faith. The numbers of priests and nuns are plummeting; religious orders are dying; Catholics schools are closing.

The moral consensus and moral code Christianity gave to us has collapsed. Since the great cultural-social revolution of the 1960s, there has occurred what Nietzsche called the "transvaluation of all values."

What was morally repellent—promiscuity, homosexuality, abortion—is now seen by perhaps half the nation as natural, normal, healthy and progressive.

Socially, too, America is breaking down.

Where out-of-wedlock births in the 1950s were rare, today, 41 percent of all American children are born out of wedlock. Among Hispanics, it is 51 percent; among blacks, 71 percent. And the correlation between the illegitimacy rate, the drug rate, the dropout rate, the crime rate and the incarceration rate is absolute.

This helps to explain the four decades of plunging test scores of American children and the quadrupling of the prison population.

And while all this is happening, the state is failing.

We cannot control our borders, win our wars or balance our budgets. In three consecutive national elections—2006, 2008 and 2010—the incumbents have been repudiated. Confidence in politics, politicians and the future of the country has never been so low in our lifetimes.

There was a time not so long ago when the nation was united on a common faith, morality, history, heroes, holidays, holy days, language and literature. Now we fight over them all.

Neocons says not to worry, the Constitution holds us together.

Does it? Do we all agree on what the First Amendment says about the freedom to pray in school and celebrate Christmas and Easter? How can we be the "one nation, under God" of the Pledge of Allegiance, or the people "endowed by their Creator" with inalienable rights, if we cannot even identify or discuss or mention that God and that Creator in the schools of America?

Do we agree on what the Ninth Amendment says about right to life? What about what the 14th Amendment says about affirmative action? What the Second Amendment says about the right to carry a concealed gun?

The new secession that is coming, Rick Perry notwithstanding, is not like the secession of 1861. It is a secession of the heart from one another.

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