First, we were informed that surveillance of the telephone "metadata" of the US population stopped 50 acts of terrorism worldwide, but only two examples were provided, neither of them at all persuasive.  One was some $8,500 given to Al Shahab, an alleged a terrorist group in Somalia.

In fact, only the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Norway, and Sweden have designated Al Shahab as a terrorist organization.  Generally speaking, it is a militant Islamic military group that is one of several parties to an ongoing civil war.  It does recruit Somalis living in America, as well as other Islamic militants, to its ranks, but it is hardly a blip on the international terrorist radar screen.  It probably cost the US hundreds of thousands if not tens of millions of dollars to do what--to stop a contribution of $8,500.  Very impressive!

The other case involved a plot to blow up the Stock Exchange in NYC.  Now, few Americans would weep over such an event, but since no one was actually charged in the plot, it is hard to take the threat very seriously.  Again, very impressive detective work!

The big picture presented was even more absurd.  Of the billions of phone calls being observed in 2012, only 300 numbers were actually spied on.  That is roughly one out of a million people in the country.  Then, what good did it do them to collect data on my calls, your calls, and the calls made your great-uncle Cecil who spends all his free time making historic buildings out of matchsticks?

These shenanigans not only involve  a significant waste of time, resources, and tax dollars, but they positively get in the way of counter-espionage.  The FBI had been warned in advance about those pleasant young Saudis who hijacked the airliners on 911, but they are so overwhelmed by useless and distracting tips that they did not listen to one of their own people who gave them reliable information.  The Russians gave us quite concrete information about Tamerlan Tsernayev, but the CIA and FBI ignored it, partly because our government wants to portray the Russians as savage oppressors of the peaceful Chechens but partly because they are all too busy collecting metadata on 300 million Americans.

If the top brass of US intelligence agencies--or anyone, for that matter,  in government--had any interest in protecting the American people from terrorism, they would not be taking note of every call made by your great-uncle Cecil to the match factory. (Who knows what he does  with all those miniaturized incendiary devices?)

They would not be granting citizenship and and making welfare payments to militant Islamic Chechens, and they would not be bringing in boatloads of Somali Muslims.

They would, instead,  be monitoring all known Islamic organizations including mosques and the headquarters of CAIR, and they would publicly warn Americans that the principal threat to their security comes from believing Muslims.

General Alexander wants Congress and the American people to take his word for it: Our government is not spying on us, just as our IRS is not politically persecuting conservative organizations.  He appears to be frankly puzzled that any would would not believe him.  But, since the NSA and the FBI are ubwilling to take the first step toward protecting the citizenry of this country, we have to assume that every time they open their mouths they are lying

When General Alexander comes to the Congress with his fairy tales, he must be a fool if he thinks anyone in Congress will believe him, but if they do believe anything thing he says, they are even greater fools.

British crime dramas are often well done, but that is not the case with this movie knockoff of a popular 1970s television series about an elite London police squad.  This is one of the most unintentionally (I think) silly films I have seen in a while.  Americans often have trouble understanding lower-class Brit accents, but  I was able to decipher the speech of most of the characters.  But not the surly, mumbling Cockney slang of the lead, Ray Winstone, supposed head of the elite “flying squad.”  Aging and big-bellied, he engages in numerous unlikely physical fights and has a ludicrously improbable affair with the gorgeous Hayley Atwell.  Even worse, purportedly a top veteran head of the top squad of a respected police force, he goes off repeatedly on reckless, irresponsible tangents that usually end in failure.

It is well known that the British police operate with severe firearm restrictions.  In this film it is never made clear what those are.  At times the Sweeneys seem to have pistols, at other times they are chasing down heavily armed felons with baseball bats, non-issue equipment.  In most cases an officer with a pistol could quickly and easily subdue the felon without firing a shot.  Instead we are treated to ridiculous foot races. car chases,  and gunfights across London with unbelievable collateral damage, and that usually fail to “nick” the suspect.  Clearly the  multicultural New Britain is no longer the society that can function with Bobbies armed only with nightsticks.

On the positive side,  the newcomer Ben Drew does a good job as the troubled young officer swept up in Winstone’s capers.  And, of course, political correctness is de rigueur.  Drew inexplicably has an eight-year old black child, though he is too young for that and has a pregnant white girlfriend.  And, it hardly needs mentioning, the irredeemably ruthless villains are Serbian.

Syria is using chemical weapons against the rebels, so we are told, and  leading members of the coalition of the criminally insane--e.g., John McCain and Barack Obama--are unleashing the dogs of war against the Asad regime.

So far, the only cautionary note is being sounded by "conservatives" who are worried about unintended consequences, and a number of analysts are telling FOX News that more advanced weapons may fall into the hands of extremists.  But the Syrian rebels are, very largely, extremists, jihadists with links to  Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood.

This operation already combines some of the worst features of the Second Iraq War--remember Colin Powell lying to the world on television?-- (Even he could not have been stupid enough to believe the nonsense about WMD's in Iraq)--and Hilary Clinton's Arab Spring.

Here is how it works.  On the one hand, the government reserves the right to spy on American citizens because it wants to defend us from terrorists, but on the other, we are willing to arm and pay Islamic terrorists in Bosnia, Kosovo, Egypt, Lybia, and Syria.

We do not need Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden to feed our paranoid fantasies.  The maniacs in charge--Obama and McCain--actually tell us publicly what they are planning to do.

At least there is some hope in the rising stars of the GOP.  Jeb Bush, walking in the footsteps of Senator Rubio, now holds out the great hope for the American future: fertile Latino immigrants.  At a meeting of the "Faith and Freedom Coalition" (where do they find PR agents to dream up these sill names?) the former governor declared:

"Immigrants create far more businesses than native-born Americans... are more fertile, and they love families, and they have more intact families, and they bring a younger population. Immigrants create an engine of economic prosperity."

Gosh, I wish I could be an immigrant.  Do you think Mexico would take me?  If must be a wonderful place to have produced such wonderful people.

A child molester is more likely to be a Democrat.  A closeted homosexual is more likely to be a Republican.

Nothing fails like success.  But the opposite is not true—unless you have affirmative action.

The USPS will discontinue Saturday mail in August.  I can remember when there was delivery twice a day in town.  There were only three kinds of mail: regular (3 cents),  airmail, and Special Delivery.

I can also remember when there were only a half dozen or so makes of cars, brands of beer and cigarettes, and television channels.  People were  content  with much less “diversity.”   (Of course, I can even remember when there were no television channels.)

There are no "local” public schools in the U.S., nor any “state” public school systems.  All “public” schools are property of the central government, administered at every level by interchangeable slaves of  the federal courts and bureaucracy.

The great gift  that the U.S. Supreme Court bestowed upon criminals by its “defendant’s rights”  rulings in the 1960s has now been absorbed completely into our fabric of life—one reason for a large increase in violent crime and the proliferation of multiple offenders at loose to strike again at the innocent.  We no longer even notice the damage done to law and order even with conspicuous examples like  that case of that football player in California.  Most of the of the time of criminal trials is now spent with the jury out of the room while the defense lawyers try to  invoke technicalities to prevent the jury from seeing the evidence that would certainly lead to conviction if they were able to see it.  And these days defense lawyers almost always pick the dumbest jurors they can find—those who are easiest to sidetrack, scare, and  bamboozle.  All of this has destroyed the bedrock of the Anglo-American  legal system—which is common sense.  The keeping of law and order is now a matter of abstractions rather than common sense, which may partly explain the increasing authoritarianism of the police.  Of course, this is not surprising when federal judges routinely impose their subjective feelings on the Constitution.

The previous Republican President and his accomplices are war criminals. So the first Republican President and the probably last Republican President were war criminals.  Think about it.

We are almost to the middle of 2013 and, in Lord Melbourne’s words, “What all the wise men promised has not happened.” Todd Ganos of Forbes recently surveyed the economic situation since the “budget sequester” went into effect on January 1. In the first three months of 2013 the GDP grew at a 2.5% annual rate, slightly better than 2012’s growth rate of 2.2%. In the first four months of 2013 about 800,000 jobs were created. Initial jobless claims have been consistently lower then in 2012. The Congressional Budget Office has modified its budget estimates and now predicts that the deficit would shrink by $52 billion to $378 billion in 2015.

This is all very bad news. Of course, there is still time for the situation to turn around and for the economy to dive into a tailspin and enter another Great Depression. In the short run, though, things are looking dark. Suppose people draw the totally unjustified conclusion that cutting the federal budget—not draconian cuts, of course, but still not derisory ones either—could be accompanied by, or even causally related to, a slowly improving economy. No, no. It is too awful even to contemplate.

That the unrest is abating has been evident from the muted reaction of the markets. In recent days the lira registered a modest decline, reaching the October 2011 level against its dollar/euro basket, but this may be seen as good news for Turkey’s export-oriented economy. The cost of insuring Turkish debt against default rose slightly but not alarmingly: it the same now as in August of last year, well below crisis levels.

A further sign of government confidence is the continuing clampdown on the Turkish army top brass. On June 6 a criminal court in Ankara approved an indictment filed by the prosecutor’s office under which 102 retired officers (76 of whom are in prison) will be tried for allegedly staging the military coup in 1997. Right now there are 450 active and retired officers accused of either toppling former governments, or making plans to unseat the current government. As The Daily Zaman’s columnist Lale Kemal noted the other day, this raises the issue of the state of the morale of the Turkish Armed Forces at a sensitive time.

In the early days of unrest, street protests in Turkey were compared in the Western media to the misnamed “Arab Spring.” The comparison was inaccurate: no regime change was on the cards, no foreign money and logistics were in evidence, and outside a few hotspots in Istanbul, Ankara, and a few other cities Turkey’s life went on as usual. The government remained firmly in control of the state apparatus, the police proved obedient, and the army—already purged of hundreds of senior officers and no longer a significant political factor—stayed silent.

Prime Minister Rejep Tayyip Erdogan’s decade-old, increasingly personal rule is being challenged, but that challenge comes from unexpected quarters: from his fellow religious conservatives who resent his authoritarian style and arrogance.

There are many influential Turks of Islamist persuasion—both within and outside the ruling AKP (Justice and Development Party)—who are increasingly disenchanted with Erdogan. They have not been adverse to the drift away from secularism at home and to the assertive pursuit of neo-Ottomanism abroad, but they believe that the power of “the Sultan” (as Erdogan is known among his friends and foes alike) needs to be curtailed. While they do not identify with the values and aspirations of the secular and liberal urban middle class which has provided the backbone of protests, some religious conservatives see recent unrest as an opportunity to persuade the “Sultan” that he needs to listen to the neglected pashas and viziers.

For the first time since he became prime minister 11 years ago, some AKP-friendly media outlets have started to criticize Erdogan, following his near-paranoid reaction to the demonstrations. His calling protesters looters, drunks, marauders, extremists, and foreign agents, his ominous hints that his “patience is running out,” and his calls for counter-rallies by his supporters have not played well with Turkey’s more cautious conservatives, especially in the business community, who see his combative style as counterproductive. They are uncomfortable with Erdogan’s portrayal of the protest as a struggle between the “white Turks” (non-religious, upper-class, urban elites) versus the ‘black Turks’ (socially conservative, lower-middle and working class Sunnis from Anatolia). Even in his hitherto reliable power base in the Anatolian heartland, President Abdullah Gul—Erdogan’s long-time ally—is now mentioned as someone who could pursue the long-term AKP project of de-Kemalizing Turkey with greater caution and tact.

The real test will come later this year, when Erdogan will try to change the constitution and inaugurate an authoritarian presidential system. On June 6 Foreign Affairs published an interesting article by Halil Karaveli which aptly summarized the “Sultan’s” problem: “Erdogan’s own party members sense the changing tide. Indeed, even before the protests, there was widespread uneasiness within the AKP ranks. Most AKP parliamentarians had little enthusiasm for Erdogan’s plan to change the constitution and introduce an executive presidency. His scheme would have concentrated all power into the hands of a supreme leader, a position that Erdogan covets, basically neutering all other government officials.”

There is unease with Erdogan in Washington, too. Nobody in the U.S. Administration wants a regime change in Ankara, but some old Turkish hands advocate more strongly worded criticism of Erdogan’s methods as a means of reining him in. His switch from neutrality to support for the rebellion in Syria a year ago was welcomed in Washington, but his continuing public advocacy of intervention is becoming wearisome in view of Bashar’s recent battlefield successes. His open support for Hamas in the Palestinian Authority, and his close links with the putative Kurdish statelet in northern Iraq, are also deemed problematic in Washington—not to mention his strident criticism of Israel, which has decisively turned Israel’s friends on the Hill against him.

The protesters cannot threaten the overall architecture of Turkish politics because the majority of Turks are in agreement with the dual policy of de-secularization of the state and capitalist-based growth. That growth has been impressive, almost on par with China after Deng, but it has not dampened political and cultural tensions. There is an inherent discrepancy at work between the Islamic stamp on the country’s cultural and political scene which Erdogan has imposed, and the deepening gap between Turkey’s haves and the have-nots which the decade of prosperity has produced. The AKP-connected new oligarchs, in many ways similar to their uncouth Russian and East European counterparts, are Erdogan’s creation. Thanks to their party political affiliations they have profited from massive government-financed construction projects—like the proposed redevelopment at Taksim that triggered off the protests two weeks ago. To a devout yet poor, unemployed or underemployed Turk, increasing social stratification is incompatible with Erdogan’s advocacy of Islamic moral and social values which are deeply egalitarian. The losers in the process of Turkey’s transition in the villages generally do not oppose further de-secularization, but their loyalty to Erdogan personally should no longer be taken for granted.

Erdogan is in trouble because the harmless Istanbul protests showed him to be an intransigent autocrat and his rivals within the establishment sense his weakness. Having scored his third consecutive election victory in 2011, Erdogan focused on empowering his core constituency through a crony capitalism. He also pushed through a series of measures for state enforcement of conservative religious mores, like banning Turkish Airways flight attendants from wearing red lipstick and restricting the sale and consumption of alcohol, which even his supporters see as unnecessarily divisive and potentially destabilizing. Abroad, they feel that he has overplayed his hand on Syria. Most Turks, AKP supporters and Kemalists alike, are opposed to Erdogan’s support for the Syrian rebels and advocacy of foreign intervention, which is perceived as an “American,” rather than “Turkish” policy. By overplaying his hand on Syria, Erdogan has forfeited his hoped-for role as the leader of the Islamic Greater Middle East. His foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu’s policy of “zero problems with all neighbors” has failed, not only in Syria, but also vis-à-vis Iraq and Iran, both of which support Bashar.

A powerful Sunni imam, Fethullah Gülen, may decide Erdogan’s political future. Little-known in the West—although he has lived in self-imposed exile in rural Pennsylvania for years—Gulen controls a global empire of media outlets (including Turkey’s top circulation daily), charities, businesses and schools now known simply as Hizmet (“The Service”). Shortly after the military coup in 1997, the army leaders started a purge of the movement. Gülen went abroad, was tried in absentia for seeking to overthrow Turkey’s secular order, but he was cleared in 2006, after Erdogan came to power. His is by far the most powerful religiously-based movement in Turkey, described as the country’s third power, alongside Erdogan’s increasingly authoritarian AKP and Turkey’s decreasingly influential military. “While the group is often described as ‘shadowy’ or ‘mysterious,’ this is inaccurate,” according to journalist Claire Belinski, based in Istanbul. “Quite a bit is known about it. Its behavior is both observable and predictable.”

Having supported Erdogan’s rise to power in 2002, Gülen was able to expand his network within the political establishment. The two men had a strategic partnership at first, with Gülen providing the AKP with votes while Erdogan protected the “cemaat,” as the former’s network is known. Already by 2004 one-fifth of the AKP’s members of parliament were members of the Gülen movement, including the justice and culture ministers. In 2006, former police chief Adil Serdar Sacan estimated that the “Fethullahcis” held more than 80 percent of senior positions in the Turkish police force. As we noted in these pages last August, for all his philanthropic pretenses Gülen controls a fundamentalist sect calling for a New Islamic Age based on the “Turkish-Islamic Synthesis.” By now it is all-pervasive, with many rich businessmen, judges and senior civil servants donating an average of 10 percent of their income to the cemaat.

Gülen now feels strong enough to engineer Erdogan’s comeuppance that will not disrupt the regime while increasing the power of his followers. The rift between Erdogan (a fellow imam) and Gülen is now in the open. Speaking in the U.S. last week, the latter effectively blamed Erdogan for the protests: “Are the ones at fault those who were unconcerned, who underestimated [the protest] by labeling it as ‘this and that’? ... If innocent people are killed, if some are choked with gas bombs and if some are blind enough not to see this, the fire could rage.” Shortly before the protests erupted Gülen warned against the arrogance of power, saying “even if a person is a believer, they can morally be a pharaoh… He may always look at people from on high, telling them ‘stay in your place’.”

Gülen seems to think that the power structure will not be unduly strained if Erdogan is weakened or even replaced. The army has been neutered and there is no strong leader in the ranks of secularists and liberals. The protesters have unwittingly aided Fethullahcis, ominously Stalinist in their steady march through Turkey’s institutions, against Erdogan’s Trotsky-like zeal for rapid re-Islamization.

Last week, the Atlantic ran a piece on the loss of industrial jobs in Milwaukee that showed why Obama's ads on outsourcing worked so well.  Between 1961 and 2001, Milwaukee lost 69% of its manufacturing jobs.  The article notes that this massive job loss was the result of several causes, including increasing automation.  But free trade and the commitment to what Furman termed "global economic integration"  also played an enormous role in this economic devastation.  As Sophie Quinton noted in her Atlantic piece,  new plants built by Milwaukee's Rockwell Automation "could just as easily be in Shanghai or Singapore as in Oconomowoc."  That was not true, of course, when America had the tariff.  As Ian Fletcher notes in his magisterial  Free Trade Doesn't Work,  "the pain experienced by the Midwestern manufacturing areas of the U. S. . . .since the mid-sixties" is the direct result of America's abandonment of the tariff as a result of John F. Kennedy's Trade Expansion Act of 1962.

The commitment to "global economic integration" has led part of America to become what our elites derisively term the "Rust Belt."  And America will continue to shed manufacturing jobs until that disastrous commitment is reversed.

All this was in stark contrast with our assessments from two years ago (“On current form it is an even bet that [Bashar] will survive, which is preferable to any likely alternative,” I wrote in the May 2011 issue of Chronicles), and from February 2012 (“The regime of Bashar al-Assad is… not in any immediate danger of collapsing; if there is no foreign intervention it may survive”). It was reiterated most recently in March of this year, two weeks before Obama’s statement in Amman (“The rebels are unable to bring down the government of President Bashar al-Assad, foreign political support and military supplies notwithstanding”).

I was right and Obama, Clinton et al were wrong. The proponents and opponents of Western intervention now agree that the tide has turned. Sen. John McCain, a hawk par excellence, declared that “Bashar al-Assad is winning” while visiting rebel-held territory last month to urge U.S.-led intervention. The fact that Bashar is winning has prompted other, more levelheaded commentators to insist that we should stay out of Syria. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) warns that our record of arming “rebels” has resulted in a disaster in Libya and elsewhere. Writing in the National Review, Andrew McCarthy (former Assistant U.S. Attorney who prosecuted the “Blind Sheik,” Omar Abdel Rahman) ridiculed McCain’s call for yet another war. While rubbing elbows with Syria’s motley jihadists last month, McCarthy wrote, the increasingly senile Arizona Senator said that they “are just trying to achieve the same thing that we have shed American blood and treasure for well over 200 years”:

Yeah, just like in Benghazi. And in Egypt, where a pogrom against Christians is underway, and the Muslim Brotherhood government McCain joins Obama in supporting has just installed a sharia constitution. And in Iraq, where Sunnis and Shiites are back to slaughtering each other under the sharia constitution our State Department helped them write. And in Afghanistan, where, under a similar American-sponsored sharia constitution, the Taliban bides its time while the U.S.-backed Islamist forces turn their guns on their American trainers. And in Turkey, where an Islamic-supremacist regime jails its political opponents, supports terrorist organizations, undermines sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program, and gradually suffocates what was once a pro-Western democracy.

“Liberty is not spread by fueling sharia supremacists,” McCarthy concluded – and he used to be a proponent of military intervention, once. The Financial Times also used to favor intervention, but now its columnists admit that “the fact that Mr. Obama is refusing to respond to calls for ‘tough action’ in Syria is not a sign that he is a weak leader,” it is a sign of his prudence. Writing in the Boston Globe, America’s leading foreign policy realist Andrew Bacevich warned that, on Syria, the U.S. Government “is manifestly clueless and powerless.”

The Syrian rebels are far from powerless, but they are utterly out of their depth. Their most recent announcement that they will not attend the proposed Geneva conference on the crisis unless their fighters receive new supplies of arms and ammunition is a sign of despair. They will not get anti-aircraft weapons they crave because no Western power will deliver such weapons to the bearded human flesh-eaters, the rhetoric in Washington, London and Paris notwithstanding. Their real message is that the fall of Qusayr has changed the equation so radically that the rebels do not want to attend any conference at a time of evident and increasing battlefield weakness. That weakness will be even more evident when Aleppo is cleared of rebel forces, which I predict will happen in the next two to three weeks.

Foreign intervention is bad in principle if no vital American security and economic interests are at stake. In Syria this is manifestly not the case. Foreign intervention is bad in particular if its likely outcome is worse than the status quo. In Syria it is clear that the only likely alternative to Bashar is a nosedive into terrorist jihadist mayhem. That is infinitely worse from the vantage point of U.S. interests, geopolitically as well as morally, than what we have now in Damascus. Bashar is certainly no John Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry, but he is the least bad option.

Sixteen of those convicted were Americans. All but one, Robert Becker of the National Democratic Institute, had already departed. Becker fled this week rather than serve two years in an Egyptian prison.

And U.S. interventionists are in an uproar.

"Appalling and offensive," said Sen. Pat Leahy of the verdicts.

"The 2011 revolution was supposed to end the repressive climate under Mubarak," said The Wall Street Journal of our ally of 30 years whom Hillary Clinton called a family friend.

This "crackdown," decries The Washington Post, was defended with "cheap nationalism and conspiracy theories." As for Egypt's proposed new law for regulating foreign-funded groups promoting democracy, it is "based on ... repressive and xenophobic logic."

Yet the questions raised by both the Cairo and Moscow crackdowns on U.S.-funded "democracy" groups cannot be so airily dismissed.

For these countries have more than a small point.

While U.S.-funded democracy promotion is portrayed as benign, the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, DNI and Freedom House have been linked to revolutions that brought down regimes in Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, and nearly succeeded in Belarus.

People who pride themselves on bringing about revolutions should not whine when targeted regimes treat them like troublemakers.

And who directs these "pro-democracy" groups?

Before 2011, Freedom House was headed by ex-CIA Director Jim Woolsey, who says we are in "World War IV." The IRI is chaired by John McCain, who pushed for U.S. intervention in the Russia-Georgia war and is clamoring for air strikes on Syria.

The DNI chairman is ex-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who says: "We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall, and we see further than other countries into the future."

Is it not understandable to patriots of the original "Don't Tread on Me" republic that foreigners might resent paid U.S. agents operating inside their countries to alter the direction of their politics?

We have a right to advance our democratic values, we say.

But for the United States to push, for example, for freedom of speech, press and assembly in the People's Republic of China is to promote political action that must lead to the fall of Beijing's single-party state. Do we not understand why that might be seen by the Chinese Communist Party of Xi Jinping as subversive?

In the Cold War Americans learned that not only was the Communist Party U.S.A. a wholly owned subsidiary of Joseph Stalin's Comintern, that party had deeply infiltrated the U.S. government and Hollywood. In the late '40s and early '50s, America was convulsed over communist penetration of our institutions.

Martin Luther King Jr. was wiretapped by J. Edgar Hoover at the direction of JFK and Attorney General Robert Kennedy because he refused to dump an adviser, Stanley Levison, who was a communist and thought to be a Soviet spy.

Were the Kennedys being "repressive and xenophobic"?

If we were apoplectic that Soviet-funded communists were seeking to influence our culture and politics, why ought not other countries, with cultures and institutions far different from our own, react even as we did?

In the stricter societies of the Islamic world, governments have enacted laws regarding alcohol, premarital sex, divorce, abortion, homosexuality, gay marriage and religious conversions different from any such laws in the U.S.A.

In some of those countries, such activities can produce floggings, amputations, stonings and beheadings. In many of these countries, children are indoctrinated in the Islamic faith in government-supported schools. Not here.

We may deplore this, but where do we get the right to intervene in the internal affairs of these countries if they do not threaten us?

And are we really consistent in our democracy promotion?

How many U.S.-funded agents of Freedom House, NED, IRI and NDI are in Bahrain demanding elections that would permit the Shia majority to dump the king and oust our 5th Fleet from its Persian Gulf base?

How would we react if Riyadh funneled billions of petrodollars into organizations and agents to finance Wahhabi madrassas and assist local Muslim communities in the U.S.A. with their efforts to enact sharia law?

What lies behind U.S. interventions in the internal affairs of countries all over the world?

There is, first, the residual Cold War mindset. What we did for Solidarity in Poland was right and successful, and we cannot give up this tool of democracy just because the Cold War is over.

Second, there is the arrogance of power, the End-of-History babble about democracy being the last, best hope of earth to which all nations should aspire—and if they don't, give them a kick in that direction.

Once the most admired of nations, America is no longer so.

Why not? Because of our compulsive interventions, military and political, in the internal affairs of nations that are none of our business.

Defund the American Comintern, and bring the outside agitators home.

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