It’s not how they should be done in any religion, but sadly that just isn’t the world we live in.

Much has been written in recent days on the pickle “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone put themselves in by depicting (or rather not depicting by dressing him in a bear costume) the prophet Mohammed in an episode of their popular cartoon series. By now, the absurdly over-the-top reaction of a New York-based jihadist group has been too ubiquitously documented to require reprise here.

Much of what I’ve seen in commentaries adopts the same point of view as an editorial in today’s New York Post titled “Cowardly Central.” The bottom line of the editorial is summed up in a single, closing sentence: “And until the West decides—culturally and collectively—not to take it any longer, it’s only going to get worse.”

The general point is hard to dispute. Behind it is the attitude—in a very real sense it was a warning—that we Americans conveyed in the days and weeks after 9/11 by flying the American flag and displaying posters showing Old Glory and carrying the legend “These colors don’t run.”

But there is an important distinction between that situation and this one. It is one thing to stand tall and hang tough as a nation. It is quite another to do the same when you as an individual have been singled out and have a bounty on your head.

Before you exception me your exceptions, understand: I agree with the general tenet that if you give the islamist cretins an inch, they’ll take a mile, and that we should not tolerate their threats, which are little more in the end than thinly veiled excuses to kill more of us “non-believers.” They certainly needed no provocation to wantonly murder 3,000 innocent Americans on 9/11, and we now know from another headline this morning that they will keep on trying with every last breath in their being.

That eventuality—a day when the last of these monstrous miscreants takes his last breath—is something to be devoutly wished for. But until it arrives, we need to do what it takes to survive—both en masse and as individuals. If that means we resist depicting their prophet, so be it. It’s a small sacrifice to make it if means living to fight another day.

It is a truism of survival that under threatening circumstances it is important first and foremost to keep you head. At this critical juncture in the lives of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, let us all pray that they are able to keep theirs.

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What makes 1938 unique on such a list is our own absence from the critical scenes.  The effect in Giles MacDonogh’s month by month, sometimes day by day and hour by hour, chronicle of the year, is a portrait of American leadership traced out as though in a photographic negative.

The cloudy, black and gray surface reveals the following:  A world without American leadership is a world that can fall prey to the “gambles” of upstart second-raters and maniacs. A world without American leadership is a world in which secretive, shifting alliances, immoral deals, territorial larceny, and brute force lead, step by step, to chaos and conflagration. It’s a world in which everyone can choose to look the other way when a monster and his brood are appeased, and appeased again, at the expense of races, religions, and nations. It’s also a world in which anyone can get in on the action while the getting seems good, not daring to think that he might be next.

In other words, 1938 marks the last historical moment up to the present day during which other nations could pretend to solve matters of great importance without significant American involvement.  For nearly three more years, the U.S. avoided formal entry into the developing conflict, but the last pretense that the world could take care of itself on its own ended a few months into 1939.  Soon, the argument for acting “while dangers gather,” instead of waiting for whatever day of infamy, would have 60 – 100 million direct casualties and a rubble of nations weighing on its side.

That cataclysm is the other “negative subject” of this chronicle, which, like many histories focusing on Nazi Germany, makes for fascinating yet agonizing reading.  At the beginning of the year, Adolf Hitler was Chancellor in a rightwing coalition government.  The country and the National Socialist order spent the year on the verge of bankruptcy and economic chaos. German borders were still defined by the Versailles Treaty, and Germany’s range of action was constrained by, supposedly, firm commitments of the “Great Powers.” The military establishment, still dominated by aristocrats and a special target of the Nazi power structure, spent much of the year planning and preparing a coup.  According to much evidence, and for good reason, the German masses were uncertain and fearful, and still capable of resistance.

By the end of the year, following a series of successful, highly improvisational acts of acrobatic brinksmanship on the world stage, Hitler was the unchallenged leader of an empire at dawn set for further expansion, the nation having already absorbed and to some extent exhausted its newly acquired financial, material, and human resources.  The internal opposition had been silenced and humiliated. The officers around General Ludwig Beck put plans for rebellion, which at times had been mere days from irrevocable execution, on indefinite hold (many of the same conspirators would be involved in the Valkyrie plot six years later).

In the meantime – and this story takes up a large portion of 1938 - the oppression of the Jews and the suppression of dissent escalated. For the first time, a policy that foisted second-class status on law-abiding citizens took on a literally mass murderous shape, and in a widening transnational orbit, thanks to the collaboration of allies and opportunists.  Someone should have been able to do the math: Millions of Jews to be forcibly dispossessed, under orders of expulsion from a continent increasingly under Nazi domination… minus  thousands of spots grudgingly made available for immigration around the world. The final solution of this simple equation was something that either no one was willing to imagine or, a much darker thought, very many people, not just German-speaking people, were happy to write off on their own personal balance sheets.

Another piece of inexorable math might have been less obvious, but was critical to all that followed. The fascist economic system, contrary to the PR, was a total failure. Without larceny and enslavement on an international scale, it couldn’t survive. Combine economic compulsion with a culture of self-superiority and an ideology that celebrated the remorseless use of force, and war was inevitable.

These equations also expose certain schools of historical revisionism for the dreary obscenities they are.  By 1938 there was already ample moral and legal justification to act against Hitler’s Germany.  There was also opportunity:  The regime was vulnerable to the point of desperation.  Nothing succeeds like success, however, and the world, by cooperation and by omission, gave the Nazis one triumph and rescue after another.   By the end of the year, the message sent and received was “barbarism works” and “no one can stop it.”

For 70 years, we’ve been committed to sending the opposite messages, and have mostly succeeded, but are we still doing the math?

Instead of counting on watered-down United Nations sanctions, the West should cut off all diplomatic ties with Iran, close down all airspace and seaports going to or from Iran, sanction all companies doing business with Iran, and cut off its gasoline supply. We should then demand an immediate halt to all Iranian nuclear and missile delivery activities and the right to peaceful demonstration and freedom of speech for all Iranians. And if that fails, a military action should be in the cards.

“Reza Kahlili” – “An ex-CIA spy explains Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons” – Yahoo! News.

And if Netanyahu doesn’t wind up losing face, doesn’t Obama? What was intended as a show of strength risks, without results, turning into a show of impotence.

(One caveat: The passage of healthcare would provide such a massive boost to Obama’s political standing that it would give him new capital across the boards)

That “caveat” deserves to be considered on its own terms, but also points to the other side of the A story:  The massive blow to Obama’s political standing, and capital, that failure of the bill would bring.  Even if most direct participants focus on the bill and their own political fates, and even if the remaining undecided Democrats are furious with their leadership, including the President, the prospect of a broken party and presidency looms large and at times threatens to overshadow the issue, as momentous as it may be.

George W. Bush spent a huge amount of political capital on Iraq, though the risks that most observers thought he was taking – of an invasion that went badly – turned out be different from the ones he was really taking – of a long hard slog to the devastation of his own standing and his party’s fortunes.  Barack Obama’s positive decision to turn his presidency into the hostage of a single, troubled bill is something else – as though Bill Clinton, instead of, ahem, dallying with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office, had taken her out in public on his arm and dared anyone to say anything about it.

After Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts, Obama could have fallen back and re-grouped.  Instead he’s rushing forward to a moment of decision.  It looks more than a bit mad, but he wouldn’t be the first leader willing to take himself and his team, or expedition, or religious movement, or country to the brink of disaster in pursuit of the big win.  History suggests that the tactic can work very well – producing victory after victory, to breathtaking effect, until, as fate demands, the gambler finally finds an impossible gamble, and he and everyone he’s carried along meet a disaster whose scope would have seemed almost unimaginable when they began.

We all wondered who Barack Obama really was.  Now we’re beginning to get an idea.  His political friends fearing the aftermath of failure probably haven’t considered that success might be even more dangerous, to all concerned, and not because the bill will remain unpopular, but because a success like this one will lead a gambler to seek even higher stakes, and in new venues.  I think for Obama it could involve the B story, or something like it.

If you were Barack Obama, having won the presidency out of nowhere, having rammed a bill down democracy’s throat, wouldn’t you wonder if you could be beaten?  Wouldn’t you need to find out?

There have been positive signs of change on the Palestinian side in the last few years. The rise of Hamas has created panic within Fatah, and the result is, for the first time, genuine security cooperation with Israel. Also, the emergence of Salam Fayyad as Palestinian prime minister marks a shift from ideological to pragmatic leadership (though Fayyad still lacks a power base). Finally, the West Bank economy is growing, thanks in part to Israel’s removal of dozens of roadblocks. The goal of negotiations at this point in the conflict should be to encourage those trends.

But by focusing on building in Jerusalem, Obama has undermined that possibility too. To the fictitious notion of a peace process, Obama has now added the fiction of an intransigent Israel blocking the peace process.

The administration, according to a report in the Israeli newspaper Yedito Aharonot, is making an even more insidious accusation against Israel. During his visit, wrote Yediot Aharanot, Biden told Israeli leaders that their policies are endangering American lives in Afghanistan and Iraq. The report has been denied in the White House. Whether or not the remark was made, what is clear today in Jerusalem is that Obama’s recklessness is endangering Israeli–and Palestinian–lives. As I listen to police sirens outside my window, Obama’s political intifada against Netanyahu seems to be turning into a third intifada over Jerusalem.

Yossi Klein Halevi – The Crisis | The New Republic.

On January 16, two days after a killer earthquake hit Haiti, a team of senior military officers from the U.S. Central Command (responsible for overseeing American security interests in the Middle East), arrived at the Pentagon to brief JCS Chairman Michael Mullen on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The team had been dispatched by CENTCOM commander David Petraeus to underline his growing worries at the lack of progress in resolving the issue. The 33-slide 45-minute PowerPoint briefing stunned Mullen. The briefers reported that there was a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CENTCOM’s mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, that Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region, and that Mitchell himself was (as a senior Pentagon officer later bluntly described it) “too old, too slow…and too late.”

* * *

There are important and powerful lobbies in America: the NRA, the American Medical Association, the lawyers – and the Israeli lobby. But no lobby is as important, or as powerful, as the U.S. military. While commentators and pundits might reflect that Joe Biden’s trip to Israel has forever shifted America’s relationship with its erstwhile ally in the region, the real break came in January, when David Petraeus sent a briefing team to the Pentagon with a stark warning: America’s relationship with Israel is important, but not as important as the lives of America’s soldiers. Maybe Israel gets the message now.

The Petraeus briefing: Biden’s embarrassment is not the whole story, by Mark Perry | The Middle East Channel.

UPDATE:  The word is that “Petraeus’ people” deny this story, but I have yet to see a definitive, on the record report to this effect.  So far, it’s on the level of what one reporter said to a blogger who told another blogger…  Others have pointed out that Mark Perry appears to be an enemy of Israel or at least of the “Israel lobby” – but that’s not quite the same thing as a fraud.  If anyone gets further info, please provide it!

UPDATE II: Perry has updated his own post to include the following statement from a “senior military officer”:

“CENTCOM did have a team brief the CJCS [Mullen] on concerns revolving around the Palestinian issue, and CENTCOM did propose a UCP [delineating CENTCOM's area of responsibility] change, but to CJCS, not to the WH [White House],” the officer said via email. “GEN Petraeus was not certain what might have been conveyed to the WH (if anything) from that brief to CJCS.”

Not a blanket denial of the gist of the story, though does raise additional questions.

UPDATE III: Perry has now updated his own post, and interprets the denial on the minor point as amounting to a confirmation of the whole:  He stands by his original sources, and writes, “It is significant that the correction was made, not because it is an important detail, but because it is was inconsequential to the overall narrative. In effect, the U.S. military has clearly said there was nothing in this report that could be denied.”

I think it’s clear by now that Obama does not wish to make a confrontation with Iran part of his presidency. As I’ve written before, this means that Israeli security fears become a major problem for the administration: surely Obama realizes that one of his most important jobs is therefore preventing the Israelis from attacking.

How does one do that? Typically, the way the United States has alleviated Israeli security concerns is by affirming the closeness of the strategic relationship. But doing this on the Iran issue doesn’t work, for two reasons: 1) it would undermine Obama’s mission to the Arab world, which requires pushing the Israelis away; 2) and in the context of a nuclear Iran, it doesn’t really matter how close the U.S. and Israel are. The Israeli fear of the Iranian bomb is that one nuke would destroy the Jewish state, and that even in the absence of such a strike, Israel would be confronted with an emboldened Syria-Hezbollah-Hamas axis, more wars, constant (and credible) threats of annihilation, and over time would experience the psychological, demographic, and economic attrition of the country.

When we follow this logic chain to its conclusion, we find that Obama’s only option for restraining an Israeli attack is the one that we’re seeing unfold before our eyes: a U.S. effort to methodically weaken the relationship; provoke crises; consume the Netanyahu government with managing this deterioration; and most important, create an ambiance of unpredictability by making the Israelis fear that an attack on Iran would not just be met with American disapproval but also a veto and perhaps active resistance.

Noah Pollak – Contentions – “Re: Re: A New Low”

We began with the big GOTCHA! headlines on the apprehension of the Taliban #2, Mullah Baradar, but experts on the region began making skeptical noises from the very beginning.  One such expert spoke up at NRO-the Corner, where his note was soon followed by a summary piece co-authored by former Bush White House Press Secretary Dana Perino, focused on reporting from the New York Times:

…there’s a better-than-even chance that the administration is trying to turn a lemon into lemonade. Its public messaging is that the capture of Baradar is a huge win in the ongoing war with the Taliban. But is the administration concealing the downsides of the capture? We hope not. And we certainly hope the administration is not crowing about capturing Baradar in Pakistan in order to distract from the difficulties it has had on the home front with the KSM trial and Mirandizing the Christmas bomber. But if the Times story is accurate, the evidence is beginning to tilt in the wrong direction.

Our colleague JE Dyer has now written two pieces – The Pakistan Connection and Taliban Roll-Up: The Other Connections – further exploring  the Baradar capture and subsequent events – mazy complexities in West-canted concentric networks of unknowns radiating at least as far as Moscow, Baghdad, and Dubai.

Returning to the initial event, Chet Nagle at The Daily Caller doesn’t hesitate to call the arrest “phony”:

With regard to this murky event I prefer the word detained, since Baradar and other senior Taliban leaders were captured once before—and released. In 2001, Baradar and several colleagues were taken by Afghan militiamen. Pakistan intervened and the Taliban bosses were sent on their way. Baradar will probably have the same good fortune again, after a decent interval.

He closes on highly speculative and even incendiary-looking suggestions regarding an apparent proposal to divert $7.3 Billion in Stimulus dollars to Pakistan, alongside the observation that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons factories have undergone “astounding modernization and expansion” over the period during which the country has received $12 Billion in aid.

If it’s a game, I’m not even sure who’s playing it for us at this point, or what they’re trying to achieve – other than keep it from impacting too much on the U.S. domestic audience, whichever way things go.

Should the United States use force to regime-change Iran? No – not today. But should we be ready to use all the elements of national power – diplomatic, informational, military, and economic – to support the reformists, and actively hinder the IRGC in trying to suppress them and brutalize the Iranian people?

Such intervention need not be a repeat of the CIA-sponsored coup against the Mossadegh government in 1953. It could well be carried out without any more hint of the US selecting Iran’s future leaders than attended Reagan’s support to Solidarity in Poland. Moreover, the idea that the US would be the only nation potentially involved is ludicrous: the Tehran regime already draws security support from China, and of course its principal patron for arms and nuclear technology is Russia. Russia and China will both try to exploit to their benefit any attempt by Obama to further isolate Iran. One or the other would almost certainly be involved, from the shadows, in an all-out regime crackdown on the Iranian population.

The biggest problem with a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities has always been that merely doing that isn’t enough. A US-level strike could set the program back by years; but the nuclear technology isn’t the problem: the revolutionary, terror-sponsoring ideology is. Iran’s people have the will to do the world the great favor of removing that ideology from power. But they will need help. As the events of 11 February unfold, the greatest failure of the Obama administration will not be that it is taking its time to implement sanctions that won’t change the mullahs’ minds anyway. The greatest failure will be the fact that, in the name of the American people, it is standing by and doing nothing to promote the best chance we have of averting a nuclear-armed Iran.

JE Dyer – Hot Air – “Missing the Big Opportunity in Iran”; also at The Optimistic Conservative

Xie’s side-observations are sometimes as interesting as his main themes. I didn’t know, for instance, that both Russia and India were experiencing double-digit inflation well in excess of nominal growth rates. His next-decade economic forecast for the U.S. and the Eurozone is summed up in one word: “terrible.” Yet the most eye-catching takeaway from his first two pieces at Caing.com – “Trapped Inside a Property Bubble” and “Pumped with Cash – And Ready to Crash?” – is his designation of 2012 as a target year for the Chinese bubble to burst amidst another global financial crisis:

2012 is building up to be another crisis year. Governments and central banks did not handle the last crisis well. They did not reform a global financial system plagued by incentive misalignment and wild speculation. All the money governments and central banks released is turning into global inflation. And they resorted to bailing out speculators, laying the foundation for another crisis.

The focus of the Chinese problem, in Xie’s view, is property speculation, the same property bubble that has made for those striking videos of empty, never-occupied skyscrapers and never-alive ghost towns, but which, more important, is also pricing China’s large, but proportionally small middle class out of the housing market, and spreading inflationary pressures on wages while also turning potentially productive citizens into compulsive speculators.

It’s mere coincidence if Xie seems to be reading from a Mayan calendar. He bases his prediction on rough but reasonable calculations derived from historical precedents and real-time observations, not on ancient prophecy. As Xie explains, the conditions that made China’s decade-long growth spurt possible have disappeared, and are unlikely to return. Even as China has lost its status as “lowest of the low-cost producers,” the country remains heavily export-dependent, yet prospects for a worldwide resurgence in export markets are dim at best. Like other economists, Xie expects near-zero growth in the Eurozone and Japan, and low growth in the U.S., with no prospect for other countries to take up the slack, especially since many of them are almost as export-dependent as China, if not more so.

China seems, however, to be far from having adjusted psychologically or politically to this new reality. Rather than undertake a re-adjustment of expectations, and face attendant political strains, China has been taking a path of least social and political resistance, in a manner that will strike some familiar chords for Americans:

The biggest risk to China’s economy is the desire to maintain past economic growth rates by maximizing investments in property – an unproductive asset. It supports short-term growth by sacrificing long-term growth as capital’s average productivity declines over time.

Local government performance in China is measured according to GDP and fiscal revenue. Property development can achieve high numbers for both quickly. This is why property’s share in China’s capital allocation is rapidly rising as prices appreciate and volumes increase. This is a politically driven bubble — and it’s already massive. Unless the trend is reversed by reforming incentives for local governments, China’s property bubble could mushroom in two years from what’s now a dangerous level.

Xie is building on his own past work here – he is one of the world’s proven experts on economic bubbles, especially of the Asian variety – but you don’t need to be an economist or China expert to follow him: The inflation of the Chinese property bubble amounts to “mal-investment” on as gigantic a scale as you would expect from the non-transparent, un-free, deeply corrupt public administration of an economy encompassing the lives and fortunes of over 1 billion people. The supposed advantages of authoritariansm, so impressive to New York Times columnists and some American presidents, can come at an unimaginably steep price.

Observers of the world scene – including JE Dyer in recent posts at the Optimistic Conservative’s Blog and elsewhere, or people like the international diplomats cited in Sunday’s Washington Post – have good reason to view China as a great power on the rise, a potential peer competitor to the U.S. It’s tempting to look at the financial crisis that Xie sketches, or at China’s well-documented and widely discussed demographic and resource issues, and assume that the challenge to American status is taking care of itself, but it would be imprudent to assume that a bad decade for China will permanently simplify our strategic lives. Indeed, the prospect of China’s weakness may turn out to be more dangerous than the prospect of Chinese ascendancy – even before we begin to consider the direct effects of a Chinese implosion on our own immediate interests.

The stridency of Chinese diplomats reacting to U.S.-Taiwan arms deals may reflect new self-confidence – or it may foreshadow a more bellicose, even desperate reaction to increasing pressures at home, amidst historically new, decisively frustrated expectations. Countries quietly confident that their hour is coming can afford to be patient. Countries sensing that their hour is passing – Germany 1914, Japan 1941, to note two of the more famous examples – often become more aggressive.