concerned with the impact that new START will have on America's ability to develop and deploy the best missile defenses available.

Starting with the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative, the Kremlin has sought to tie America's hands on missile defense. The Kremlin says that this is precisely what it has negotiated with START. The Administration says it didn't. They can't both be right. ..

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START contains a political poison pill that does something akin to the ABM treaty by putting a high price on future missile defense development. ...

START's reductions in nuclear weapons are tolerable, but restraints on missile defenses are not. Before it ratifies the pact, the Senate needs to insist that President Obama personally clarify the limits implied by the treaty text ... The Senate should also state clearly itself, in an addendum to the treaty if need be, that it is recognizing no limits on the ability of the U.S. to defend itself against missile attacks.

the fanatic Islamists in Iran who are developing nuclear weapons and the fanatic tyrant in North Korea who already has them.

Imagine if President Roosevelt had decided not to speak about German Nazism, lest he offend Germans who were not Nazis, nor utter the words "Italian Fascism" since not all Italians were of the Fascist persuasion, and of course refrained from mentioning Japanese militarism . . . you get the idea.

Since the days of Sun Tzu, military strategists have stressed the importance of understanding one's enemy. America, Israel, India, and other free nations are attempting to defend themselves against regimes and movements waging what they call a "jihad," justified by their interpretation of Islamic scripture. Not acknowledging this reality is worse than fighting with one hand tied behind our back. It's fighting with a blindfold over our eyes.

would be to allow Iran to defy years of effort by the world's leading nations and become a nuclear power. That would unleash a new age of proliferation that would swamp this week's attempts at controlling nuclear materials. Prevent an Iranian breakout, and the risk of an al Qaeda nuclear attack falls sharply. High-profile nuclear summitry has its uses, but it won't mean much if Mr. Obama dodges the hard decisions necessary to stop the world's most dangerous proliferators.

have made clear that they view any further U.S. movement on missile defense as hostile. New START "can operate and be viable only if the United States of America refrains from developing its missile defense capabilities quantitatively or qualitatively," the Kremlin outlined in an official statement. All of which makes abundantly clear that, for all of the Administration's rhetoric to the contrary, missile defense has become a casualty of our new strategic understanding with Russia. …

President Obama and his principals long have embraced the idea of "a world without nuclear weapons," driven by the notion that, if only Washington led the way in nuclear abolition, other countries would be sure to follow suit. Never mind that a compelling argument can be made that exactly the opposite would happen; as America's arsenal constricts, those seeking an advantage against it are likely to redouble their investments in technologies that can outmatch U.S. capabilities and defeat American defenses. Team Obama still seems determined to take America out of the nuclear superiority business.

The new U.S.-Russian agreement gets the ball rolling in that direction, providing Moscow with a vehicle by which to gradually secure the strategic advantage over Washington.

Although President Reagan wanted to eliminate nuclear weapons -- believing it dangerous to rely indefinitely on a balance of nuclear terror -- when Mikhail Gorbachev offered to eliminate ballistic missiles in exchange for eliminating missile defenses, Reagan refused the deal.

frantically enriching uranium to make a bomb, and which our own State Department identifies as the greatest exporter of terrorism in the world.

Nor on the agenda was Pakistan’s plutonium production, which is adding to the world’s stockpile of fissile material every day.

Pakistan is a relatively friendly power, but it is the most unstable of all the nuclear states. It is fighting a Taliban insurgency and is home to al-Qaeda. Suicide bombs go off regularly in its major cities. Moreover, its own secret service, the ISI, is of dubious loyalty, some of its elements being sympathetic to the Taliban and thus, by extension, to al-Qaeda.

So what was the major breakthrough announced by Obama at the end of the two-day conference? That Ukraine, Chile, Mexico, and Canada will be getting rid of various amounts of enriched uranium.

What a relief. I don’t know about you, but I lie awake nights worrying about Canadian uranium. I know these people. I grew up there. You have no idea what they’re capable of doing. If Sidney Crosby hadn’t scored that goal to win the Olympic gold medal, there’s no telling what might have ensued. …

The appropriate venue for such minor loose-nuke agreements is a meeting of experts in Geneva who, after working out the details, get their foreign ministers to sign off. Which made this parade of world leaders in Washington an exercise in misdirection -- distracting attention from the looming threat from Iran, regarding which Obama’s 15 months of terminally naïve “engagement” has achieved nothing but the loss of 15 months.

or its role, despite U.S. and United Nations sanctions, as a 24/7 convenience store for rogue regimes interested in weapons of mass destruction plus delivery systems. The further problem is that North Korea provides perverse inspiration for other despotisms.

While Obama talks about a world without nuclear weapons, Kim Jong Il sets tyrants everywhere a swaggering example of how to build the bomb and get away with it. Indeed, if recluse weirdo Kim can have the bomb, how on earth could Iran's ayatollahs face themselves in the mirror every morning if they don't have one too?

In the new millennium, Pyongyang has been blazing a proliferation trail that includes illicit nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009; illicit tests of ballistic missiles; and such extravagant stuff as help for Syria in building a secret nuclear reactor (which might even now be cranking out plutonium for bombs, had the Israelis not destroyed it with an air strike in 2007). Coupled with such North Korean habits as vending missiles and munitions to the likes of Syria, Iran and Iran's Lebanon-based terrorist clients, Hezbollah, all this is a wildly dangerous mix.

have been expressing tempered enthusiasm that political change may be in the air. Their inspiration: the man whom the West should blame if Iran gets a nuclear weapon. ...

A strong argument can be made that ElBaradei sat on his hands while Iran made the most important strides in its illicit drive to develop nuclear weapons. While Iran has not yet acquired the bomb, analysts are unanimous that the mullahs are getting close. ElBaradei, for his part, seemed unwilling to accept this, even at the tail end of his term, when the evidence was glaring.

oil posted its fifth consecutive quarterly price increase: It's now solidly above $80 per barrel. If it reaches $125 a barrel again, as it did in 2008, then approximately half the wealth in the world -- above and below ground -- will be controlled by OPEC nations. …

Saudi Arabia's oil wealth enables it to control around 90% of the world's Islamic institutions even though it has less than 2% of the world's Muslims. So the teaching in most Islamic schools is not the tolerant form of Islam associated with the late Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid. These schools teach Saudi Wahhabi doctrine -- fundamental hostility to Shiites, Jews, homosexuals and apostates; oppression of women; and the pursuit of a global caliphate, or theocratic dictatorship. This doctrine bears startling resemblance to the substantive teachings of the Taliban and al Qaeda (although of course they and the Wahhabis disagree passionately about who should have power). The effect is that we now are financing both sides in our war with radical Islam. …

We urgently need to reduce oil dependence in the short term. This means lowering demand and utilizing substitutes as cheaply and quickly as possible. …

We can move quickly to strike a major blow at oil and OPEC's dominance if we'll adopt a portfolio approach and stop allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good. We can get a long way using existing vehicles, existing technology and affordable natural gas. As other improvements become practical -- like charging your electric car from solar panels on your roof -- they can be adopted. In the meantime, we need Theodore Roosevelt's attitude. He decided to improve competition by taking on Standard Oil's cartel and breaking it into 30 parts.

President Obama, meet your cartel. It's called OPEC.

Syria has transferred long-range Scud missiles to the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah, Israeli and U.S. officials alleged, in a move that threatens to alter the Middle East's military balance and sets back a major diplomatic outreach effort to Damascus by the Obama administration. ...

Israeli officials called Scud missiles "game-changing" armaments that mark a new escalation in the Mideast conflict. They alleged that Mr. Assad is increasingly linking Syria's military command with those of Hezbollah and Iran. ...

President Barack Obama has made engaging Mr. Assad's government a cornerstone of his Mideast policy, hoping to woo Damascus into a regional peace process and lure it from a strategic alliance with Iran. ..

Mr. Obama moved to ease, though not lift, sanctions targeting Syria's ability to import airplane parts and software. ...

A senior U.S. official involved in Mideast policy said Washington was uncertain why Mr. Assad would escalate tensions with Israel.

new evidence makes clear that one chapter in the longer history of radical Islamism was written in Berlin in World War II where there was not a clash of civilizations but a meeting of hearts and minds based on their worst elements. ...

There have always been Arabs, including Palestinians, who were willing to reach a compromise solution with Israel. President Anwar Sadat was the most prominent among them. Yet from the beginning those who found common cause with Nazism, such as al-Husseini, and those who, like Hassan Al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, fashioned a blend of Nazism and Islamism, always rejected any compromise with the state of Israel. They made no distinction between Jews and Zionists and rejected not just the policies of Israel but the very existence of a Jewish state in Palestine. As the assassination of Sadat made clear, those Arabs and Muslims who advocated compromise have faced the threat of assassination from nationalist and Islamist extremists.

[T]he various forms of radical Islamism represent the third major form of totalitarian ideology and politics in modern world history. While it seeks to benefit from the pathos of Third Worldist rhetoric, its ideological themes have more in common with fascism and Nazism than with Marxism-Leninism.

One would think that here in Washington, its most natural and passionate opponents would be less the heirs of Ronald Reagan than of Franklin Roosevelt. Now, over a year into the Obama administration, I hope we are at a moment when this irony will be modified, and the center-left will raise a clear and strong voice in the war of ideas with radical Islamism. …

Though political Islamism is not identical to Nazism and Fascism, the lineages and continuities are significant. One of the most obvious continuities is hatred of the Jews and the anti-Zionism it inspires. Islamists of various ideological camps all share in the conspiracy theorizing that was at the heart of Nazi ideology. …

Part of Khomeini’s political genius was to combine left-wing rhetoric about anti-imperialism with the reactionary core of his vision of an Islamicized Iran. …

Though the meeting of hearts and minds in [World War II] Berlin was relatively short, it was an important chapter in the much longer history of political Islamism. It was there that a cultural fusion of Nazism and political Islamism took place. …

The ideological aftereffects of this fusion fed directly into the development of Islamic radicalism as it is formulated today. They are evident in the public statements of Hassan Al Banna, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood; the essays of Sayyid Qutb, the Islamist ideologue who was so important for the inspiration of leaders of Al Qaeda; and in Husseini’s postwar political prominence. Of course, Islam, like any other major cultural phenomenon, can be interpreted in different ways. It cannot be the task of American foreign policy to foment a Reformation and Enlightenment in the Muslim world. That is beyond our abilities. But it is within our ability to call a spade a spade. This means we should call our enemies by their proper names and avoid euphemisms.

The policy implications of this analysis include the following. First, liberals should be willing to devote more efforts to the moral and political delegitimation of radical Islamism. It is a form of totalitarian ideology. It is profoundly reactionary and deeply anti-Semitic and, in this sense, racist. …

A bomb in the hands of the Iranian regime raises the possibility to unacceptable levels both of a second Holocaust against the Jews and of attacks with nuclear weapons on our own country. It raises the possibility that a bomb will wind up in the hands of terrorists. Given modern history, there is little reason to believe that things will work out for the best if people with these beliefs get a hold of such weapons. Thus, conventional military strikes by the United States and our allies against Iran’s nuclear program should remain a serious option.

For almost a decade, the United States has been at war with reactionary enemies whose ideological inspiration it has been reluctant to name. The time is long overdue to break with this reticence.

The Islamic revolutionary regime in Tehran is poised to hand the United States its worst foreign-policy setback since the fall of South Vietnam. …

Since that regime came to power in 1979, no single foreign entity has caused more destruction to American interests, kidnapped more Americans, or conducted or directed more deadly terrorist attacks against American targets. Only al-Qaeda has murdered more U.S. citizens in cold blood. …

[W]e underestimate the fanatical tenacity of the Iranian regime, just as we tend to overestimate the desire of other countries around the world to cooperate with us and be our friends, or at least avoid our displeasure. We believe this even when our displeasure has no severe consequences, including military action. …

Contrary to the currently fashionable analysis, diplomacy and “soft power” tactics (such as economic sanctions) don’t form a continuum with military force, but rather a circle. Neither has credibility without the other, and neither can be effective without the full weight of the other behind it.

IN THEIR OWN WORDS

"A nuclear armed Iran with hegemonic ambitions is the greatest threat to Arab nations today."
(03/2009) Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

"It wasn’t the United States that didn’t ‘get’ 9/11. It was the Europeans, anxious that their comfortable slumber not be disturbed. They insist that terrorism remains a law-enforcement problem, refusing even to consider that we might face a broad, complex, psychotic threat spawned by a failed civilization."
(10/24/2009) Col. Ralph Peters (ret.).

"A world of democracies would be a world at peace."
(10/31/2004) Writer Arnold Beichman

 

IN THE MEDIA

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The El Baradei Candidacy
04/18/2010, Jonathan Schanzer, Khairi Abaza, The Weekly Standard
The seemingly interminable reign of President Hosni Mubarak has suppressed Egypt's domestic political scene for decades. The Pharaoh, as he is known, has held an iron grip on power since the assassination of Anwar el-Sadat in 1981.

The Obama Doctrine
04/15/2010, Clifford D. May, Scripps Howard News Service
In recent days, the Obama administration has fired a salvo of national security initiatives: a new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), a new National Security Strategy (NSS), and this week's Nuclear Security Summit attended by more than 40 heads of state. What do they add up to? Perhaps the outlines of an Obama Doctrine. And certainly cause for concern.

Kim Jong Il's 'Cashbox'
04/15/2010, Claudia Rosett, Forbes.com
Despite all the pomp and nuclear summitry, North Korea keeps sliding down President Barack Obama's to-do list. Yet something must be done. The threat here is not solely North Korea's own arsenal, or its role, despite U.S. and United Nations sanctions, as a 24/7 convenience store for rogue regimes interested in weapons of mass destruction plus delivery systems.

Review: Leaving Terrorism Behind
04/14/2010, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa
Though its chapters are somewhat uneven, Leaving Terrorism Behind makes a valuable contribution to the study of terrorist deradicalization and disengagement. The volume's most significant contribution is providing a comparative review of disengagement programs and processes related to a variety of movements, including the racialist right, left-wing and nationalist terror groups, and jihadi groups.

Peace Talks, Bashar's War by Other Means
04/13/2010, Tony Badran, NOW Lebanon
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is known to have a penchant for brinksmanship. Calculating that he has nothing to fear from a timid Obama administration, he is upping the ante in his direct military support to Hezbollah in Lebanon. The latest brazen act may involve the shipment of Syrian Scud D missiles to his Shia allies.

Nuclear Security Priorities: First Iran, Second al Qaeda
04/12/2010, Dr. Walid Phares, The Australian Conservative
This week the U.S. is hosting the leaders of 46 countries at a two-day nuclear security summit: Many of the attending governments urging that the summit serve as a benchmark for a renewal of international focus to prevent nuclear terrorism. Ironically, the summit is taking place a few days after the Iranian regime, which constantly thumbs its nose at the international community, celebrated its so-called "National Day of Nuclear Technology."

 

America's Nightly Scoreboard'
04/16/2010, Dr. Walid Phares, Fox Business News
Recent arrests tied to the New York subway terror plot.

 

The Ed Show
04/15/2010, Clifford D. May, MSNBC
The need for energy sanctions against Iran.

 

News Hour Two
04/15/2010, Dr. Walid Phares, BBC Arabic
Syria providing Hezbollah in Lebanon with SCUD missiles.

 

America's Nightly Scoreboard
04/14/2010, Claudia Rosett, Fox Business News
The Nuclear Security Summit.

 

Fox and Friends
04/14/2010, Dr. Walid Phares, Fox News Channel
The Nuclear Security Summit.

 

Cavuto
04/12/2010, Clifford D. May, Fox Business News
Israel and the Nuclear Security Summit.

 

Your World with Neil Cavuto
04/12/2010, Kathleen Troia "KT" McFarland, Fox News Channel
Israel and the Nuclear Security Summit.

 

America's Nightly Scoreboard
04/12/2010, Kathleen Troia "KT" McFarland, Fox Business News
China and energy sanctions against Iran.

 

CTV News Tonight
04/12/2010, Dr. Walid Phares, CTV News (Canada)
The Nuclear Security Summit.

 

The John Batchelor Show
04/16/2010, Dr. Sebastian Gorka, WABC - New York (NY)
Afghanistan and the future of President Karzai.

News Update
04/15/2010, Dr. Walid Phares, France 24 Arabic
The Middle East peace process.

The Hugh Hewitt Show
04/13/2010, Clifford D. May, Syndicated
The Nuclear Security Summit.

Drive Time Happy Hour
04/13/2010, Claudia Rosett, WSKY - Gainesville (Florida)
The Nuclear Security Summit.

The G. Gordon Liddy Show
04/12/2010, Clifford D. May, Syndicated
Israel and the Nuclear Security Summit.

Secure Freedom Radio
04/12/2010, Dr. J. Peter Pham, Syndicated
Sudanese elections.

News Update
04/12/2010, Dr. Walid Phares, BBC Arabic Radio
The Nuclear Security Summit.

 

NEWS AND EVENTS

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FDD Welcomes Reports that Malaysia's Petronas Has Ended Gasoline Shipments to Iran
04/15/2010