Mark Twain’s insight comes to mind as one observes the panic of Beltway Republicans over the latest polls in the battle of Obamacare.

According to Gallup, approval of the Republican Party has sunk 10 points in two weeks to 28 percent, an all-time low. In the Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, approval of the GOP has fallen to 24 percent.

In the campaign to persuade America of their Big Lie — that the House Republicans shut down the government — the White House and its media chorus appear to have won this round.

Yet, the truth is the Republicans House has voted three times to keep open and to fund every agency, department and program of the U.S. government, except for Obamacare.

And they voted to kill that monstrosity but once.

Republicans should refuse to raise the white flag and insist on an honorable avenue of retreat.

And if Harry Reid’s Senate demands the GOP end the sequester on federal spending, or be blamed for a debt default, the party should, Samson-like, bring down the roof of the temple on everybody’s head.

This is an honorable battle lost, not a war.

Why, after all, did Republicans stand up? Because they believe Obamacare is an abomination, a new entitlement program this nation, lurching toward bankruptcy, cannot afford.

It is imposing increases in health care premiums on millions of Americans, disrupting doctor-patient relationships and forcing businesses to cut workers back to 29 hours a week. Even Democratic Sen. Max Baucus has predicted a coming “train wreck.”

Now if the Republican Party believes this, what choice did the House have except to fight to defund or postpone it, against all odds, and tune out the whining of the “We-can’t-win!” Republican establishment?

And if Republicans are paralyzed by polls produced by this three-week skirmish, they should reread the history of the party and the movement to which they profess to belong.

In the early 1960s, when the postwar right rose to challenge JFK with Mr. Conservative, events and actions conspired to put Barry Goldwater in the worst hole of a Republican nominee in history.

Kennedy was murdered in Dallas one year before the election. Goldwater had glibly hinted he would privatize Social Security, sell the Tennessee Valley Authority and “lob one into the men’s room at the Kremlin.”

After his defeat of Nelson Rockefeller in the California primary assured his nomination, Goldwater was 59 points behind LBJ — 77-18.

The Republican liberals — Govs.

Rockefeller, George Romney and William Scranton — to the cheers of the Washington press, began to attack Goldwater for “extremism” and failing to vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

At the Cow Palace convention, liberals demanded Goldwater rewrite the platform to equate The John Birch Society with the Communist Party USA and the Ku Klux Klan, which had murdered four black girls at a Birmingham church in 1963 and three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Miss., that same summer.

Goldwater rejected this stinking outrage, declaring, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” And, so, the liberals all abandoned him.

One man stood by Goldwater. The two-time loser Richard Nixon, who had not won a race in his own right since 1950, campaigned for Goldwater and the party longer and harder than Barry himself.

And what became of them all?

Bill Scranton packed it in 1966. George Romney was trounced in 1968 by Nixon, with Goldwater’s legions at his side, in New Hampshire, and quit the race two weeks before the returns came in.

Rockefeller, who had spent a career calling Nixon a “loser,” lacked what it took to challenge Nixon in any of the contested primaries.

And, lest we forget, one other national Republican spoke up for Goldwater and conservatism in that 1964 humiliation, the retired Hollywood actor and impresario of GE Theater: Ronald Reagan.

Nixon and Reagan would go on to win four of the next five GOP nominations and presidential elections. In the one convention Reagan lost, 1976, the right, as the price of its support of Gerald R. Ford, demanded that Nelson Rockefeller be dumped as vice president.

Done. Rocky was last seen flipping a middle finger to the delegates happily marking “paid” on his account.

Prediction: The people who fought the battle of Obamacare will be proven right to have fought it, and America will come to see this.

And the people who said, “We can’t win!” will never win.

America is at a turning point.

If she does not stop squandering hundreds of billions on liberal agenda items like Obamacare and if she do not end these trade deficits sucking the jobs, factories and investment capital out of our country, we will find ourselves beside Greece, Spain, Illinois and Detroit.

Even if America disagrees, as in 1964 when it embraced LBJ’s Great Society plunge to social and economic disaster, Republicans need to stand up — current polls and corporate Republicans be damned.

If the right is right, time will prove it, as it did long ago.

Out of the decomposing carcass came Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Moldova, all in Europe; Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus; and Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan in Central Asia.

Transnistria then broke free of Moldova, and Abkhazia and South Ossetia fought free of Georgia.

Yugoslavia dissolved far more violently into the nations of Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Kosovo.

The Slovaks seceded from Czechoslovakia. Yet a Europe that plunged straight to war after the last breakup of Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939 this time only yawned. Let them go, all agreed.

The spirit of secession, the desire of peoples to sever ties to nations to which they have belonged for generations, sometimes for centuries, and to seek out their own kind, is a spreading phenomenon.

Scotland is moving toward a referendum on independence from England, three centuries after the Acts of Union. Catalonia pushes to be free of Madrid. Milanese and Venetians see themselves as a European people apart from Sicilians, Neapolitans and Romans.

Dutch-speaking Flanders wants to cut loose of French-speaking Wallonia in Belgium. Francophone Quebec, with immigrants from Asia and the Third World tilting the balance in favor of union, appears to have lost its historic moment to secede from Canada.

What are the forces pulling nations apart? Ethnicity, culture, history and language — but now also economics. And separatist and secessionist movements are cropping up here in the United States.

While many Red State Americans are moving away from Blue State America, seeking kindred souls among whom to live, those who love where they live but not those who rule them are seeking to secede.

The five counties of Western Maryland — Garrett, Allegheny, Washington, Frederick and Carroll, which have more in common with West Virginia and wish to be rid of Baltimore and free of Annapolis, are talking secession.

The issues driving secession in Maryland are gun control, high taxes, energy policy, homosexual marriage and immigration.

Scott Strzelczyk, who lives in the town of Windsor in Carroll County and leads the Western Maryland Initiative, argues: “If you have a long list of grievances, and it’s been going on for decades, and you can’t get it resolved, ultimately [secession] is what you have to do.”

And there is precedent.

Four of our 50 states — Maine, Vermont, Kentucky, West Virginia — were born out of other states.

Ten northern counties of Colorado are this November holding non-binding referenda to prepare a future secession from Denver and the creation of America’s 51st state.

Nine of the 10 Colorado counties talking secession and a new state, writes Reid Wilson of the Washington Post — Cheyenne, Kit Carson, Logan, Morgan, Phillips, Sedgwick, Washington, Weld and Yuma — all gave more than 62 percent of their votes to Mitt Romney. Five of these 10 counties gave Romney more than 75 percent of their vote.

Their issues with the Denver legislature: A new gun control law that triggered a voter recall of two Democratic state senators, state restrictions on oil exploration, and the Colorado legislature’s party-line vote in support of gay marriage.

In California, which many have long believed should be split in two, the northern counties of Modoc and Siskyou on the Oregon border are talking succession — and then union in a new state called Jefferson.

“California is essentially ungovernable in its present size,” says Mark Baird of the Jefferson Declaration Committee. Baird hopes to attract a dozen counties to join together before petitioning the state to secede.

Like the western Maryland and northern Colorado counties, the northern California counties are conservative, small town, rural, and have little in common with San Francisco or Los Angeles, or Sacramento, where Republicans hold not one statewide office and are outnumbered better than 2-1 in both houses of the state legislature.

Folks on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, bordered by Wisconsin and the Great Lakes, which is connected to lower Michigan by a bridge, have long dreamed of a separate state called Superior. The UP has little in common with Lansing and nothing with Detroit.

While the folks in western Maryland, northern Colorado, northern California and on the Upper Peninsula might be described as Red State secessionists, in Vermont the secessionists seem of the populist left. The Montpelier Manifesto of the Second Vermont Republic concludes:

“Citizens, lend your names to this manifesto and join in the honorable task of rejecting the immoral, corrupt, decaying, dying, failing American Empire and seeking its rapid and peaceful dissolution before it takes us all down with it.”

This sort of intemperate language may be found in Thomas Jefferson’s indictment of George III. If America does not get its fiscal house in order, and another Great Recession hits or our elites dragoon us into another imperial war, we will likely hear more of such talk.

He blew up the Paris summit in 1960, banged his shoe at the U.N., and warned Americans, “We will bury you!”

He insulted John F. Kennedy in Vienna, built the Berlin Wall, and began secretly to place missiles in Cuba capable of annihilating every city in the Southeast, including Washington.

Those were sobering times and serious enemies.

Yet in the Eisenhower-Kennedy years, living under a nuclear Sword of Damocles unlike any the world had ever known, we Americans were on balance a cool, calm and collected crowd.

How then explain the semi-hysteria and near panic in circles of this city over the possibility President Obama might meet with President Hassan Rouhani and hold negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program?

We hear talk of Hitler in the Rhineland, of a new Munich, of America failing to act as Britain failed to act, until, back to the wall, it had no choice but to fight. The old Churchill quotes are heard once again.

But is the Ayatollah Hitler? Is Rouhani von Ribbentrop? Is Iran the Fourth Reich? Should we be very very afraid?

Iran, we are told, is the most dangerous enemy America faces.

But is this true?

Depending on one’s source, Iran’s economy is 2 to 4 percent of ours. After oil and gas, its big exports appear to be caviar, carpets and pistachio nuts. Inflation is unbridled and Iran’s currency is plummeting.

Here is the New York Times last month:

“Rouhani’s aides describe Iran’s economic situation as the worst in decades. … The signs of woe abound.

“Lacking money, Iran’s national soccer team scrapped a training trip to Portugal. Teachers in Tehran nervously awaited their wages, which were inexplicably delayed by more than a week. Officials warned recently that food and medicine imports have stalled for three weeks because of a lack of foreign currency.”

Should Iran start a war, the sinking of its coastal navy would be a few days’ work for the Fifth Fleet. Its air force of U.S. Phantoms dating to the Shah and few dozen MiGs dating to the early 1990s would provide a turkey shoot for Top Gun applicants.

In 30 days, the United States could destroy its airfields, missile sites and nuclear facilities, and impose an air and naval blockade that would reduce Iran to destitution.

And Iran is not only isolated economically.

She is a Shia nation in a Muslim world 90 percent Sunni, a Persian nation on the edge of a sea of 320 million Arabs. Kurds, Azeris, Arabs and Baluch make up close to half of Iran’s population. War with America could tear Iran apart.

Why then would Tehran want a war — and with a superpower?

Answer: It doesn’t. Since the 1979 revolution, Iran has attacked no nation and gone to war once — to defend herself against Saddam Hussein’s aggression that had the backing of the United States.

In that war, the Iranians suffered the worst poison gas attacks since Gamal Abdel Nasser used gas in Yemen and Benito Mussolini used it in Abyssinia. Iran has thus condemned the use of gas in Syria and offered to help get rid of it.

Last year, Iran’s departing president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who frightened so many, made a simple logical point about Iran’s supposed bomb program:

“Let’s even imagine that we have an atomic weapon, a nuclear weapon. What would we do with it? What intelligent person would fight 5,000 American bombs with one bomb?”

Yet, still, the beat goes on. “There is no more time to hold negotiations,” says Israel’s Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz, Iran is only six months from developing an atom bomb.

Yet the New York Times reports Monday, “American intelligence experts believe Iran is still many months if not years away from having such a weapon.” Time to clear this up.

Congress should call James Clapper, head of national intelligence, and pin him down publicly on these questions:

Has Iran made the decision to build an atom bomb? Does Iran even have all the ingredients for a bomb? If Iran made a decision to build a bomb would we know about it? And how long would it take for Iran to build and test a nuclear device?

Americans were misled, deceived and lied into one war. Let’s not follow the same crowd into another.

Obama is being urged not to meet with Rouhani, as the man has a checkered past. Yet U.S. presidents met three times with Stalin, three with the Butcher of Budapest, once with Chairman Mao.

Compared to these fellows, Hussein Rouhani looks like Ramsey Clark.

Query: If Iran has the scientific and industrial capacity to build a bomb — and all agree it has — what could conceivably be the reason Iran has not yet done so?

Perhaps, just perhaps, Iran doesn’t want the bomb.

Talk to the man, Mr. President.

Observing the unfolding of the Syrian crisis, the Iron Chancellor was an insightful man.

In August, we were hours away from missile strikes on Syria and involvement in its civil war with the possibility that Hezbollah, Iran and Russia would be drawn in.

Seeking a way out of the box into which he gotten himself with his “Assad Must Go!” and “red line” bluster, President Obama announced he was going to Congress to get its backing, before bombing.

This ignited a Middle American uprising against Obama’s war. Then John Kerry said Syria could evade the terrible swift sword of Barack Obama only by surrendering all their chemical weapons within a week.

Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, watching the United States careening toward a war that Russia no more wanted than did most of Congress, seized upon Kerry’s statement and said: Let us work together to rid Syria of chemical arms.

Obama grabbed the life preserver.

To say the War Party is apoplectic at Obama for blowing this chance to get us into war with Syria, which held real promise of sucking us into a war with Iran, is an understatement.

The worst peace scare in memory is sweeping through the think tanks of Washington.

Conceding the incompetence of how Obama and Kerry got us into this mess, are we not in a far better place than a month ago?

–A U.S. war on Syria has been averted. We are not killing Syrians.

–Assad has conceded he has chemical weapons and has shown a willingness to have inspectors come in and remove it.

–The chilly, almost Cold War-like relations between Obama and Putin have given way to cooperation in getting these chemical weapons chronicled and removed.

–While this disarmament may take years, this is a powerful incentive for America and Russia to bring about a cease-fire, truce or end to this civil-sectarian war that has taken so many thousands of lives.

–There is a rising realization in the United States that the enemy in Syria is not Assad but the al-Qaida fighters and their allies. A victory for the rebels could mean mass martyrdom for Syria’s Christians and the annihilation of the Alawites.

–Hassan Rouhani, the new prime minister of Iran, has gone on U.S. television to declare Iran is not only not building an atom bomb, it will never do so. And he has signaled a willingness to prove it in return for a lifting of sanctions and readmission to the world community.

–A U.S.-Iranian meeting appears possible next week at the U.N., which could lead to direct negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.

There is always a possibility an incident could turn the United States back toward the bellicosity of August and put the War Party back in the saddle. But there are reasons to be hopeful. And that hope is not based on some naive trust in the truth of what we are being told by our adversaries, but on what their own cold interests dictate.

Take Russia. A U.S. attack on Syria would surely lead to deeper U.S. involvement, the fall of Assad, the loss of her principal ally in the Arab world and her naval base at Latakia, and a loss of prestige at having been proven unable to protect her Syrian ally from the Americans.

A U.S. war on Assad’s regime could also mean a victory for Islamists and their capture of some of Assad’s chemical weapons, which could turn up in the Caucasus just in time for the Sochi Olympics.

Take Iran. She is suffering from the sanctions. Failure to do a deal on her nuclear program carries a rising risk the War Party will get its way and the United States will launch air and missile strikes, leading to a war in the Persian Gulf. No matter the damage this might do to America and the global economy, Iran could be set back decades. A breakup of Iran is possible, as Iraq is breaking up.

And what would an atom bomb do for Iran? The Saudis would acquire one, and the Israelis would put their hundreds on a hair trigger.

If America was not intimidated by thousands of nuclear weapons in Soviet silos and on Soviet submarines, does Tehran think an Iranian bomb is going to frighten the Americans out of the Gulf?

Take Syria. Assad wants to survive and emerge victorious from his civil war. That means no war with the United States. That means meeting the Americans at least halfway.

In short, the United States, Russia, Syria and even Iran have a cold interest in no wider war in Syria. Unfortunately, powerful forces across the Middle East, and right here in River City, believe they have a vital interest in bringing about just such a war.

A grassroots coalition arose to demand Congress veto any war on Syria. Congress got the message and was ready to vote no to war, when President Obama seized upon Vladimir Putin’s offer to work together to disarm Syria of chemical weapons.

The war America did not want—did not come.

Lindsey Graham is determined that this does not happen again.

The next war he and his collaborators are planning, the big one, the war on Iran, will not be blocked the same way.

How does Graham propose to do this?

He plans to introduce a use-of-force resolution, a peacetime declaration of war on Iran, to ensure Obama need not come back to Congress—and can attack Iran at will. Lindsay intends a preemptive surrender of Congress’ constitutional war-making power—to Obama.

He wants to give Obama a blank check for war on Iran, then stampede Obama into starting the war.

On Fox’s “Huckabee” Sunday, Lindsey laid out his scheme:

“I’m going to get a bipartisan coalition together. We’re going to put together a use-of-force resolution, allowing our country to use military force … to stop the Iranian nuclear program. … I’m going to need your help, Mike, and the help of Americans and friends of Israel.”

In July, Graham told a cheering conference of Christians United for Israel: “If nothing changes in Iran, come September, October, I will present a resolution that will authorize the use of military force to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb.”

That Graham is braying that he intends to give Obama a blank check for war on Iran is not all bad news. For he thus concedes Obama does not now have the authority to attack Iran.

And by equating Iran’s “nuclear program” with a “nuclear bomb” program, Graham reveals that his bottom line is not Obama’s bottom line, but Benjamin Netanyahu’s.

Obama has said only that Iran must not be allowed to build a bomb. Bibi says Iran must not have a nuclear program.

Yet, make no mistake. The goal of Graham, the neocons, Israel and Saudi Arabia is not a negotiated solution permitting a peaceful nuclear program in Iran. The goal is a U.S. war to smash Iran.

On Nov. 10, 2010, Graham let it all out: “Instead of a surgical strike on their nuclear infrastructure, I think we’re to the point now that you have to really neuter the regime’s ability to wage war against us and our allies. … [We must] destroy the ability of the regime to strike back.”

Graham wants us to do to Iran what President Bush II did to Iraq.

But there are obstacles in our warlord’s path.

First, there is no conclusive proof Iran has decided to build a bomb.

Twice, the U.S. intelligence community, in 2007 and 2011, has asserted with high confidence that Iran has made no such decision.

Senators who do not seek a new war with Iran should call James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, to testify publicly as to whether Iran is “racing” toward a bomb. Or is this the usual War Party propaganda?

As of today, Iran has not tested a bomb and, to our knowledge, does not possess any uranium enriched to the 90 percent necessary to build a bomb. Indeed, Iran has just announced that half its supply of 20 percent-enriched uranium has been converted to fuel rods.

Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, was elected on a pledge to get U.S. sanctions lifted and to end Iran’s isolation. But to accomplish this, he must prove that Iran has no active bomb program and that he is willing to allowing intrusive inspections to prove it.

As a first step to negotiations, Rouhani just appointed the most pro-American foreign minister in four decades.

Moreover, Iran, victim of the worst poison gas attack since Benito Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, launched by Saddam Hussein with U.S. knowledge, has condemned any Syrian use of chemical weapons and signed the agreement banning them as well the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The Ayatollah has issued a fatwa against an Iranian nuclear weapon.

Often, the interests of adversaries coincide. In World War II, with Hitler as the enemy, the monster Stalin becomes an ally.

Putin wants no U.S. war on Syria or Iran. This requires no chemical weapons use in Syria and no nukes in Iran. This coincides with U.S. interests, if not Lindsey Graham’s.

The Russians, with ties to Tehran and Damascus we do not have, can be helpful in keeping us out of wars we do not want.

The true friends of America are those seeking to keep us out of wars, not those maneuvering us in.

That Vladimir Putin is going to Tehran, and Obama to the U.N. to meet Rouhani is good news.

Better news would be that Congressional anti-interventionists were meeting Graham’s war resolution with one of their own, reaffirming that, as of today, Obama has no authority to launch any preemptive or presidential war on Iran.

The Iron Duke was speaking of Waterloo.

And for the United States, it was a damn near-run thing that we are not now in a major war — with an enraged Arab and Muslim world viewing sickening videos of dead and dying Syrian women and children from U.S. missile strikes.

Next time, we may not be so lucky. Next time, we may not have Vladimir Putin to pull our chestnuts out of the fire, as he did by seizing on yet another gaffe by John Kerry and converting it into a Russian plan to have Syria identify and surrender its chemical weapons.

Putin pulled President Obama back off the ledge. He saved Obama from having either to ignominiously climb down from his “Assad must go!” and “red line” bluster — or act on his ultimata and plunge us into a war the American people and U.S. military do not want to fight.

Putin was acting in Russia’s interests. But in preventing a U.S.-Syrian war, Putin’s interests and ours are one.

Russia does not want a confrontation over U.S. missiles falling on its Syrian ally. Do we? Russia does not want a wider Mideast war, which is what a U.S. strike would bring, with Russia and Iran racing to support and re-equip their stricken Syrian ally. Do we want that wider war?

Russia does not want Assad to fall, not only because that would mean a defeat for Russia, but because of the awful consequences.

Is Putin wrong when he writes in the New York Times of the rebels:

“The United States State Department has designated Al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, fighting with the opposition, as terrorist organizations.

“Mercenaries from Arab countries fighting there, and hundreds of militants from Western countries and even Russia, are an issue of deep concern. Might they not return to our countries with experience acquired in Syria? After all, after fighting in Libya, extremists moved on to Mali. This threatens us all.”

Is Putin wrong? Even Obama seems to fear what Putin fears.

Thus Obama says any U.S. strike would not be intended to bring down Assad. But if he does not want regime change, why is Obama funneling weapons to rebels who are fighting for regime change?

Almost no one fears Assad would use chemical weapons on the United States.

But if he falls, some of these weapons would surely fall into the hands of jihadists who would relish dispatching suicide bombers with nerve gas against Americans.

Putin’s policy makes sense. It is Obama’s policy that is incoherent.

We demand proof “beyond a reasonable doubt” before we hang murderers. Yet we threaten to kill Syrians for war crimes no one has yet been able to pin directly on Bashar Assad.

Why not prove he ordered the strikes, before we start the war?

John McCain comes out of a meeting with Obama boasting a robust attack is coming. Other senators say they have assurances no such attack is in the cards.

One day John Kerry is facing down Hitler in the Rhineland. The next he is promising the world that any U.S. strike will be “unbelievably small.”

Obama has to correct him: The U.S. military does not do “pinpricks.”

Yet, no one seems able to point to a strategic benefit America will derive, other than feeling better about ourselves, from launching missiles into the middle of what Obama calls “someone else’s war.”

The natural instinct of the American people — Keep us out! — is correct.

Yet the War Party, though temporarily routed, has not given up on its goal — war on Syria, followed by war on Iran.

Lindsay Graham is urging Obama to attack Syria even without Congress’s authorization. Bibi Netanyahu, after a call from Obama, is pushing Congress to back a U.S. strike on Syria. Republican leaders John Boehner and Eric Cantor have saluted and signed on to war.

Neocon apparatchik William Kristol is urging Republicans to give Obama a blank check for war on Syria — and for war on Iran. Daniel Pipes of The Mideast Forum has an op-ed in the Washington Times and the title says it all: “Forget Syria, Target Iran.”

“We have scorched the snake, not killed it.” The War Party is not dead.

House Republicans who oppose a U.S. war on Syria speak for the people and should seize this moment to dump Obama conscripts Boehner and Cantor and replace them with leaders who will stand resolutely against Obama’s war, against Obamacare, and against amnesty.

The House should then pass a resolution instructing the president:

—Absent an attack on this country, you have no authority to take us to war against Syria, Iran, or any other nation.

—We are taking back from you the war powers the Fathers gave us.

—We are going to restore our constitutional republic.

“Rebels of the Free Syrian Army launched an assault aided by a suicide bomber from Jabhat al-Nusra,” the al-Qaida-linked Islamic terrorist group, writes the Washington Post.

The AP picked up the story: One resident said bearded rebels shouting “God is great!” attacked Christian homes and churches. “They shot and killed people. … I saw three bodies lying in the middle of a street.”

Maaloula is now a “ghost town.” Christians left behind were told, “Either you convert to Islam or you will be beheaded.” “Where is President Obama?” wailed a refugee. And, indeed, where is Obama?

He is out lobbying Congress for authority to attack the Syrian army that defended Maaloula as John McCain beats the drums for a Senate resolution to have the U.S. military “change the momentum” of the war to the rebels who terrorized the convent nuns of Maaloula.

If we strike Syria and break its army, what happens to 2 million Syrian Christians? Does anyone care?

Do the Saudis who have signed on to Obama’s war — but decline to fight — care? Conversion to Christianity is a capital offense in Riyadh.

Do the Turks, who look the other way as jihadist killers cross their frontier to set up al-Qaida sanctuaries in northern Syria, care?

Do the Israelis, who have instructed AIPAC to get Congress back in line behind a war Americans do not want to fight, care about those 100,000 dead Syrians and 400 gassed children?

Here is Alon Pinkas, Israel’s former general consul in New York, giving Israel’s view of the Syrian bloodletting: “Let them both bleed, hemorrhage to death. That’s the strategic thinking here.”

According to two polls reported this weekend by the Jerusalem Post, Israelis by 7-1 do not want Israel to go to war with Syria. But two-thirds of Israelis favor the United States going to war with Syria.

Peggy Noonan writes that the debate on war on Syria “looks like a fight between the country and Washington.” She nails it. The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and Weekly Standard are all up for air strikes. In the think tanks of D.C., the corridor talk is all about “On to Teheran!”

But what of the soldiers who will fight the neocons’ war? Major General Robert Scales speaks for our next generation of wounded warriors. Our fighting men, Scales writes, “are tired of wannabe soldiers who remain enamored of bloodless machine warfare … Today’s soldiers know war and resent civilian policymakers who want the military to fight a war that neither they nor their loved ones will experience firsthand.”Enthusiasm for war is likely higher at Cafe Milano in Georgetown than in the mess hall at Camp LeJeune.

Why is opposition to the war surging? Because the case for war is crumbling.

U.S. credibility is on the line, we are warned. If we do not attack Syria to punish a violation of Obama’s “red line,” no one will believe us again. Our allies will no longer have confidence that America will come over and fight their next war for them.

Yet George Bush blustered in his “axis-of-evil” State of the Union that “the world’s worst dictators” would not be allowed to get “the world’s worst weapons.” And Kim Jong Il went out and tested an atom bomb and built an arsenal of nuclear weapons. And what did The Decider do? Nothing. Did our alliances collapse because “W’s” bluff was called?

Should Congress really authorize a war on Syria because Hillary Clinton and Obama said “Assad must go!” and Obama said his “red line” has been crossed? Or should Congress use this vote as a teaching tool for Baby Boomer Bismarcks by declaring: “We are not taking our country to war because you blundered in issuing ultimata you had no authority to issue. Rather than go to war, you should admit your mistake, as real leaders do, and take responsibility.”

How many Syrians should we kill to restore the credibility of Barack Obama? How many Syrians should we kill to impress upon Iran how resolute we are? How many Syrians should we kill to reassure nervous allies that Uncle Sam will forever come fight their wars for them?

In America, before we put a man to death, we prove him guilty of murder “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Should we not set as high a standard of proof before we kill a thousand Syrians and plunge the United States into another war?

Where is the evidence Assad ordered a gas attack? German intelligence says it intercepted orders from Assad not to use gas. Congressmen coming out of secret briefings say the case is inconclusive.

The American people do not want war on Syria, and such a war makes no sense. Who is trying to stampede Congress into war on Syria, and then on Iran — and why? Therein lies the real question.

If Congress votes no on a resolution calling for U.S. intervention in Syria’s civil war, says McCain, it would be “catastrophic” for U.S. credibility in the world.

Consider what the senator is saying here.

Because Barack Obama, two years ago, said “Assad must go,” and, one year ago, said any use of chemical weapons crosses his “red line,” Congress has no choice but to plunge America into yet another Mideast war.

Can this be? Are we really, as a nation, required to go to war to make good the simple-minded statements of an untutored president who had no constitutional authority to issue his impulsive ultimata?

Are we really required to go to war to get the egg off Obama’s face?

Not since the War of Jenkins’ Ear has there been a dumber cause for a great country to go to war. Is there no way out?

There is, and it’s right in front of us.

The House, Senate or both can vote no on the war resolution and Obama can then say, as did David Cameron, that, while he disagrees, he respects the decision of a Congress in which the Constitution placed sole authority to authorize America’s going to war.

Are Brits now crying “catastrophe!”? Do the Spanish no longer think the Brits will defend Gibraltar? Is Britain now wholly non-credible to the world?

For Obama, and for us, it is the other options that invite catastrophe.

If, for example, the House or Senate votes down the war resolution and Obama, without authorization from Congress, the Security Council, NATO or the Arab League plunges us into a new war this nation does not want to fight, he will be courting a geostrategic and political disaster.

Even if Congress approves a war resolution, the president should think long and hard about diving into a war he sought to avoid and stayed out of for over two years. Make no mistake; if Obama attacks Syria, be it for hours or days, we are in that blood-soaked abattoir for the duration.

In his dramatic statement Saturday, as politically astute as it was constitutionally correct, Obama called Syria “someone else’s war.”

Whose war? It is Shia Alawite vs. Sunni, Muslim vs. Christian, Kurd vs. Arab, Islamist vs. secularist. Backing Bashar Assad are Iran, Hezbollah and Russia.

Backing the rebels are Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, al-Qaida, foreign jihadists and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Assad is accused of killing 100,00 people. But that is the total of the dead in a civil war Assad has as much right to fight as the rebels. While his army is accused of using gas on civilians, the Islamist rebels have murdered Christians, massacred captives and engaged in public acts of cannibalism on dead Syrian soldiers.

Gas is a sickening weapon. Yet, there is no evidence thus far that Assad ordered its use. Rebel elements are said to have been found with sarin. As for Americans who tend to prefer white phosphorus, napalm and cluster bombs, upon what lofty moral ground do we stand?

Have we forgotten that Churchill wanted to drop anthrax on Germany and settled for two days of firebombing the defenseless city of Dresden? Or that our great friend Anwar Sadat was the confidante of Gamal Abdel Nasser when Egypt was using poison gas on Yemeni tribesmen?

The United States does not have any national security interest in Syria’s war. Why would we then launch missile attacks to “degrade” Assad’s military, when that army and air force are all that stands between us and a privileged sanctuary for al-Qaida in northern Syria, not unlike what al-Qaida had in Tora Bora and Waziristan.

We are told that if we do not strike Syria — making good on Obama’s threats — Israel, Turkey and even Japan and South Korea will not be able to trust us ever again.

What nonsense. We have treaties with Japan and South Korea. As for Turkey and Israel, if what is happening in Syria is outrageous and dangerous, why do they not act? Why do they keep tugging at our sleeve?

The Israeli Air force is five minutes from Damascus, its army a two-day march. The Turks have three times Syria’s population and a 400,000-man army equipped with NATO weapons. Together, they could invade and turn the tide in a week. Why do they not man up?

McCain and Sen. Lindsey Graham came out of the Oval Office saying Obama was open to wider strikes on Syria and more lethal support for the rebels. As Iran, Hezbollah and Russia would then upgrade their own weapons shipments to Damascus, this will mean more dead, more wounded, more tens of thousands fleeing into exile and a longer war.

But what it will likely end with, after America is dragooned in, is a U.S. war with Iran; our allies, sitting in their box seats, cheering us on.

And that is the dog you will not hear bark in the war-on-Syria debate.

John Boehner can, after “consultation,” give his blessing to Barack Obama’s decision to launch a war on Syria, a nation that has neither attacked nor threatened us.

Or Boehner can instruct Obama that, under our Constitution, in the absence of an attack on the United States, Congress alone has the authority to decide whether the United States goes to war.

As speaker, he can call the House back on Monday to debate, and decide, whether to authorize the war Obama is about to start. In the absence of a Congressional vote for war, Boehner should remind the president that U.S. cruise missile strikes on Syria, killing soldiers and civilians alike, would be the unconstitutional and impeachable acts of a rogue president.

Moreover, an attack on Syria would be an act of stupidity.

Why this rush to war? Why the hysteria? Why the panic?

Syria and Assad will still be there two weeks from now or a month from now, and we will know far more then about what happened last week.

Understandably, Obama wants to get the egg off his face from having foolishly drawn his “red line” against chemical weapons, and then watching Syria, allegedly, defy His Majesty. But saving Obama’s face does not justify plunging his country into another Mideast war.

Does Obama realize what a fool history will make of him if he is stampeded into a new war by propaganda that turns out to be yet another stew of ideological zealotry and mendacity?

As of today, we do not know exactly what gas was used around Damascus, how it was delivered, who authorized it and whether President Bashar Assad ever issued such an order.

Yet, one Wall Street Journal columnist is already calling on Obama to assassinate Assad along with his family.

Do we really want back into that game? When John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy explored the assassination option with Fidel Castro, blowback came awfully swift in Dallas.

Again, what is the urgency of war now if we are certain we are right? What do we lose by waiting for more solid evidence, and then presenting our case to the Security Council?

Kennedy did that in the Cuban missile crisis. U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson made the case.

And the world saw we were right.

If, in the face of incontrovertible proof, Russia and China veto sanctions, the world will see that. Then let John Kerry make his case to Congress and convince that body to authorize war, if he can.

But if Obama cannot convince Congress, we cannot — and ought not — go to war. The last thing America needs is an unnecessary, unconstitutional war in that God-forsaken region that both Congress and the country oppose.

Indeed, the reports about this gas attack on Syrian civilians have already begun to give off the distinct aroma of a false-flag operation.

Assad has offered U.N. inspectors secure access to where gas was allegedly used. It is the rebels who seem not to want too deep or long an investigation.

Our leaders should ask themselves. If we are stampeded into this war, whose interests are served? For it is certainly not Assad’s and certainly not America’s.

We are told Obama intends to hit Syria with cruise missiles for just a few days to punish Assad and deter any future use of gas, not to topple his regime. After a few hundred missiles and a thousand dead Syrians, presumably, we call it off.

Excuse me, but as Casey Stengel said, “Can’t anybody here play this game?”

Nations that start wars and attack countries, as Gen. Tojo and Adm. Yamamoto can testify, do not get to decide how wide the war gets, how long it goes on or how it ends.

If the United States attacks Damascus and Syria’s command and control, under the rules of war Syria would be within its rights to strike Washington, the Pentagon and U.S. bases all across the Middle East.

Does Obama really want to start a war, the extent and end of which he cannot see, that is likely to escalate, as its promoters intend and have long plotted, into a U.S. war on Iran? Has the election in Iran of a new president anxious to do a deal with America on Iran’s nuclear program caused this panic in the War Party?

If we think the markets reacted badly to a potential U.S. strike on Syria, just wait for that big one to start. Iran has a population the size of Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq combined, and sits astride the Straits of Hormuz through which the free world’s oil flows.

And who will be our foremost fighting ally in Syria should we attack Assad’s army? The Al-Nusra Front, an arm of al-Qaida and likely successor to power, should Assad fall.

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

For in the Constitution, Congress appears as the first branch of government. And among its enumerated powers are the power to tax, coin money, create courts, provide for the common defense, raise and support an army, maintain a navy and declare war.

But, then, perhaps Obama’s contempt is justified.

For consider Congress’ broad assent to news that Obama has decided to attack Syria, a nation that has not attacked us and against which Congress has never authorized a war.

Why is Obama making plans to launch cruise missiles on Syria?

According to a “senior administration official … who insisted on anonymity,” President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons on his own people last week in the two-year-old Syrian civil war.

But who deputized the United States to walk the streets of the world pistol-whipping bad actors. Where does our imperial president come off drawing “red lines” and ordering nations not to cross them?

Neither the Security Council nor Congress nor NATO nor the Arab League has authorized war on Syria.

Who made Barack Obama the Wyatt Earp of the Global Village?

Moreover, where is the evidence that WMDs were used and that it had to be Assad who ordered them? Such an attack makes no sense.

Firing a few shells of gas at Syrian civilians was not going to advance Assad’s cause but, rather, was certain to bring universal condemnation on his regime and deal cards to the War Party which wants a U.S. war on Syria as the back door to war on Iran.

Why did the United States so swiftly dismiss Assad’s offer to have U.N. inspectors — already in Damascus investigating old charges he or the rebels used poison gas — go to the site of the latest incident?

Do we not want to know the truth?

Are we fearful the facts may turn out, as did the facts on the ground in Iraq, to contradict our latest claims about WMDs? Are we afraid that it was rebel elements or rogue Syrian soldiers who fired the gas shells to stampede us into fighting this war?

With U.S. ships moving toward Syria’s coast and the McCainiacs assuring us we can smash Syria from offshore without serious injury to ourselves, why has Congress not come back to debate war?

Lest we forget, Ronald Reagan was sold the same bill of goods the War Party is selling today — that we can intervene decisively in a Mideast civil war at little or no cost to ourselves.

Reagan listened and ordered our Marines into the middle of Lebanon’s civil war.

And he was there when they brought home the 241 dead from the Beirut barracks and our dead diplomats from the Beirut embassy.

The only thing we learn from history is that we do not learn from history. Congress should cut short its five-week vacation, come back, debate and decide by recorded vote whether Obama can take us into yet another Middle East war.

The questions to which Congress needs answers:

—Do we have incontrovertible proof that Bashar Assad ordered chemical weapons be used on his own people? And if he did not, who did?

—What kind of reprisals might we expect if we launch cruise missiles at Syria, which is allied with Hezbollah and Iran?

—If we attack, and Syria or its allies attack U.S. military or diplomatic missions in the Middle East or here in the United States, are we prepared for the wider war we will have started?

—Assuming Syria responds with a counterstrike, how far are we prepared to go up the escalator to regional war? If we intervene, are we prepared for the possible defeat of the side we have chosen, which would then be seen as a strategic defeat for the United States?

—If stung and bleeding from retaliation, are we prepared to go all the way, boots on the ground, to bring down Assad? Are we prepared to occupy Syria to prevent its falling to the Al-Nusra Front, which it may if Assad falls and we do not intervene?

The basic question that needs to be asked about this horrific attack on civilians, which appears to be gas related, is: Cui bono?

To whose benefit would the use of nerve gas on Syrian women and children redound? Certainly not Assad’s, as we can see from the furor and threats against him that the use of gas has produced.

The sole beneficiary of this apparent use of poison gas against civilians in rebel-held territory appears to be the rebels, who have long sought to have us come in and fight their war.

Perhaps Congress cannot defund Obamacare. But at least they can come back to Washington and tell Obama, sinking poll numbers aside, he has no authority to drag us into another war. His Libyan adventure, which gave us the Benghazi massacre and cover-up, was his last hurrah as war president.

Police have three suspects, two black and one white. The latter said they were bored and decided to shoot Lane for “the fun of it.”

As Lane was white and the shooter black, racism has surfaced as a motive. Thursday came reports that killing a white man may have been an initiation rite for the black teens in joining some offshoot of the Crips or Bloods.

What happened in Oklahoma and the reaction, or lack of reaction to it, tells us much about America in 2013, not much of it good.

Teenagers who can shoot and kill a man out of summertime boredom are moral barbarians, dead souls.

But who created these monsters? Where did they come from? Surely one explanation lies in the fact that the old conscience-forming and character-forming institutions — home, church, school, and a moral and healthy culture fortifying basic truths — have collapsed. And the community hardest hit is Black America.

If we go back to the end of World War II, 90 percent of black families consisted of a mother and father and children raised and disciplined by their parents. The churches to which these families went on Sundays were stronger. Black schools may have been largely segregated, but they were also the transmission belts of patriotism and traditional values rooted in biblical truths and a Christian faith.

Though such schools graduated hardworking, law-abiding and productive citizens, today they would be closed as unconstitutional.

Indeed, all of those character- and conscience-forming institutions of yesterday are in an advanced state of decline today.

Seventy-three percent of black kids are born to single moms. Black kids who make it to 12th grade may often be found reading at seventh-, eighth- or ninth-grade levels. In some cities the black dropout rate can hit as high as 50 percent.

Drugs are readily available. And among black males ages 18 to 29, in urban areas, often a third are in prison or jail, or on probation or parole, or walking around with a criminal record.

Where do the kids get their ideas of right and wrong, good and evil? In homes where the father is absent and the TV is always on. From radios tuned in to rap and hip-hop.

From films where Hollywood values prevail and the shooting never stops. From street gangs that sometimes form the only families these kids have ever known.

Still, crime has fallen since 1990, we are told.

And so it has. But that is only because the baby boomers, the largest population cohort in our history, passed out of the high-crime age group a quarter of a century ago, and because the jail and prison population in America has tripled.

What kind of leadership do we see today in Black America?

What can be said for an NAACP that was lately demanding a Justice Department investigation of a rodeo clown running around a bull ring in rural Missouri in an Obama mask, but cannot find its voice to address a black-on-white atrocity in Middle America?

When Trayvon Martin was shot to death in a murky incident in Sanford, Fla., Jesse Jackson rushed there to declare: “Blacks are under attack. … Killing us is big business.” Trayvon was “shot down in cold blood by a vigilante … murdered and martyred.”

After Chris Lane’s cold-blooded murder, Jesse tweeted: This sort of thing is to be “frowned upon.”

If I had a son, said President Obama, he would have looked like Trayvon; 35 years ago, I could have been Trayvon. Can the president not find his voice to speak to the parents of Chris Lane?

Since Lyndon Johnson took office, 50 years ago, we have spent trillions on his programs for health care, housing, education, food stamps, welfare and civil rights. Are we living in that Great Society we were promised?

In that same decade, we were told that the social, cultural and moral revolution bursting forth on the campuses would rid us of the repressive old-time morality and Old Time Religion, and lead to a more equal, just, humane and better America, a beacon to mankind.

Yet, are not the killers of Chris Lane who shot him for the fun of it the “do-your-own-thing!” children of that cultural revolution?

The death of Trayvon was said to be reflective of the real America, a country where black folks live in constant fear of white vigilantes and white racist cops. What nonsense.

In the real America, interracial violence is overwhelming black-on-white. Even if the media will not report it, everybody knows it.

And journalists will not dig into the numbers that prove it, for the truth would undermine their ideology and contradict the narrative that governs and gives meaning to their lives.

For liberals, America is always “Mississippi Burning.” It just has to be that way.

And to show the Russians that such Cold War thinking is antiquated, Obama canceled his September summit with Vladimir Putin.

The reason: Putin’s grant of asylum to Edward Snowden, who showed up at the Moscow airport, his computers full of secrets that our National Security Agency has been thieving from every country on earth, including Russia.

Yet there are many KGB defectors in the United States, and Russia has never used this as an excuse to cancel a summit.

The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal are delighted, hopeful that cancellation presages a more confrontational policy toward Putin.

But is a second Cold War really a good idea? And if it is coming, who is more responsible for it?

From 1989 to 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to let Eastern Europe go free and withdraw his troops and tank armies back to the Urals. The Soviet Union was allowed to dissolve into 15 nations. In three years, the USSR gave up an empire, a third of its territory, and half its people.

And it extended to us a hand of friendship.

How did we respond? We pushed NATO right up to Russia’s borders, bringing in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, even former Soviet republics Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

European objections alone prevented us from handing out NATO war guarantees to Ukraine and Georgia. Was this a friendly act?

Would we have regarded post-Cold War Russian alliances with Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Mexico as friendly acts?

To cut Moscow out of the Caspian Sea oil, we helped build a pipeline through two former Soviet republics, Azerbaijan and Georgia, and, thence, under the Black Sea to our NATO ally Turkey.

In the Boris Yeltsin decade, the 1990s, U.S. hustlers colluded with local oligarchs in looting Russia of her natural resources.

In the past decade, the National Endowment for Democracy and its Republican and Democratic subsidiaries helped dump over governments in Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia, and replace them with regimes friendlier to us and more distant from Moscow.

George W. Bush sought to put an anti-missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic. Neither country had requested it. We said it was aimed at Iran.

When my late friend, columnist Tony Blankley, visited Russia in the Bush II era, he was astounded at the hostility he encountered from Russians who felt we had responded to their offer of friendship at the end of the Cold War by taking advantage of them.

Putin is a former intelligence officer, a patriot, a nationalist.

How did we think he would react to U.S. encirclement of his country by NATO and U.S. meddling in his internal affairs?

How did American patriots in the Truman-McCarthy era react to the discovery that Hollywood, the U.S. government and our atom bomb project were riddled with communists loyal to Josef Stalin?

Why cannot we Americans see ourselves as others see us?

Why is Russia still supporting the brutal regime of Bashar Assad in Syria, the Post and Journal demand to know.

Well, Russia has a long relationship with the Assad family, selling it arms and maintaining a naval base on Syria’s coast. Did we expect Russia to behave as we did when our autocratic ally of 30 years, Hosni Mubarak, was challenged by crowds in Tahrir Square?

We ditched Mubarak and washed our hands of him in weeks.

Russia stood by its man. And does not Putin have a point when he asks why we are backing Syrian rebels among whom are elements of that same al-Qaida that killed thousands of us in the twin towers?

Is the Syrian war so clear-cut a case of good and evil that the Russians should dump their friends and support ours?

If the Assad family is irredeemably wicked, why did George H.W. Bush enlist Hafez Assad in his war to liberate Kuwait in 1991, a war to which Damascus contributed 4,000 troops?

There is another reason Russia is recoiling from America.

With the death of its Marxist-Leninist ideology, Russia is moving back toward its religious and Orthodox roots. Secretly baptized at birth by his mother, Putin has embraced this.

Increasingly, religious Russians look on America, with our Hollywood values and celebrations of homosexuality, as a sick society, a focus of cultural and moral evil in the world.

Much of the Islamic world that once admired America has reached the same conclusion. Yet the Post is demanding that our government stand with “the persecuted rock band” of young women who desecrated with obscene acts the high altar of Moscow’s most sacred cathedral.

Upon what ground do we Americans, 53 million abortions behind us since Roe v. Wade, stand to lecture other nations on morality?

Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, trade, arms reduction — we have fish to fry with Putin. As for our lectures on democracy and morality, how ’bout we put a sock in it?

The House voted 400-20 to impose new sanctions on Iran’s oil exports, two days before Iran’s new president, elected on a pledge to re-engage the West on the nuclear issue, takes his oath.

Do these triumphs of AIPAC and the War Party, of neocons and liberal internationalists, tell us where we are going? Or are they the last hurrahs of the interventionists, as America’s long retreat proceeds apace.

If we take what Richard Nixon called “the long view,” the trend line seems unmistakable. Under President Obama, America has pulled all U.S. forces out of Iraq and has scheduled a full withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2014.

Despite his “red line” in Syria having allegedly been crossed, and the cawing of Hill hawks like Sens. Lindsey Graham and John McCain, Obama seems the very portrait of a reluctant warrior in Syria.

A large majority of Americans, too, want no part of that civil war.

On Iran, the Pentagon seems to concur with Obama, in opposition to a new Mideast war. And as Congress votes new sanctions on Iran and new billions for an Egyptian army that just arrested its elected government, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is laying out scenarios for reducing the size, reach and power of the U.S. military.

“Without the controlling principle that the nation must maintain its objectives and its power in equilibrium, its purposes within its means, and its means equal to its purposes, its commitments related to its resources, and its resources adequate to its commitments, it is impossible to think at all about foreign affairs.” So wrote Walter Lippmann in 1943.

That is our situation today.

During World War II, we were united in defeating Germany and Japan. After the war, we became united on a new foreign policy — containment of communism and a Soviet Empire that had spread from the Elbe River to the Bering Sea. Through great sacrifices we ensured that our resources were adequate to our commitments.

Vietnam shattered the Cold War consensus.

Yet enough of it survived for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush to lead the nation and the West to victory.

Bush I then set out to build his “New World Order.” He invaded Panama, drove Iraq out of Kuwait and put U.S. troops into Somalia. The country sent him packing.

After 9/11, Bush II invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and undertook to nation-build in both. The country removed his party from power in both houses of Congress in 2006 and from the presidency in 2008.

George W. was going to “end tyranny in our world.” Enough said.

Obama began the long retreat of American power that proceeds today despite a bellicosity on Capitol Hill redolent of the Cold War.

Today, as government at all levels consumes nearly 40 percent of gross domestic product, as the deficit is growing three times as fast as the GDP, as China continues to grow at four times the U.S. rate, we need to ask ourselves:

What should we fight for? Whom shall we defend? What can we afford in the way of national defense? What must we afford?

Consider America’s alliances, almost all of which date to a Cold War no American under 25 can even remember.

NATO was formed in 1949 to protect Western Europe from a Soviet Bloc and a Soviet Union that disappeared a generation ago.

U.S. treaties with Japan and the Philippines date to the 1950s, when Chairman Mao was exporting communist revolution. Should these treaties now require us to go to war with China to defend disputed islets and rocks in the East and South China Sea?

Our treaty with South Korea dates to a war against the North that ended in a truce 60 years ago. South Korea today has twice the population of the North and 40 times the GDP.

Must we still deploy a U.S. army on the Korean DMZ?

In 1977 we undertook to give $5 billion in annual foreign aid to Israel and Egypt. After 35 years, how long should the United States, whose middle class has not seen a rise in real income since 1977, borrow from China to pay Egyptians and Israelis $5 billion a year not to fight each other?

Through a mindless adherence to policies that date to a long-dead past, America is forfeiting her future.

Through our abandonment of economic patriotism and embrace of globalism, we have run up $10 trillion in trade deficits since Reagan. We have fought two trillion-dollar wars in 12 years.

Every year we go into world financial markets to borrow tens of billions for the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and foreign aid to send to regimes that routinely vote against the us in the United Nations.

Is Rand Paul really the one living in yesterday?

In his second term, Ronald Reagan had Iran-Contra, but also a treaty eliminating U.S. and Soviet missiles in Europe, his “tear-down-this-wall” moment in Berlin and his lead role in ending the Cold War.

In his second term, Bill Clinton had Monica, but also came close to a peace treaty between Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat.

Obama’s second-term scandals — IRS, Benghazi, wiretapping The Associated Press and Fox — are in the low-kiloton range compared to the resignation of Nixon or the impeachment of Clinton.

And as Obama is going to get nada from a Republican House on guns, amnesty, cap-and-trade or a second stimulus, he should look for his legacy — as Nixon, Reagan and Clinton did — to foreign policy.

Two opportunities beckon. First, the mirage — a Middle East peace. Essential to any treaty, however, is a withdrawal of Israeli “settlers” from the West Bank, a sharing of Jerusalem, Palestinian acceptance of Israel as a “Jewish state” and Arab repudiation of the “right of return.”

Good luck. Bibi Netanyahu, who calls Jerusalem our “eternal capital” and Judea and Samaria our ancient lands, is not going to divide Jerusalem or uproot Jewish settlers from the West Bank — not when he opposed their removal from Gaza by Ariel Sharon.

Bibi will not do it, cannot, if he wants his Likudnik coalition to survive. And Obama lacks the clout in Congress or this capital city to force Bibi to do anything he does not wish to do.

Hence Obama’s legacy hopes lie not in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in Washington this week, but in what is happening in Iran — the inauguration of the president who replaces Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Hasan Rouhani was elected with 51 percent of the vote by the constituency that voted against Ahmadinejad in 2009. His triumph was due to his endorsement by former presidents Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami. Both had been kept off the ballot by Ayatollah Khamenei.

Rouhani is a founding father of the Islamic Republic and was a close ally of Ayatollah Khomeini. But he was elected on a pledge to revive the economy, get sanctions lifted, and re-engage with the West.

He won on a promise of better times for the Iranian people and an end to Iran’s isolation.

Yet the only way he can achieve these goals is to come to terms with Obama on Iran’s nuclear program.

Despite the decades of acrimony between us, the basic elements of a Washington-Tehran deal are there.And as he was once Iran’s lead negotiator on that program, Rouhani knows exactly what is required.

Iran wants its rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) — to peaceful nuclear research and nuclear power — recognized by the United States. And it wants U.S.-UN sanctions lifted.

The United States wants more than verbal assurances that Iran is not building a bomb. We need intrusive inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities to assure us that she is not building an atom bomb.

As Reagan said, trust but verify.

Yet this seems not beyond the realm of possibility.

Despite the hysteria about Iran’s “mad dash” to an atom bomb, Tehran has never tested a bomb and never produced the 90-percent-enriched uranium needed for a bomb, and does not have sufficient 20-percent uranium to further enrich for a bomb test.

Netanyahu’s initial prediction that Iran was “three to five” years away from a bomb came — in 1992. Since then we have been getting monthly updates on the imminence of the Iranian bomb, but no bomb.

Moreover, Khamenei has declared nuclear weapons anti-Islamic, and U.S intelligence agencies have never retracted their declarations of 2007 and 2011 that Iran has made no decision to build a bomb.

Rouhani’s political future, the continued allegiance of his Iranian followers who want to re-engage with the West and the world, hangs on whether he can get a deal on Iran’s nuclear program and a lifting of sanctions. He knows this.

What Rouhani cannot do is surrender Iran’s rights to nuclear power and research. On this his nation is united. But he may be able to give the West what it requires, intrusive inspections, to prove that what Iran claims to be true is true — that it has no nuclear weapons program.

If we can get that, we should be able to get a deal, and America can lift her sanctions, their objective having been achieved.

That would be the crown jewel of Obama’s second term.

Who would be against such a deal? Bibi and the War Party that wants Iran smashed, as we smashed Iraq, even if that means another trillion-dollar unnecessary war.

Obama can, however, defeat the War Party coalition. He should congratulate Rouhani on his inauguration, declare his readiness for direct talks with Tehran, and appoint as negotiators national security hawks who want no war with Iran, but no Iranian atom bomb either.

History beckons. Obama should seize the moment.

But why, when the fires of anger over the Zimmerman verdict were dying down, did he go into that pressroom and stir them up?

“A week of protests outside the White House, pressure building on him inside the White House, pushed him to that podium,” said Tavis Smiley on “Meet the Press.” Black leaders demanded Obama come out of hiding and stand in solidarity with the aggrieved and outraged.

Belatedly and meekly, Obama complied.

“Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” said Obama.

But which Trayvon?

The one walking home with Skittles and tea? Or the one who sucker-punched Zimmerman, decked him, piled on, pummeled him martial arts style, hammered his head on the sidewalk, ignored his screams for help and got shot by the guy he was assaulting?

For that is the story Zimmerman told, Sanford police believed, the lone eyewitness confirmed, the defense argued, the prosecution could not shake and the jury believed. Not guilty, on all counts.

If Obama thinks the verdict was justified, why did he not urge that the demonstrations, marches, vandalism and violence cease?

If he agrees Zimmerman got away with murder — “an atrocity,” Al Sharpton said of the verdict — why did Obama hide behind this mush: “Once the jury’s spoken, that’s how the system works.”

The president sent his “thoughts and prayers” to Trayvon’s family.

To George Zimmerman, painted as a racist monster for 16 months, hiding in fear of his life, his Peruvian mother and family under threat — not a word of compassion from the president.

Obama moved swiftly off the trial and into a rambling discourse on the black experience and racial profiling.

But why? The jury said Trayvon was not profiled.

What is Obama up to? Answer. A law professor, he knows this case, based on evidence and testimony, was open and shut. And he knows Eric Holder is not going to file any hate-crime civil rights charges.

Because Holder and Obama know they would be seen as caving to Sharpton & Co., they would get stuffed in court, and the nation would react with outrage to a double-jeopardy, murder-charge, racial prosecution of this persecuted man whose innocence was established in a court of law.

So Obama swiftly changed the subject.

“There are very few African-Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off.”

“There are very few African-American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me … before I was a senator.”

“That happens often,” said Obama. Undeniably. But why do black males awaken such apprehensions and fears? Is it their color?

Well, 13 percent of our population is black. Half of that — say, 6 plus percent — is male. Of that 6 percent, one in six — just 1 percent of the U.S. population — consists of black males age 18 to 29.

Of all black males 18 to 29, writes Ron Unz in “Race and Crime in America,” 28 percent are in jail or prison, or on probation.

The “liberal Sentencing Project organization,” says Unz, estimates that “one-third of all black men are already convicted criminals by their 20s, and the fraction would surely be far higher for those living in urban areas.”

Twenty years ago in Chicago, where black kids are gunned down daily, Jesse Jackson was quoted, “There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”

That’s the same apprehension, Mr. President, those women feel on that elevator.

Obama traced the “violence … in poor black neighborhoods” to “poverty and … a very difficult history.

But slavery and segregation were far closer in time to the black America of the 1950s, and poverty was far greater. Yet we never saw crime and incarceration rates like we see today in Black America.

As Unz writes, El Paso, Texas, and Atlanta are cities of equal size and poverty rates. Yet Atlanta has 10 times the crime. Oakland and Santa Ana, Calif., are equal in size and poverty numbers. Yet Oakland “has several times the rate of crime.” Why?

Why are white folks nervous about strange young black men in the neighborhood? Perhaps because they commit interracial muggings, robberies and rapes at 35 times the rate of whites.

As newspapers avoid the issue of black racism and rarely give the stats on interracial crime, Obama dwelt lovingly on the indignities of racial profiling — without really addressing the root cause.

It was an uncourageous commentary. Weak as Kool-Aid, said Tavis.

But Obama was where he likes to be, leading from behind — this time behind Al Sharpton.

Yet they know — and Barack Obama, whose silence speaks volumes, knows — nothing is going to happen.

“Stand-Your-Ground” laws in Florida and other states are not going to be repealed. George Zimmerman is not going to be prosecuted for a federal “hate crime” in the death of Trayvon Martin.

The result of all this ginned-up rage that has produced vandalism and violence is simply going to be an ever-deepening racial divide.

Consider the matter of crime and fear of crime.

From listening to cable channels and hearing Holder, Sharpton, Jealous and others, one would think the great threat to black children today emanates from white vigilantes and white cops.

Hence, every black father must have a “conversation” with his son, warning him not to resist or run if pulled over or hassled by a cop.

Make the wrong move, son, and you may be dead is the implication.

But is this the reality in Black America?

When Holder delivered his 2009 “nation-of-cowards” speech blaming racism for racial separation, Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald suggested that our attorney general study his crime statistics.

In New York from January to June 2008, 83 percent of all gun assailants were black, according to witnesses and victims, though blacks were only 24 percent of the population. Blacks and Hispanics together accounted for 98 percent of all gun assailants. Forty-nine of every 50 muggings and murders in the Big Apple were the work of black or Hispanic criminals.

New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly confirms Mac Donald’s facts. Blacks and Hispanics commit 96 percent of all crimes in the city, he says, but only 85 percent of the stop-and-frisks are of blacks and Hispanics.

And these may involve the kind of pat-downs all of us have had at the airport.

Is stop-and-frisk the work of racist cops in New York, where the crime rate has been driven down to levels unseen in decades?

According to Kelly, a majority of his police force, which he has been able to cut from 41,000 officers to 35,000, is now made up of minorities.

But blacks are also, per capita, the principal victims of crime. Would black fathers prefer their sons to grow up in Chicago, rather than low-crime New York City, with its stop-and-frisk policy?

Fernando Mateo, head of the New York taxicab union, urges his drivers to profile blacks and Hispanics for their own safety: “The God’s honest truth is that 99 percent of the people that are robbing, stealing, killing these drivers are blacks and Hispanics.”

Mateo is what The New York Times would describe as “a black Hispanic” Yet he may be closer to the ‘hood than Holder, who says he was stopped by police when running to a movie — in Georgetown.

Is Holder saying we’ve got racist cops in the district where Obama carried 86 percent of the white vote and 97 percent of the black vote? And his son should fear the white cops in Washington, D.C.?Which raises a relevant question. Georgetown is an elitist enclave of a national capital that has been ruled by black mayors for half a century. It’s never had a white mayor.

What about interracial crime, white-on-black attacks and the reverse?

After researching the FBI numbers for “Suicide of a Superpower,” this writer concluded: “An analysis of ‘single offender victimization figures’ from the FBI for 2007 finds blacks committed 433,934 crimes against whites, eight times the 55,685 whites committed against blacks. Interracial rape is almost exclusively black on white — with 14,000 assaults on white women by African Americans in 2007. Not one case of a white sexual assault on a black female was found in the FBI study.”

Though blacks are outnumbered 5-to-1 in the population by whites, they commit eight times as many crimes against whites as the reverse. By those 2007 numbers, a black male was 40 times as likely to assault a white person as the reverse.

If interracial crime is the ugliest manifestation of racism, what does this tell us about where racism really resides — in America?

And if the FBI stats for 2007 represent an average year since the Tawana Brawley rape-hoax of 1987, over one-third of a million white women have been sexually assaulted by black males since 1987 — with no visible protest from the civil rights leadership.

Today, 73 percent of all black kids are born out of wedlock. Growing up, these kids drop out, use drugs, are unemployed, commit crimes and are incarcerated at many times the rate of Asians and whites — or Hispanics, who are taking the jobs that used to go to young black Americans.

Are white vigilantes or white cops really Black America’s problem?

Obama seems not to think so. The Rev. Sharpton notwithstanding, he is touting Ray Kelly as a possible chief of homeland security.

In the Big Media, which has relentlessly sought out the voices of those most incensed by the verdict in Sanford, Fla., that is how the Saga of Trayvon Martin is being told. And from listening to TV reports of the rage across black America, that is what is widely believed there.

But is that what happened? Well, not exactly.

Trayvon Martin was not shot while walking home.

He was shot after sucker-punching George Zimmerman, breaking his nose, knocking him down, jumping on top of him, beating him martial arts style and banging his head on a concrete walk, while Zimmerman screamed again and again, “Help me, help me.”

This is what George Zimmerman said happened.

It is what the sole eyewitness to the fight, John Good, says happened. It is what Sanford police believed.

It is what the defense proved beyond a reasonable doubt. It is what that jury of six women came to believe.

Why, then, do so many in the black community believe Trayvon was profiled and murdered, when even most of the analysts on the cable news shows were saying in the last days of the trial that the prosecution had failed completely to make its case?

Answer: Many had convicted George Zimmerman in their hearts before the trial began. Here, as this writer noted a year ago, are some of the voices that had declared Zimmerman guilty of murder before a witness had been called.

“Blacks are under attack,” railed Jesse Jackson. “Killing us is big business.” Trayvon was “shot down in cold blood by a vigilante … murdered and martyred.”

“A hate crime,” said Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif. Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., said Trayvon had been “executed.”

The Grio compared his killing to the lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955. The New Black Panther Party put Zimmerman’s face on a “Wanted Dead or Alive” poster, called for 5,000 black men to run him down and said Trayvon had been “murdered in cold blood.”

Spike Lee twittered Zimmerman’s home address.

And President Obama? Did he calm the waters? Hardly. He signaled whose side he was on. “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” he said.

Not only did they all inflame the black community into believing a racist atrocity had occurred, others still do so, even after the weeks of testimony that raised far more than a reasonable doubt.

Moments after the verdict, Al Sharpton ranted, “This is an atrocity.” He went on to explain the moral outrage that the ladies of the jury had just committed.

“What this jury has done is establish a precedent that when you are young and fit a certain profile, you can be committing no crime, just bringing some Skittles and iced tea home to your brother, and be killed.”

Did the ladies of the jury really establish such a “precedent”?

The four-term mayor of Washington, D.C., Marion Barry, has now brought his healing touch to the proceedings.

The Zimmerman verdict was “awful,” he said, another example of “institutionalized racism.” But look to Marion to find a bright side.

“The good news is that Zimmerman will never be in peace. He won’t be able to get a job. He’ll have to go underground, travel incognito and never live in peace. That’s the good news for me.” Now a comment like that might befit a James Earl Ray. But George Zimmerman? Who turned this neighborhood watch fellow, well-liked by all in his community, into some racist monster?

The night of the verdict, Mark O’Mara gave America the answer.

George “didn’t know why he was turned into a monster,” O’Mara told the assembled journalists. “But quite honestly, you guys had a lot to do with it. You took a story that was fed to you, and you ran with it, and you ran right over him, and that was horrid to him.”

Like his partner Don West, O’Mara exhibited moral courage in that post-verdict press conference, as did that jury of six women, who rejected the prosection’s pleas to at least give them manslaughter or child abuse.

President Obama might now exhibit a little moral courage of his own, by directing his Justice Department to halt this scavenger hunt for a “hate crime.” If Sanford police and the FBI could not find a hate crime, and the prosecution could not prove racial profiling or malice, what reason is there to believe any such motive ever existed?

If Barack Obama and Eric Holder capitulate to Al Sharpton’s demand for “Plan B” and the NAACP’s demand for a second trial of George Zimmerman for a crime of which he has been acquitted, most Americans will come to believe this is no search for justice, but a drive for racial retribution and revenge. And they will be right.

End this persecution of George Zimmerman, Mr. President.

Shut it down.

For George Zimmerman’s defense has proven, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he shot Trayvon Martin not out of malice, rage or hate — but in a desperate act of self-defense.

Zimmerman was being beaten “ground-and-pound,” mixed martial arts style. His head was being banged on the cement. Screaming again and again for help, he pulled out his gun and fired.

Even the prosecution is now conceding Trayvon might have been on top, and is now scrambling for a compromise verdict on a lesser charge than second-degree murder, a charge that never should have been brought. Indeed, this trial should never have been held.

What we have witnessed in Sanford, Fla., is the prosecution of an innocent man for murder because the politically and socially powerful demanded it.

That Trayvon is dead is a tragedy, and an avoidable tragedy. But it was not murder. And it does not justify railroading a man who, whatever his mistakes that night — and George Zimmerman made them — committed no crime.

The case comes down to four questions. And the answers, supported by the evidence, testimony and common sense, point straight to an acquittal.

First, who was the aggressor?

All agree it would have been better if Zimmerman had never left his car or followed Trayvon that night.

Yet, ask yourself:

Would a pudgy, out-of-shape 28-year-old with a gun, facing a 17-year-old athletic kid, 4 inches taller, with a longer reach, throw a punch and start a fistfight with him?

If Zimmerman threw the first punch, what would be his motive? If you have a gun and your adversary does not, is not the sensible stance to keep your distance so you can be free to pull the gun? Who armed with a pistol starts a fistfight with a suspicious stranger?

Moreover, Trayvon’s body showed no signs of having ever been punched, while George’s nose looks like he was sucker-punched.

Second, who was on top in those final moments of the fight?

If Zimmerman was on top and Trayvon was on his back, Trayvon would have been found on his back. He was found dead on his stomach.

If Zimmerman was on top and Trayvon was on his stomach, he would have been shot in the back. He was shot in the chest.

How could Trayvon have been found lying on his face, with a bullet hole in his chest, if Zimmerman was sitting on top of him? Only if George Zimmerman, after shooting Trayvon, would have turned him over as he lay dying. No one has even suggested that.

Why was the back of Zimmerman’s jacket soaking wet, and the back of Trayvon’s dry, if Trayvon was on the bottom? Why were the knees of Trayvon’s pants wet, if he was on the bottom?

Third, who was screaming for help?

His mother, brother and father say it was Trayvon. George’s mother, father and half a dozen friends say it is George’s voice on the tape, screaming for help.

Trayvon’s father and brother apparently told investigators initially that the voice was not Trayvon’s, or they did not know. And the eyewitness John Good says the guy on the bottom in the red jacket, George Zimmerman, was the one screaming.

But, again, let us assume it was Trayvon screaming.

Why would he be screaming? If he was being beaten up martial arts style on the ground, would Trayvon not have had cuts and bruises?

What, exactly, was George Zimmerman doing to this 17-year-old football player that he should be screaming for help?

Where is the physical evidence that Trayvon had been hurt in any way before he was shot? Is screaming how a tough 17-year-old male reacts in a fistfight, even one he is losing?

Trayvon was a stranger in that neighborhood, and George was the neighborhood watch guy. Which of the two is more likely to be yelling for help from the neighbors?

Fourth, was the use of a firearm justified, even if Zimmerman was losing the fight and being beaten up?

Were his injuries that serious? Was he really is danger of grave bodily harm?

Experts disagree. But the real question is: What did Zimmerman think at the time? And judging by those piercing screams, was not that screaming man frightened, even terrified?

Trayvon’s parents think these were the desperate cries for help of a son about to be killed. But if they were Zimmerman’s cries, could George not have had those same thoughts?

George Zimmerman should have informed Trayvon he was the neighborhood watch. Trayvon should not have pummeled him. Both made mistakes. One is dead. To send the other to prison for what happened that night would be an act of vengeance, not justice, an invocation of the old lex talionis — an eye for an eye.

That’s not what America is supposed to be about.

Having won the presidency of Egypt in free and fair elections after the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, President Mohammed Morsi has been ousted in a military coup and placed under house arrest. Brotherhood leaders, convicted of no crimes, are being rounded up.

They played by America’s rules. Now, with America’s blessing, they are being locked up by America’s friends in Egypt’s armed forces.

Nor is this the first perceived betrayal. When Hamas won the free elections demanded by George W. Bush, America refused to recognize their legitimacy and plotted the violent overthrow of Hamas in Gaza.

When Islamists swept the first round of Algerian elections in 1991, the regime, with the blessing of Bush 1, canceled the second round, leading to a guerrilla war that cost 100,000 to 200,000 dead.

If Muslims have come to believe that Americans preaching democracy are charlatans and hypocrites, do they not have a point?

U.S. foreign policy once seemed to make sense. We put vital interests ahead of democratist ideology. We stood by those who stood by us. We did not spend time inspecting the moral credentials of those who took America’s side. We played the cards we were dealt in this world.

Gen. Washington danced a jig when he heard Louis XVI, a descendant of the Sun King, would support America’s cause against our mother country.

In 1917, Woodrow Wilson took us to war “to make the world safe for democracy” as an associate power of five empires — the British, French, Italian, Russian and Japanese. At war’s end, Wilson signed treaties that plundered the lands and colonies of the three defeated empires, for the benefit of the victorious empires.

In the Good War from 1941 to 1945 against the Nazis, our greatest ally was the mass murderer of Christians and democrats Josef Stalin.

In the Cold War, Dwight Eisenhower sanctioned the overthrow of democratic governments in Guatemala and Iran and their replacement by autocrats who would take our side in the struggle for the world.

We welcomed the Shah, Saudi kings and Gulf emirs. JFK welcomed the “Butcher of the Balkans,” Marshal Tito, to the White House. President Nixon sided with autocratic Pakistan over democratic India — for Pakistan had sided with us.

Nixon went to Beijing to toast Chairman Mao, a monster as great as Stalin. Liberals sickened by our alliance with the “corrupt and dictatorial regime” of President Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon were ecstatic.

The Nixon White House celebrated the overthrow of elected president Salvador Allende of Chile by Gen. Augusto Pincohet.

Among other U.S. allies in the Cold War were Asian dictators and generals Chiang Kai-shek of China, Syngman Rhee and Park Chung-hee of South Korea, and Suharto of Indonesia.

Portugal’s dictator Antonio Salazar and Spain’s Gen. Francisco Franco were loyal allies against Bolshevism. Mobutu Sese Seko was for 32 years our man in the Congo, as Emperor Haile Selassie was in Ethiopia.

Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak were American allies and dictators of Egypt from 1970 to 2011, until, in the name of our democratic ideals, we threw our flawed friend Mubarak to the wolves.

What is the cause of our present angst over what is happening in Cairo? Our democratist ideals appear to have been run over by U.S. armored personnel carriers driven by Egyptian soldiers trained by the U.S. Army. Whether or not our interests have been advanced, our ideals seem to have been wounded.

Behind our ambivalence and paralysis may be found several truths. First, the Cold War, the life-or-death civilizational struggle that defined our times, is over. No vital U.S. interest is at risk in Egypt to justify military intervention or the shedding of American blood.

This is thus their problem, not ours, most Americans believe, and our influence is receding there, even as that of the British, French and Russians did before us. Let them work it out.

Testifying to this truth is the tape of Secretary of State John Kerry inspecting his yacht off Nantucket as the Egyptian regime fell, and Obama, after a brief National Security Council conclave, heading off for the golf course on the July 4 weekend, then on to Camp David.

Today, from Egypt to Lebanon to Syria and Iraq, it is Islamist against secularist, Sunni vs. Shia, tribe against tribe, those in power against those who want power. The Arab Spring has ushered in the Arab war of all against all.

That year 1848, when all the thrones of Europe were shaken by revolution, was a similar time. And those wise old war hawks of 1812, Henry Clay and John Calhoun, found themselves again on the same side.

America, they said, should stay out.

“Masterly inactivity” is our role, said Calhoun. Added Clay, “Avoiding the distant wars of Europe, we should keep our lamp burning brightly on this Western shore as a light to all the nations than to hazard its utter extinction amid the ruins of fallen or falling republics.”

“They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Ben Franklin is much quoted in today’s debate on the trade-off between freedom and security, as we learn about the National Security Agency’s easy access to our phone records and emails.

Yet we Americans have often sacrificed liberty for safety.

In World War II, Korea and Vietnam, we conscripted millions of men and sent hundreds of thousands to their deaths fighting against Italians, Germans, Japanese, Koreans and Vietnamese.

The greater antagonist of liberty is not the quest for security, but our insatiable demand and inexorable drive for equality – not equality of rights but equality of results.

To equalize incomes the government confiscates 40 percent of the earnings of the most successful Americans and uses that wealth to subsidize the food, health care, housing and income of that half of the nation that pays no income taxes.

A steeply progressive income tax was originally advanced by that great egalitarian Karl Marx.

The federal estate tax is 40 percent for the wealthy. Some states tack on 16 percent. Individuals may spend entire lives acquiring wealth for their progeny. And governments, in the name of equality, will seize half of it on their deaths. Socialism, said Winston Churchill, is the philosophy of envy and gospel of greed.

To guarantee equal pay for equal work, the government has created agencies to monitor the payrolls of every business, agencies empowered to identify, expose and punish employers who might dare to use their economic freedom to reward some workers more than others.

To ensure racial, ethnic and gender equality in the labor force and the front office, the government fields thousands of agents to police the hiring, promotion and dismissal decisions of executives.

Affirmative action and quotas have been imposed on colleges and universities, stripping those institutions of freedom of choice, to advance a greater racial, ethnic and gender equality in student bodies and on faculties than a free and fair competition might produce.

Contract set-asides have been established on which no white male may bid. To make minorities and women more equal, we make others less free.

Freedom of assembly, which produced men’s and women’s clubs and colleges, has been under assault for decades. Only a handful of men’s colleges survive. Even Augusta National Golf Club was forced to conform to the dictates of diversity and equality.

To achieve greater equality in the test scores of Asian, white, Hispanic and black children, enormous sums have been extracted from taxpayers and shoveled into an educational establishment with little to show for it in 50 years. Yet the clamor rises for more billions to achieve this modern form of alchemy.

In a decades-long intrusion on freedom that ignited a social rebellion, children were forcibly bused out of their home neighborhoods across cities to troubled schools to achieve a “racial balance.”

Why? Because it was said that through a process of osmosis, underachievers could attain greater equality with overachievers by having them sit beside one another in classrooms. Parental freedom yielded to social dictation.

“A man’s home is his castle,” was a concept we inherited from English law and proudly adopted as our own. No more. A man’s right to sell or rent his home is restricted by open housing laws.

Owners of hotels, motels, taverns and restaurants can lose their licenses if they conduct their businesses according to personal biases and beliefs.

In the land of the free, such freedom is now illegal.

“If we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal, as well,” said Obama in his second inaugural. Thus, homosexual unions will soon have to be treated equally with traditional marriage, though “marriage equality” contradicts Christian teaching.

Our Union was “founded on the principles of liberty and equality,” said Obama. But how could that be when the word “equality” does not appear in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights or the Federalist Papers?

Egalite is rather a founding principle of Robespierre’s revolution, not ours. It is ideological contraband smuggled into America and the enemy of that freedom for which our fathers fought.

In 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal in their God-given rights to life and liberty. Does anyone think that Jefferson, who kept slaves all his life, excoriated Indians in that same Declaration of Independence and spoke of a “natural aristocracy” that Providence had wisely provided to govern us, believed all men and all women were equal in any other way?

In The Lessons of History, Will and Ariel Durant wrote: “Leave men free and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917.

“Freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.”

As the Party of Equality triumphs, the Party of Freedom expires.

Happy Independence Day!

The Best of Patrick J. Buchanan

Is the Second Reconstruction over?

The first ended with the withdrawal of Union troops from the Southern states as part of a deal that gave Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency after the disputed election of 1876.

The second began with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a century after Appomattox. Under the VRA, Southern states seeking to make even minor changes in voting laws had to come to Washington to plead their case before the Justice Department and such lions of the law as Eric Holder.

Southern states were required to get this pre-clearance for any alterations in voting laws because of systematic violations of the 14th and 15th amendment constitutional rights of black Americans to equal access to polling places and voting booths.

The South had discriminated by using poll taxes, gerrymandering and literacy tests, among other tactics. Dixie was in the penalty box because it had earned a place there.

What the Supreme Court did Tuesday, in letting the South out of the box, is to declare that, as this is not 1965, you cannot use abuses that date to 1965, but have long since disappeared, to justify indefinite federal discrimination against the American South.

You cannot impose burdens on Southern states, five of which recorded higher voting percentages among their black populations in 2012 than among their white populations, based on practices of 50 years ago that were repudiated and abandoned in another era.

You cannot punish Southern leaders in 2013 for the sins of their grandfathers. As Chief Justice John Roberts noted, black turnout in 2012 was higher in Mississippi than in Massachusetts.

Does this mean the South is now free to discriminate again?

By no means. State action that discriminates against minority voters can still be brought before the Department of Justice.

Even the “pre-clearance” provision of the VRA remains. All the court has said is that if Congress wishes to impose a pre-clearance provision on a state or group of states, Congress must have more evidence to justify unequal treatment than what “Bull” Connor did in Birmingham back in 1965.

Congress could pass a bill today authorizing Justice Department intervention in any state where the registration of blacks, Hispanics or Asians fell below 60 percent of that electorate.

What Congress can no longer do is impose conditions on Southern states from which Northern states are exempt. Washington can no longer treat the states unequally – for that, too, is a violation of the Constitution.

The Roberts court just took a giant stride to restoring the Union.

Yet the hysterical reaction to the decision reveals a great deal.

What do critics say they are afraid of?

While conceding that immense progress has been made with the huge turnout of black voters in the South and the re-election of a black president, they say they fear that without the pre-clearance provision this would never have happened. And now that the provision no longer applies to the South, the evil old ways will return.

On several counts this is disheartening.

For what the critics of the court decision are saying is that, no matter the progress made over half a century, they do not trust the South to deal fairly and decently with its black citizens, without a club over its head. They do not believe the South has changed in its heart from the days of segregation.

They think the South is lying in wait for a new opportunity to disfranchise its black voters. And they think black Southerners are unable to defend their own interests – without Northern liberal help.

In this belief there are elements of paranoia, condescension and bigotry.

Many liberals not only do not trust the South, some detest it. And many seem to think it deserves to be treated differently than the more progressive precincts of the nation.

Consider Wednesday’s offering by Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson. The South, he writes, is the home of “so-called right-to-work laws” and hostility to the union shop, undergirded by “the virulent racism of the white Southern establishment,” a place where a “right-wing antipathy toward workers’ rights” is pandemic.

The South is the “the heartland of cheap-labor America. … When it wants to slum, business still goes to the South.” Then there are those “reactionary white Republican state governments.”

Were a conservative to use the term “black” as a slur the way Meyerson spits out the word “white,” he would be finished at the Post. Meyerson’s summation:

“If the federal government wants to build a fence that keeps the United States safe from the danger of lower wages and poverty and their attendant ills – and the all-round fruitcakery of the right-wing white South – it should build that fence from Norfolk to Dallas. There is nothing wrong with a fence as long as you put it in the right place.”

Harold looks forward to the day that a surging Latino population forces “epochal political change” on a detestable white South.

The Best of Patrick J. Buchanan

“The Pentagon unveiled plans Tuesday for fully integrating women into front-line and special combat roles, including elite forces such as Army Rangers and Navy SEALs.”

So ran the lead on the CNN story. And why are we doing this?

Did the young officers leading troops in battle in Afghanistan and Iraq, returning with casualties, say they needed women to enhance the fighting efficiency of their combat units and the survival rate of their soldiers?

Did men from the 101st and 82nd airborne, the Marines, the SEALs and Delta Force petition the Joint Chiefs to put women alongside them in future engagements to make them an even superior force?

No. This decision to put women in combat represents a capitulation of the military brass, a surrender to the spirit of our age, the Pentagon’s salute to feminist ideology.

This is not a decision at which soldiers arrived when they studied after-action reports, but the product of an ideology that contradicts human nature, human experience and human history, and declares as dogma that women are just as good at soldiering as men.

But if this were true, rather than merely asserted, would it have taken mankind the thousands of years from Thermopylae to discover it?

In the history of civilization, men have fought the wars. In civilized societies, attacks on women have always been regarded as contemptible and cowardly. Even the Third Reich in its dying hours did not send women into battle, but old men and boys.

“You don’t hit a girl!” was something every American boy had drilled into him from childhood. It was part of our culture, the way we were raised. A Marine friend told me he would have resigned from the Corps rather than fight women with the pugil sticks used for bayonet practice at Parris Island.

Sending women into combat on equal terms seems also to violate common sense. When they reach maturity, men are bigger, stronger, more aggressive. Thus they commit many times the number of violent crimes and outnumber women in prisons 10 to 1.

For every Bonnie Parker, there are 10 Clyde Barrows.

Is it a coincidence that every massacre discussed in our gun debate – from the Texas Tower to the Long Island Railroad, from Columbine to Ft. Hood, from Virginia Tech to Tucson, from Aurora to Newtown – was the work of a crazed male?

Nothing matches mortal combat where soldiers fight and kill, and are wounded, maimed and die for cause or country. Domestically, the closest approximations are combat training, ultimate fighting, boxing and that most physical of team sports, the NFL.

Yet no women compete against men in individual or team sports. They are absent from boys’ and men’s teams in high school and college, be it football, basketball, baseball, hockey or lacrosse.

Even in the non-contact sports of golf, tennis and volleyball, men compete with men, women against women. In the Olympics, to which nations send their best athletes, women and men compete separately in track and field, swimming and gymnastics.

Consider our own history. Would any U.S. admiral say that in any of America’s great naval battles – Mobile Bay, Manila Bay, Midway, the Coral Sea – we would done better with some women manning the guns?

In the revolutionary and civil wars, World Wars I and II, Korea and Vietnam, women were not in combat. Was it invidious discrimination of which we should all be ashamed that women were not fighting alongside the men at Gettysburg, in the Argonne, at Normandy or with “Chesty” Puller’s Marines in the retreat from the Chosin Reservoir?

Undeniably, some women might handle combat as well as some men. But that is true of some 13-, 14- and 15-year-old boys, and some 50- and 60-year old men. Yet we do not draft boys or men that age or send them into combat. Is this invidious discrimination based on age, or ageism?

Carry this feminist-egalitarian ideology to its logical conclusion, and half of those storming the Omaha and Utah beaches should have been girls and women. Is this not an absurdity?

We have had Navy ships become “love boats,” with female sailors returning pregnant. At the Naval Academy, three midshipmen, football players, allegedly raped an intoxicated classmate. For months, she was too ashamed and frightened to report it.

An estimated 26,000 personnel of the armed forces were sexually assaulted in 2011, up from 19,000 in 2010. Obama and the Congress are understandably outraged. Such assaults are appalling. But is not the practice of forcing young men and women together in close quarters a contributory factor here?

Among the primary reasons the Equal Rights Amendment, the ERA, went down to defeat three decades ago was the realization it could mean, in a future war, women could be drafted equally with men, and sent in equal numbers into combat.

But what appalled the Reaganites is social progress in the age of Obama. This is another country from the one we grew up in.

The Best of Patrick J. Buchanan

On U.S. military intervention in Syria’s civil war, where “both sides are slaughtering each other as they scream over an arbitrary red line ‘Allahu akbar’ … I say let Allah sort it out.”

So said Sarah Palin to the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference. And, as is not infrequently the case, she nailed it.

Hours later, Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times, at length, echoed Palin: “Those who are urging the US to get more deeply involved in the Syrian conflict now are living in the past.”

Four fundamental changes make it “no longer realistic, or even desirable, for the US to dominate” the Middle East as we did from the Suez crisis of 1956 through the Iraq invasion of 2003.

The four changes: the failures of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the Great Recession, the Arab Spring and emerging U.S. energy independence.

Indeed, with $2 trillion sunk, 7,000 U.S. troops dead, 40,000 wounded, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans dead, and millions of refugees, what do we have to show for this vast human and material waste?

Can a country with an economy limping along, one that has run four consecutive deficits in excess of $1 trillion, afford another imperial adventure?

On the Shiite side of the Syrian civil war are Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Hezbollah and Syrian President Bashar Assad. On the Sunni side are the al-Qaida-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra, Sunni jihadists from across the Middle East, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Is victory for either side worth yet another U.S. war?

Ought we not stand back and ask: What vital interest is imperiled here?

And even if Americans favor one side or the other, how lasting an impact could any U.S. intervention have? The region is in turmoil.

Since the Tunisian uprising that dethroned an autocratic ally, dictators have fallen in Egypt and Libya. There have been a Shiite revolt in Bahrain, a civil war in Yemen and a civil-sectarian war in Syria that has cost 90,000 lives. Iraq is disintegrating. Al-Qaida is in Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, the Maghreb region and Mali.

Now the muezzin’s call to religious war is heard.

“How could 100 million Shiites defeat 1.7 billion (Sunnis)?” roared powerful Saudi cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, calling for a Sunni-Shiite war. Al-Qaradawi denounces Assad’s Alawite sect as “more infidel than Christians and Jews” and calls Hezbollah “the party of the devil.”

“Everyone who has the ability and has training to kill … is required to go” to Syria, said al-Qaradawi.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban have made a comeback, and the United States is negotiating with the same crowd we sent an army to oust in 2001. And the press reports we will be leaving behind $7 billion in U.S. military vehicles and equipment when we depart.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the most successful Turkish leader since Kemal Ataturk, appears to have lost his mandate, with hundreds of thousands pouring into streets and squares both to denounce and to defend him.

The United States, says Rachman, “has recognised that, ultimately, the people of the Middle East are going to have to shape their own destinies. Many of the forces at work in the region – such as Islamism and Sunni-Shia sectarianism – are alarming to the West but they cannot be forever channelled or suppressed.”

Did those clamoring today for intervention in Syria learn nothing from Ronald Reagan’s intervention in an earlier Arab civil war, the one in Lebanon? Result: 241 dead Marines, the U.S. Embassy in Beirut bombed and hostages taken.

Reagan left office believing his decision to put Marines in Lebanon was his greatest mistake. And to retrieve those hostages, he acceded to a transfer of weapons to Iran, an action that almost broke his presidency.

Yet it is not only in the Middle East that we are “living in the past,” in a world long gone. As Ted Galen Carpenter writes in Chronicles, under NATO we are committed to go to war with Russia on behalf of 27 nations.

If Russia collides with Estonia or Latvia over the treatment of their Russian minorities, we fight Russia. For whose benefit is this commitment?

Today Japan spends 1 percent of its gross domestic product on defense. Yet the USA is committed to go to war to defend not only the home islands but the Senkaku islets and rocks in the East China Sea that China also claims.

Are the Senkakus really worth a war with China?

NATO was established to defend Europe. Yet Europe spends less on its own defense than we do. Sixty years after the Korean War, we remain committed to defend South Korea against North Korea. Yet South Korea has an economy 40 times as large as North Korea’s.

Former Rep. Ron Paul asks: Why, when U.S. debt is larger than our GDP and we are running mammoth annual deficits, are we borrowing money abroad to give away in foreign aid?

Good question. As for those ethnic, sectarian and civil wars raging across the Middle East, let Allah sort it out.

The Best of Patrick J. Buchanan

Barack Obama has just taken his first baby steps into a war in Syria that may define and destroy his presidency.

Thursday, while he was ringing in Gay Pride Month with LGBT revelers, a staffer, Ben Rhodes, informed the White House press that U.S. weapons will be going to the Syrian rebels.

For two years Obama has stayed out of this sectarian-civil war that has consumed 90,000 lives. Why is he going in now?

The White House claims it now has proof Bashar Assad used sarin gas to kill 100-150 people, thus crossing a “red line” Obama had set down as a “game changer.” Defied, his credibility challenged, he had to do something.

Yet Assad’s alleged use of sarin to justify U.S. intervention seems less like our reason for getting into this war than our excuse.

For the White House decided to intervene weeks ago, before the use of sarin was confirmed. And why would Assad have used only tiny traces? Where is the photographic evidence of the disfigured dead?

What proof have we the rebels did not fabricate the use of sarin or use it themselves to get the gullible Americans to fight their war?

Yet, why would President Obama, whose proud boast is that he will have extricated us from the Afghan and Iraq wars, as Dwight Eisenhower did from the Korean War, plunge us into a new war?

He has been under severe political and foreign pressure to do something after Assad and Hezbollah recaptured the strategic town of Qusair and began preparing to recapture Aleppo, the largest city.

Should Assad succeed, it would mean a decisive defeat for the rebels and their backers: the Turks, Saudis and Qataris. And it would mean a geostrategic victory for Iran, Hezbollah and Russia, who have proven themselves reliable allies.

To prevent this defeat and humiliation, we are now going to ship arms and ammunition to keep the rebels going and in control of enough territory to negotiate a peace that will remove Assad.

We are going to make this a fair fight.

What is wrong with this strategy? It is the policy of an amateur. It treats war like a game. It ignores the lessons of history. And, as it continues a bloodbath with no prospect of an end to it, it is immoral.

In every great civil war of modernity – the Russian civil war of 1919-1921, the Spanish civil war of 1936-1939, the Chinese civil war of 1945-49, one side triumphs and takes power. The other loses and lives with the consequences – defeat, death, exile.

What is the likely reaction to our escalation from humanitarian aid to military aid? Counter-escalation. Russia, Iran and Hezbollah are likely to rush in more weapons and troops to accelerate the progress of Assad’s army before the American weapons arrive.

And if they raise and call, what does Obama do?

Already, a clamor is being heard from our clients in the Middle East and Congress to crater Syria’s runways with cruise missiles, to send heavy weapons to the rebels, to destroy Assad’s air force on the ground, to bomb his antiaircraft sites.

All of these are acts of war. Yet under the Constitution, Congress alone authorizes war.

When did Congress authorize Obama to take us to war in Syria? Where does our imperial president get his authority to draw red lines and attack countries that cross them?

Have we ceased to be a republic? Has Congress become a mere spectator to presidential decisions on war and peace?

As Vladimir Putin seems less the reluctant warrior, what do we do if Moscow answers the U.S. escalation by delivering on its contract to provide S-300 antiaircraft missiles to Damascus, which can cover half of Israel?

Obama has put us on the escalator to a war already spilling over Syria’s borders into Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan, a war that is now sundering the entire Middle East along Sunni and Shia lines.

He is making us de facto allies of the Al-Qaida-like al-Nusra Front, of Hamas and jihadists from all across the region, and of the Muslim Brotherhood. Egypt’s President Mohammed Morsi just severed ties to Syria and is demanding a “no-fly zone,” which one imagines the United States, not the Egyptian air force, would have to enforce.

Our elites shed tears over the 90,000 dead in Syria. But what we are about to do will not stop the killing, but simply lengthen the duration of the war and increase the numbers of dead and wounded.

At the top of this escalator our country has begun to ascend is not just a proxy war with Iran in Syria, but a real war that would entail a disaster for the world economy.

If the ouster of Assad is what the Sunni powers of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt demand, why not let them do it?

Anti-interventionists should demand a roll-call vote in Congress on whether Obama has the authority to take us into this Syrian war.

The Best of Patrick J. Buchanan

Next year should be a banner year for the GOP, and may yet be.

Obamacare, a “train wreck” about to happen, says Democratic Sen. Max Baucus, goes into full effect Jan. 1, with the popular IRS as enforcer.

The Obama media feel betrayed by the secret intrusions on First Amendment rights. Libertarians see the National Security Agency’s data mining as a massive violation of Fourth Amendment rights.

The White House is bedeviled by scandals, the second-term curse has caught up with the Obama presidency, and prospects for the U.S. economy seem dicier than a few months ago.

History is also on the GOP’s side. In the second midterm elections, Presidents Wilson, FDR, Eisenhower, JFK-LBJ, Nixon-Ford, Reagan and Bush II all suffered big losses. It has become a tradition.

But if the GOP is favored to hold the House and make gains in the Senate, the long-term prognosis for the party remains grim.

First, libertarianism is breaking up that old gang of mine.

Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham call for air strikes on Syria. But no echo is heard, as the Republican Party becomes anti-interventionist.

Yet the acid test comes after Friday’s Iranian election, as the neocon war drums begin to beat.

Libertarian Republicans believe the National Security Agency is Big Brother and the Brave New World at hand. National security Republicans back the agency’s right to access private data banks to protect us from terrorism.

On how to deal with 12 million illegal aliens – send them home or grant them amnesty and a “path to citizenship” – the party’s rancorous division will be starkly visible when the bill reaches the House.

But the existential crisis of the GOP, from which it has turned its eyes away since George H.W. Bush, is demography.

Yet the matter cannot be avoided now, for it is on page one.

“White Numbers Shrink,” was the headline on the lead story in USA Today. “More Whites Dying Than Being Born,” blaredThe Wall Street Journal. What does this mean?

In demographic terms, more white Americans died in 2012 than were born. Never before – not during the Civil War bloodletting, not during the influenza epidemic after World War I, not during the Great Depression and birth dearth of the 1930s – has this happened.

In ethnic terms, it means that Americans whose forebears came from Great Britain, Ireland and Germany, Southern and Eastern Europe – the European tribes of North America – have begun to die.

The demographic winter of white America is at hand, even as it began years ago for the native-born of old Europe.

In political terms, this is depressing news for the Republican Party. For nearly 90 percent of all Republican votes in presidential elections are provided by Americans of European descent.

In 1960 white folks were close to 90 percent of the entire U.S. population and 95 percent of the electorate. Nixon’s New Majority was created by pulling Northern Catholic ethnics and Southern conservative Protestants, white folks all, out of the Roosevelt coalition and bringing them into a new alliance that would give Nixon a 49-state landslide in 1972, which Reagan would replicate in 1984.

But since that New Majority gave the Republicans five victories in six presidential elections, four of them 40-state landslides, the political world has turned upside down, and demography is the cause.

Mitt Romney won 59 percent of the white vote, a 3-to-2 victory over Obama among America’s majority. In any year before 1980, that would have meant victory. But in 2012 whites were only 74 percent of those who went to the polls.

Thus, Obama’s sweep of 80 percent of the African-American, Asian and Hispanic vote, one-fourth of the electorate and rising, enabled him to coast to a second term.

Between 2008 and 2012, the Hispanic vote rose 1.4 million, the black vote by 1.7 million, and the white vote fell by 2 million.

Where is America going? What does the GOP future look like?

America’s white majority, 64 percent of the population and 74 percent of the electorate, still declining in relative terms, has begun to decline in real terms. Deaths outnumber births. Among all U.S. births in 2012, white babies were outnumbered by babies of color.

If Republicans are opposed to what mass immigration is doing to the country demographically, ethnically, socially and politically, there are, as Reagan used to say, “simple answers, just no easy answers.”

Those answers: No amnesty, secure the border, enforce laws against businesses that hire illegals, and impose a moratorium on new immigration so wages can rise and immigrants enter the middle class and start voting as did the children and grandchildren of the immigrants of 1890-1920 by 1972.

So what are the Republicans doing?

Going back on their word, dishonoring their platform, and enraging their loyal supporters, who gave Mitt 90 percent of his votes, to pander to a segment of the electorate that gave Mitt less than 5 percent of his total votes.

Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.

The Best of Patrick J. Buchanan

A Cairo court has convicted 43 men and women of using foreign funds to foment unrest inside Egypt in connection with the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak.

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.

The Best of Patrick J. Buchanan

Before his committee sat, unapologetic and uncontrite, Apple CEO Tim Cook, whose company had paid no U.S. corporate income taxes on the $74 billion it had earned abroad in recent years.

“Apple has sought the Holy Grail of tax avoidance,” said Levin. “Apple has exploited an absurdity.”

Actually, Apple had done nothing wrong, except hire some crack accountants who chose Ireland’s County Cork as the headquarters of their international division. Thus Apple paid on profits earned outside the U.S.A. nothing but a 2 percent tax imposed by the Irish government.

Far from being condemned, Apple’s CPAs ought to be inducted into the Accountants Hall of Fame.

It is no more immoral for Apple to move its headquarters for foreign sales to Ireland than for Big Apple residents to move to Florida to escape the 12 percent combined state and city income tax.

Among the reasons the Sun Belt is booming at the expense of the Rust Belt is not just the weather. Southern states strive to keep income and estate taxes low or nonexistent. They want companies and families to relocate and live there, and to spend their money there.

The problem here is not with Apple, it is with Sen. Levin & Co.

In a press release, “Avoiding Their Fair Share of Taxes,” the AFL-CIO hails Levin and bewails the fact that though the U.S. corporate tax rate is 35 percent, highest in the world, corporate income tax revenue has fallen to well below 10 percent of federal tax revenue.

“Cash tax payments by non-financial companies in the S&P 500 Index fell … to $222 billion in 2010,” moaned the AFL-CIO.

“Another corporate tax avoidance strategy is to move overseas to a corporate tax haven like Bermuda. By reincorporating offshore, companies avoid paying federal income taxes on profits earned outside the United States.”

Yes, they do. But instead of bewailing this, perhaps we should start thinking and acting as our forebears did. In the same Wall Street Journal that reported on Cook’s defense of Apple, former Sen. Phil Gramm described that earlier America:

“Over the late 19th century, real GDP and employment doubled, annual average real earnings rose by over 60 percent and wholesale prices fell by 75 percent, thanks to marked improvement in productivity.”

Astonishing. And what is the difference between that age and ours? A 35 percent income tax rate on individuals and corporations that did not exist then, and would have been regarded by Americans of the Gilded Age as the satanic work of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx.

From the Civil War to World War I, our economy grew from one-half the size of Great Britain’s to twice Britain’s. American companies were capturing markets abroad. Today’s U.S. companies are looking for ways to relocate abroad.

Herewith, a modest proposal to turn this around.

Since the U.S. corporate income tax now produces less than 10 percent of federal revenue and less than 2 percent of gross domestic product, abolish it. Get rid of it.

Think of it. A continent-wide nation that doesn’t tax business.

Assume this would cost the Treasury $250 billion in lost revenue.

How to make it up? Put a 10 percent tariff on imports entering the United States, which last year added up to $2.7 trillion.

This tax reform would thus be revenue neutral.

And what would a corporate income tax rate of zero, with a 10 percent tariff on goods entering the U.S.A. from abroad, accomplish?

First, every U.S. corporation that had moved abroad in search of lower taxes in recent years would start thinking about coming home and bringing its production and its jobs back to America.

Second, that $2 trillion in income U.S. companies have stashed abroad would come roaring back into U.S. institutions.

Third, foreign companies would begin to relocate and produce here in America, both to get around the tariff and pay no taxes.

Fourth, U.S. producers would see sales soar inside the $17 trillion U.S. market, at the expense of foreigners who would pay a 10-percent admission fee to get into this market, a fraction of what they used to pay in the 19th century.

While this would cause a surge in unemployment among IRS agents and accountants, hundreds of millions of man hours could be redirected away from filling out tax forms and into productive work.

“Since 1980, the U.S. has run trade deficits in every year totaling about $9 trillion,” writes columnist Robert Samuelson.

That is 9 thousand billion dollars in trade deficits!

It is what unmade America as a self-reliant republic and made China a manufacturing marvel. And those trade deficits are how America became a dependent nation in hock to the world.

From 1865 to 1914, America had 10 Republican presidents. All believed in financing government by taxing imports, not the incomes of U.S. citizens or the U.S. companies that employed them.

And this was how the miracle Sen. Gramm details came about.

The Best of Patrick J. Buchanan

The thrice-promised land it has been called.

It is that land north of Mecca and Medina and south of Anatolia, between the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf.

In 1915 – that year of Gallipoli, which forced the resignation of First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill – Britain, to win Arab support for its war against the Ottoman Turks, committed, in the McMahon Agreement, to the independence of these lands under Arab rule.

It was for this that Lawrence of Arabia and the Arabs fought.

In November 1917, however, one month before Gen. Allenby led his army into Jerusalem, Lord Balfour, in a letter to Baron Rothschild, declared that His Majesty’s government now looked with favor upon the creation on these same lands of a national homeland for the Jewish people.

Between these clashing commitments there had been struck in 1916 a secret deal between Britain’s Mark Sykes and France’s Francois Georges-Picot. With the silent approval of czarist Russia, which had been promised Istanbul, these lands were subdivided and placed under British and French rule.

France got Syria and Lebanon. Britain took Transjordan, Palestine and Iraq, and carved out Kuwait.

Vladimir Lenin discovered the Sykes-Picot treaty in the czar’s archives and published it, so the world might see what the Great War was truly all about. Sykes-Picot proved impossible to reconcile with Woodrow Wilson’s declaration that he and the allies – the British, French, Italian, Russian and Japanese empires – were all fighting “to make the world safe for democracy.”

Imperial hypocrisy stood naked and exposed.

Wilson’s idealistic Fourteen Points, announced early in 1918, were crafted to recapture the moral high ground. Yet it was out of the implementation of Sykes-Picot that so much Arab hostility and hatred would come – and from which today’s Middle East emerged.

Nine decades on, the Sykes-Picot map of the Middle East seems about to undergo revision, and a new map, its borders drawn in blood, emerge, along the lines of what H.G. Wells called the “natural borders” of mankind.

“There is a natural and necessary political map of the world,” Wells wrote, “which transcends” these artificial states, and this natural map of mankind would see nations established on the basis of language, culture, creed, race and tribe. The natural map of the Middle East has begun to assert itself.

Syria is disintegrating, with Alawite Shia fighting Sunni, Christians siding with Damascus, Druze divided, and Kurds looking to break free and unite with their kinfolk in Turkey, Iraq and Iran. Their dream: a Kurdistani nation rooted in a common ethnic identity.

Shia Hezbollah controls the south of Lebanon, and with Shia Iran is supporting the Shia-led army and regime of Bashar Assad.

Together, they are carving out a sub-nation from Damascus to Homs to the Mediterranean. The east and north of Syria could be lost to the Sunni rebels and the Al-Nusra Front, an ally of al-Qaida.

Sectarian war is now spilling over into Lebanon.

Iraq, too, seems to be disintegrating. The Kurdish enclave in the north is acting like an independent nation, cutting oil deals with Ankara.

Sunni Anbar in the west is supporting Sunni rebels across the border in Syria. And the Shia regime in Baghdad is being scourged by Sunni terror that could reignite the civil-sectarian war of 2006-2007, this time without Gen. Petraeus’ U.S. troops to negotiate a truce or tamp it down.

Sunni Turkey is home to 15 million Kurds and 15 million Shia. And its prime minister’s role as middle man between Qatari and Saudi arms shipments and Syria’s Sunni rebels is unappreciated by his own people.

Seeing the Shia crescent – Hezbollah in Lebanon, Assad’s Syria, Nuri al-Maliki’s Iraq, the Ayatollah’s Iran – imperiled by the potential loss of its Syrian linchpin, Tehran and Hezbollah seem willing to risk far more in this Syrian war than does the Sunni coalition of Saudis, Qataris and Turks.

Who dares, wins.

Though the Turks have a 400,000-man, NATO-equipped army, a population three times that of Syria and an economy 12 times as large, and they are, with the Israelis, the strongest nations in the region, they appear to want the Americans to deal with their problem.

President Obama is to be commended for resisting neocon and liberal interventionist clamors to get us into yet another open-ended war. For we have no vital interest in Assad’s overthrow.

We have lived with him and his father for 40 years. And what did our intervention in Libya to oust Moammar Gadhafi produce but a failed state, the Benghazi atrocity, and the spread of al-Qaida into Mali and Niger?

Why should Americans die for a Sunni triumph in Syria? At best, we might bring about a new Muslim Brotherhood regime in Damascus, as in Cairo. At worst, we could get a privileged sanctuary for that al-Qaida affiliate, the Al-Nusra Front.

As the Sykes-Picot borders disappear and the nations created by the mapmakers of Paris in 1919-1920 disintegrate, a Muslim Thirty Years’ War may be breaking out in the thrice-promised land

It is not, and it should not become, America’s war.

The Best of Patrick J. Buchanan

No, this is not Watergate or Iran-Contra. Nor is it like the sex scandal that got Bill Clinton impeached.

The AP, IRS and Benghazi matters represent a scandal not of presidential wrongdoing, but of presidential indolence, indifference and incompetence in discharging the duties of chief executive.

The Barack Obama revealed to us in recent days is something rare in our history: a spectator president, clueless about what is going on in his own household, who reacts to revelations like some stunned bystander.

Consider. Because of a grave national security leak, President Obama’s Department of Justice seized two months of records from 20 telephones used by The Associated Press. An unprecedented seizure.

Yet the president was left completely in the dark. And though he rushed to defend the seizure, he claims he was uninvolved.

While the AP issue does not appear to have legs – we know what was done and why – it has badly damaged this president. For his own Justice Department treated the press, which has an exalted opinion of itself and its role, with the same contempt as the IRS treated the Tea Party.

The episode has damaged a crucial presidential asset. For this Washington press corps had provided this president with a protective coverage of his follies and failings unseen since the White House press of half a century ago covered up the prowlings of JFK.

The Benghazi issue is of far greater gravity. Still, Obama’s sins here as well seem to be those of omission, not commission.

The president was apparently completely in the dark about the urgent requests from Benghazi for more security. Obama was also apparently completely out of the loop during the seven-hour crisis of Sept. 11-12, when Ambassador Stevens was assassinated, calls for help from Benghazi were denied and two heroic ex-Navy SEALs died fighting to defend U.S. personnel from the roof of that CIA installation.

No one seems to know where Obama was that night.

The following week, as the State Department, CIA and National Security Council all worked the “talking points” to make it appear that this preplanned terrorist atrocity was a spontaneous event triggered by an anti-Islamic video, Obama knew nothing of the discussions.

Thus, almost a week after the massacre, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice was put on six networks to move the line that we could not have better prepared for what would happen in Benghazi because it was all a spontaneous event triggered by a YouTube video.

Rice’s version was untrue, but consistent with Obama’s campaign message: “Bin Laden is dead, and al-Qaida is on the run.”

Yet if Rice’s credibility was crippled by what she was sent out to parrot, a week after she got the egg all over her face, Obama was himself peddling the same line at the United Nations. Obama, it seems, may have been the last man to know the cover story had collapsed.

As for the IRS’s targeting of Tea Party applications for tax-exempt status, this bureaucratic misconduct began as far back as 2010, when the Tea Party was a national sensation.

Yet, despite Tea Party protests to members of Congress, who made inquiries of the IRS, the discrimination against groups with “Tea Party” and “Patriot” in their names continued, and was extended to groups whose proclaimed mission was to defend the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.

Literally for years this went on. Investigations were begun by the IRS, and the results reported to the Treasury Department.

But nothing was made public before the election of 2012.

This weekend we learned that the White House counsel was told this April about the IRS misconduct and the investigations, but she did not inform President Obama. He learned about it from news reports.

What we have here, it appears, is a government out of control and a president clueless about what is going on in that government.

And that is the best case. For it is difficult to believe the IRS could conduct a full-court press on Obama’s opponents, that IRS higher-ups knew about it, years ago, and that Treasury knew about it before the election – but the White House was kept in the dark about a scandal that could have derailed the Obama campaign.

But whatever Obama knew, he and his allies in Congress bear moral responsibility for denying these Tea Party folks for years their right to participate fully in the politics of their country.

For years, Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and other Democrats have slandered and slurred Tea Party people as enemies of progress – smears echoed by their mainstream press allies.

Should we then be surprised that IRS bureaucrats, hearing this, thought they were doing what was right for America by slow-walking applications for tax exemptions from these same Tea Party folks?

Who demonized the Tea Party people? Who created the climate of contempt? Whoever did gave moral sanction to those IRS agents.

And the Spectator President is right in the vanguard.

The Best of Patrick J. Buchanan

“The American people are weary. They don’t want boots on the ground. I don’t want boots on the ground. The worst thing the United States could do right now is put boots on the ground in Syria.”

That was the leading Senate hawk favoring U.S. intervention in Syria’s civil war. But by ruling out U.S. ground troops, John McCain was sending, perhaps unintentionally, another message: There is no vital U.S. interest in Syria’s civil war worth shedding the blood of American soldiers and Marines.

Thus does America’s premier hawk support the case made by think-tank scholars Owen Harries and Tom Switzer in their American Interest essay, “Leading from Behind: Third Time a Charm?”

There is in the U.S.A. today, they write, “a reluctance to commit American blood.”

A legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan “is an unwillingness of the American public to take casualties on behalf of less than truly vital challenges. … While such concerns may be admirable … they are incompatible with a superpower posture and pretensions to global leadership.”

You cannot be the “indispensable nation” if you reflexively recoil at putting “boots on the ground.”

“If a nation is not prepared to take casualties, it should not engage in the kind of policies likely to cause them. If it is not prepared to take casualties, it should resign itself to not having the kind of respect from others that a more resolute nation could expect.”

About the author’s premise, that Americans are reluctant to take casualties, is there any doubt?

To demonstrate this, we need only address a few questions.

Would we be willing to send another army of 170,000 to stop a Sunni-Shia war that might tear Iraq apart? Would the American people support sending 100,000 troops, again, to fight to keep Afghanistan from the clutches of the Taliban?

To ask these questions is to answer them.

Should Kim Jong Un attack across the DMZ with his million-man army and seize Seoul, would Barack Obama’s America, like Harry Truman’s America, send a third of a million U.S. soldiers and Marines to drive the North out? Or would we confine our support to the South, under our security treaty, to air, sea and missile strikes – from above and afar?

Under NATO, the United States is required to assist militarily any member nation that is a victim of aggression.

If Moscow occupied Estonia or Latvia in a dispute over mistreatment of its Russian minorities, would we declare war or send U.S. troops to fight Russians in the Baltic?

Would we fight the Chinese to defend the Senkakus?

“America no longer has the will, wallet or influence to impose an active and ambitious global leadership across the world,” Harries and Switzer contend. They cite Walter Lippmann, who wrote that a credible foreign policy “consists in bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, a nation’s commitments and the nation’s power.

“Without the compelling principle that the nation must maintain its objectives and its power in equilibrium, it purposes within its means and its means equal to its purposes, its commitments related to its resources and its resources adequate to its commitments, it is impossible to think at all about foreign affairs.”

Though U.S. commitments are as great or greater than in 1991, the authors write, America is not so domineering as she was at the end of the Cold War, or when Bush 43 set out to “end tyranny in our world.”

“The dollar is weak. The debt mountain is of Himalayan proportions. Budget and trade deficits are alarming. Infrastructure is aging. The AAA bond credit rating is lost. Economic growth is exceptionally sluggish for a nation that is four years out of a recession. And where 20 years ago U.S. military power was universally considered awesome in its scope, today, after more than a decade of its active deployment, the world is much more aware of its limitations and costs. It is decidedly less impressed.”

Consider Syria, where the neocons and liberal interventionists are clamoring for U.S. military action, but “no boots on the ground.”

Is there really any vital U.S. interest at risk in whether the 40-year-old Assad dictatorship stands or falls?

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been calling for Assad’s ouster for two years and transships weapons to the rebels, has now seen his country stung by a terrorist attack.

But though he has a 400,000-man NATO-equipped army, three times Syria’s population, and a 550-mile border to attack across, Erdogan wants us, the “international community,” to bring Assad down.

But why is Assad our problem – and not Erdogan’s problem?

Harries and Switzer urge Obama to enunciate a new foreign policy that defines our true vital interests and brings U.S. war guarantees into balance with U.S. power – a policy where the first question U.S. leaders ask about a conflict or crisis abroad is not “how” but “why”?

Why, exactly, is this America’s problem?

The Best of Patrick J. Buchanan