China Raises Fuel Prices

The FT reports that China has raised fuel prices across the board. Gas is now more expensive in China (about $3 per gallon) than it is in the US. What does it say about the US, when a developing country under recessionary pressures, like China, increases gas prices, while a rich country like the US keeps them low? Europe has kept gas prices high for years by adding taxes of various kinds.

Tom Friedman among many others has been calling for higher gas prices in order to promote other, greener forms of energy, but without success. When gas prices went much higher last summer, although they were still low compared to Europe, it was because of manipulation of the financial market, according to Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone, not because of any intelligent policy decision.

It looks like the US could at least pursue a policy as sensible as the Chinese, although our policies appear to be controlled by oil and gas and financial interests who are only interested in boosting their profits, not by our national interest.

Elliott Abrams as Ghost and in Person

Elliott Abrams' return to op-ed pages has given me fits. See his WSJ and NYT op-eds. Now the ghost of Iran-Contra is back, although Abrams has now moved from Latin American issues to his real love, Middle East issues, where he is lobbying hard for Israel.

I don't know how Abrams happened to start in Latin America. I'm guessing he got his job as Assistant Secretary for Latin America at the State Department through the connections of his wife's father, Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, the influential Jewish magazine. I'm guessing Abrams would rather have worked on the Middle East then, but Reagan (or maybe George Shultz) was unwilling to give him that important a job. Thus, he ended up with Latin America, where his main job was to assure that the US pursued a very conservative agenda. Those were the days when the Reagan Administration greatly feared that it was going to be invaded by El Salvador or Nicaragua.

It was Abrams' efforts to shore up right-wing governments in Central America, like the military coup that just took power in Honduras, that led to his involvement in Iran-Contra. It is ironic that Iran and a Central American coup share the top of the news cycle twenty years later. I think things are better in both places, but they still have a long way to go, especially in Iran. I'm not optimistic that significant changes are going to be implemented in Iran as a result of the recent protests. Thinking is changing there, but it will take a long time to bring any concrete changes to fruition, and there is a possibility that things could get worse. There is a lot of talk that on the authoritarian side in Iran, the leadership has moved from being dominated by clerics to being dominated by the military. And the military is back in power in Honduras. The more things change the more they stay the same.

On "Morning Joe" this morning, Mike Barnacle kept asking guests whether the withdrawal of US troops from Iraqi cities meant that a new government that is Saddam-lite might be taking over. The main response seemed to be, "Not now, but who knows what will happen in a few years." Of course, one of the main effects of the US invasion of Iraq has been the strengthening of Iranian influence there. Fareed Zakaria mentioned last Sunday that nobody was paying attention to what Iranian cleric Sistani was doing in Iraq, where he is currently living in Najaf.

Abrams' job as Israeli spokesman and lobbyist is, of course, to do all he can to get the Obama Administration to beat Iran about the head and shoulders.

Elliott Abrams Is Bank Again

Elliott Abrams has another op-ed, this time in the WSJ. It, of course, goes totally against Tony Judt's op-ed on Israeli settlements. He says the US agreed to the settlements that Obama's administration is now questioning. He's basically saying that George W. Bush was an unpatriotic, cowardly President who was afraid to stand up to the Israelis. Abrams says in effect, "I put words in Bush's mouth recognizing the settlement, and he said them." However, Abrams and Bush failed to bring anything to fruition as a result. Bush kissed Sharon's ass as instructed by Abrams, but no legal document was signed. They failed. The world has moved on. It's like Abrams is trying to enforce the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. It's dead. Get over it!

But all these articles about settlements show that the Israelis are genuinely worried. They have obviously told their Israeli agents to go all out to get the US off this settlements kick. They may succeed; Jews have lots of money and power in the US. But at least for a few shining moments the US seems to be pursuing a policy defined by US interests, rather than Israel's. Let Elliot Abrams, Bret Stevens, and the rest of the Likudniks on the WSJ editorial page stew for a little while longer.

MTCR Still Around

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists calls for a missile test ban to supplement the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR). Interestingly the article puts the MTCR in the context of the Reykjavik Summit, where Richard Perle famously stopped President Reagan from agreeing to sweeping arms control limitations with the Soviets. Perle was also instrumental in limiting the MTCR, mainly by trying to get super strong controls that other countries would not agree to. It was a typical case of the best being the enemy of the good. What we got was worse than if the US had had a more flexible negotiating position.

Anyway, the good news is that the MTCR is still alive and is probably the strongest regime controlling missile proliferation. It could have been stronger, but at least we got something.

Settlements, Schmettlements

This NYT op-ed by Tony Judt, a Jew, about the illegality of all Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory illustrates the best in Jewish thinking on the Israel situation. And it's published in the NYT, which is owned by Jews. So there is open-minded thinking on this issue in the Jewish community, even in the US. (Israelis appear more open-minded on Israeli issues in general than American Jews do.) Meanwhile Paul Wolfowitz seems to be spouting a right-wing Zionist diatribe in the Washington Post calling on President Obama to take a stronger, more public stand against Iran. So, is Wolfowitz just a neo-con like many fundamentalist Americans, or does he have an Israeli agenda, since Iran is a much greater threat to Israel than to the US?

Elliott Abrams Is Back

I was unhappy to see an op-ed by Elliott Abrams in today's NYT about Lebanon and Iran. I was going to write a letter to the editor saying that they should have mentioned in his profile that he is a convicted felon; however, according to Wikipedia, he is not a convicted felon. It says that while felony charges were prepared against him for Iran-Contra, he pleaded guilty only to two misdemeanors. It doesn't sound as good to say that he is a confessed petty criminal. Plus, it says Bush I pardoned him; does that mean he's no longer guilty even of a misdemeanor?

He has gone on from success to success despite Iran-Contra, serving as a senior official in Bush II's NSC and now at the Council on Foreign Relations. My opinion of the Council on Foreign Relations just went down several notches.

With all the furor over the recent shooting at the Holocaust Museum, there's a lot of talk about anti-Semitism. But it's people like Abrams who stir up anti-Semitism. He's held high positions in government mainly because he is a Jew with strong Jewish network connections. Another example is Michael Milken, who really is a convicted felon. Now he's back in the news, hobnobbing with the rich and famous. Bernie Madoff is unlikely to follow in Milken's and Abram's footsteps of redemption, because Madoff hurt other Jews, not Gentiles, i.e., he cut his ties to the Jewish old boy network. Another member of the club -- Mark Rich, whose pardon by Bill Clinton almost cost Eric Holder his appointment as Obama's Attorney General.

Apparently it's okay (politically correct) to complain about the old boy network of white men, but it you say the same thing about Jews, it's anti-Semitic.

Diplomatic History Only Interesting If White Men in Charge

The NYT reports that traditional history is decreasing in importance at most universities. It says that while universities are giving decreasing importance to diplomatic or international history, they are giving increased importance to the history of things like women's studies, race, and cultural issues. The ironic thing is that just as history is getting away from a "great man" focus of history that until recently focused on white men, because they were at the top of the heap, women and other races are becoming more important. In tandem with the drop in diplomatic history, the leading diplomats in the US have been Madeline Albright, Colin Powell, Condi Rice, and Hillary Clinton, none of them white men.

My own concern about this is that the loss of interest in diplomatic or international history is likely to result in a lack of the expertise needed to conduct diplomacy. My experience was that diplomacy really is directed by the man (or woman) at the top. As I move up in the State Department (not particularly high), I found that the higher I went, the more likely it was that senior people would take an interest in, and control over, the issues I was working on. In fact, often the issues would be decided by the White House, not just by the Secretary of State. Historians might resent that the system works this way, but denying that it does is likely to result in an unrealistic understanding of history.

I was just listening to Obama talk about health care, and he repeated a line I've heard before when people complain about all the things he is involved in, such as the auto industry, he said he would rather not be involved in these issues, because he already has so much on his plate, and then every issue he mentioned was a foreign policy issue -- North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan.

Republicans Destroyed the CIA

Today's NYT front pages the conflict between Admiral Dennis Blair, the Director of National Intelligence, and Leon Panetta, the head of the CIA over who should be station chiefs at embassies around the world. In describing the dispute, the NYT simply says, "Mr. Blair took over an office born out of the intelligence failures before the Iraq war." In retrospect those intelligence "failures" were born out of the Bush administration's desire to have the CIA produce the intelligence that the White House wanted. Because the CIA was reluctant to produce politically motivated intelligence, the White House moved to reduce its clout by installing a new bureaucracy above it -- hence Blair vs. Panetta. But it's also the military versus the civilians. The NYT says one dispute is whether to make the head of London station an NSA officer rather than a CIA officer. Then it goes on to say the Defense Intelligence Agency might be more appropriate to head up the Iraq station, etc. However, NSA is primarily military; it's always headed by a military officer. DIA of course is military, as are most other intelligence operations. It's interesting that in the run up to the Iraq war the two small intelligence organizations that were least willing to buy Cheney's claims about Iraq's development of nuclear weapons were the State Department's and the Department of Energy's, two civilian organizations. The CIA is the other big civilian spy operation, and Bush/Cheney hated it and wanted to destroy or emasculate it. It looks like they succeeded to some extent. Hopefully the CIA will go down fighting.

Where's Volker

This article in yesterday's NYT chronicled the infighting among Obama's economic advisers, but it didn't mention Paul Volker. I find that disturbing, because Volker is the only one who has really gotten the US out of an economic mess. Greenspan looked like he did, but it turned out that he was only postponing trouble and making it worse. Larry Summers was Bob Rubin's deputy, when they looked great, but not it turns out that they led the changes that got us into this economic mess. We don't really know about Geithner, but suspicions are that at the New York Fed, he was in bed with the Wall Street wizards who got us into this mess. Bernanke gets points for taking unorthodox steps at the Fed that may have prevented the financial system from imploding, but he did it by making money easier and basically making everybody happier. I'd feel better if he had made somebody hurt. I'd prefer that the bankers hurt, but if it had to be the general population, so be it. Bernanke has done smart things, but he has not done difficult things. When you mess up by overcharging on your credit cards or by making a bad investment, it's unusual to have someone give you a billion or a trillion dollars to make it alright. Usually you have to cut back in some way. But that's because you can print money like Bernanke does. It's unlikely that zero interest rates are the answer to every problem.

So far, for the last several decades, nobody in government has inflicted pain on the US economy. Private citizens, of course, the leaders of our banking and investment establishment, have produced the savings and loan debacle, the tech stock bubble, the housing bubble, and then the financial system meltdown.

Volker actually got us out of the Nixon-Carter-Reagan stagflation quagmire by prescribing tough medicine for the US economy. Nobody else has had the foresight or the guts to do the same thing in response to our more recent problems.

Granted Volker is in his 80's, but these young whipper-snappers ought to be seeking out his advise and listening to it. The NYT article intimates that Summers doesn't have a very high opinion of anybody else's opinions. I hope Obama listens to Volker more and Summers less.

NYT Op-Eds

It may happen frequently or infrequently, but it looks like all the authors of op-eds in today's New York Times are Jewish. Actually, I'm not sure about the guy who did the cartoons of an old graduating class, but his name sounds Jewish -- for sure Krugman, Brooks, and Livni are. In theory there's nothing wrong with this, but I worry that it gives the reader a slanted perspective. The Times is owned by Jews; so, maybe it's on purpose, but the news usually seems pretty balanced, although there are probably lots of Jewish writers in the newsroom as well.

I am hoping that reading the Financial Times op-eds will give me some balance, although who knows, they may be Jewish, too. Certainly one of the most celebrated Financial Times columnists until he left to join the Obama administration was Larry Summers, who is Jewish. In addition, a lot of the bad business practices that led to the current financial debacle were carried out by Anglos, both in New York and London, (probably not WASPs, since the P for Protestant seems to be a dying breed).

I am somewhat heartened that Niall Ferguson, who I think is Scottish, has taken on Paul Krugman, at least on the issue of inflation, in the Financial Times. I think Jon Meachum, who may be Episcopalian, is also a fresh voice on these issues.

Meanwhile, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions is in the news all the time because of his role in examining Sotomayor for the Surpreme Court. He comes from my background: Alabama, U of A Law School (about the same time I graduated there, although I don't remember him), now lives in Mobile, and presumably Protestant. But I don't agree with him on much of anything. I agree with Brooks and Krugman much more often, not to mention Tom Friedman, with whom I agree most of the time.

Selig Harrison Wise on North Korea

Selig Harrison was correct to point out on Fareed Zakaria's CNN GPS show that the US and its Japanese and South Korean allies were the first to fail to honor the agreement with North Korea.  The right-wing North Korea haters may be right that North Korea would not have lived up its agreement with the US, but we'll never know, because the US abrogated the agreement first by failing to provide North Korea with the heavy fuel oil that we promised.  

After we reneged on the agreement, North Korea restarted its nuclear reactor and produced the plutonium for several more atomic bombs.  But apparently the Rush Limbaugh crowd got some kind of satisfaction from revitalizing the North Korean nuclear weapons program.  

Republican Hypocrisy on CIA

The intelligence failures to predict North Korea's nuclear test and Iran's missile test are indictments of the current CIA. Newt Gingrich has been deriding Nance Pelosi for criticizing the CIA; however, the Republicans under Bush/Cheney leadership tried to destroy the CIA. They gutted the career CIA leadership, and they imposed additional layers of intelligence bureaucratic leadership over the CIA. Until Bush, the head of the CIA was the head of the intelligence community. Now the CIA has been reduced to just one of many intelligence agencies, and a separate intelligence chief has been created to oversee the whole community, including the CIA.

Why? Because the CIA wouldn't parrot the line that Cheney and company wanted them to, saying that Iraq was an immediate danger to the US. When the CIA wouldn't provide what it believed to be lies, Cheney and Bush destroyed it. Newt Gingrich and most talking head commentators on TV have conveniently forgotten this. The intelligence failures on Iran and North Korea demonstrate that the US is clearly not safer than it was before Bush and Cheney undermined our security by destroying our most important intelligence agency.

Intelligence Failure on North Korea

The fact that today's North Korean nuclear test came without any warning indicates a serious intelligence failure regarding North Korea's military buildup. We've had long warnings about other North Korean nuclear and missile tests, which turned out to be less than successful. This test, which appears to have been successful, came without warning.

The New York Times says that it is a signal for the succession process, by which Kim Jong Il will replaced. If so, it may mean that constant messing around by conservative Republicans has lost our best chance to constrain the North Korean program. They refused to negotiate with the North, broke off the previous, Clinton agreement, and generally stuck their fingers in North Korea's eye. I'm sure they feel better and will probably say, "See, we told you negotiations were impossible." Of course they were, because the Republicans would not negotiate in good faith. And now, there is nobody in North Korea to negotiate with.

Thanks a lot, John Bolton, for putting the atomic bomb in the hands of maniacs. The Bush administration, and the Republican Congress under Newt Gingrich and Denny Hastert before them, were just monumentally stupid and incompetent.

Memorial Day

During lunch the HBO movie "Taking Chance" was on, about a Marine officer taking the remains of a dead Marine back to his parents.  I wondered why I didn't feel prouder, either of myself for serving in Vietnam, or of others who served in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, or anywhere else.  

I think it's because it's not a shared experience like World War II was.  This country clearly prefers those who didn't serve.  No veteran has won the presidency since Bush I.  Bob Dole was defeated, as were Al Gore, John Kerry and John McCain.  Bush II, Cheney and Clinton were all the right age to have been drafted to serve in Vietnam, but they managed not to, like most of those who voted for them. Obama was too young, and so I give him a pass, although he could have volunteered for military service.  He did, however, choose not to go for the big bucks as a Wall Street lawyer or investment banker, although he probably could have done that.  

Iraq veterans get a lot more respect from the general population than Vietnam veterans did, but that's probably because people feel less guilt about not serving, since there is no draft.  But if people were really sincere about the importance of military service, they would serve.  They are content to leave it to a certain class, largely middle to lower class, small town Christians.  I feel that we went to war in Iraq largely because of Israeli and American Jewish urging.  Bush did have issues with his father's Iraq war, but I don't think that his personal issues alone would have let us to invade after 9/11.  Jews are prominent in politics, finance, business, but largely absent in the American military, unlike the Israeli military, where people think they are some of the best soldiers in the world.  They let Christians die for America; Jews die for Israel.  It's strange that defending America comes down to religion or ethnicity.  People should consider themselves Americans, regardless of religion, race, or wealth.  

Because the American military now comes from a narrow cross-section of the population, it is almost like a mercenary army, unlike World War II.  Mercenary armies are typically less successful than armies that are fighting for their homes.  America's is sort of a mix of the two.  While I come from that narrow cross-section that still constitutes the army, I don't feel that it is a national army or that there is true national support for the troops.  Ironically, I think Obama is one of the most sincere supporters and defenders of the troops, unlike a lot of his politician colleagues, particularly flag-waving Republicans, illustrated most recently in their fear over allowing Guantanamo prisoners to be jailed in US prisons.  

So, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, thank you and welcome home, but this country is not really going to do much of anything for you.  

Thank God for Obama

Just to weigh in on the Obama-Cheney debate on Thursday, Obama defends the America I love, and Cheney disgraces it. From what Brooks says in this column, Cheney's views were rejected even by the Bush administration. Obama says the right things as far as I'm concerned. So what about indefinite detention and other stuff the left worries about? Obama inherited a bad situation. If decent people had been thinking about how to handle this situation, we would never have had Gitmo, rendition, torture, and all the other weird stuff that went against centuries of Western law and tradition.

Cheney says this weird stuff protected the US from another attack. That's like saying that it also protected us from an invasion by intergalactic aliens. When do we give them credit for stopping an invasion, rather than just saying that no one tried to invade? When there is no attack one day after 9/11. After one month? After seven years? There is no way to know. Certainly there were no well planned attacks against the US that were prevented. Some incompetents were caught, and some well planned attacks were carried out in other countries. I guess Cheney doesn't care if some Spaniards or some Brits died on his watch.

Obama faces a tough situation. Of course the real villains are the terrorists, and there are still terrorists out there. But the Bush administration handled its reaction to 9/11, Iraq and the "war on terror" badly. That now makes Obama's job tougher than it would have been if better people had been in charge on 9/11. Better in the sense of more competent (maybe they would have read the intelligence saying bin Laden planned to attack the US) and better in the sense of more moral (no torture, adherence to US and international laws and mores).

Obama, I'm with you. Try to do the right thing.

New Credit Card Law

The new Senate bill regulating the credit card industry no doubt owes much of its success to the financial debacle on Wall Street. People used to think that bankers were people just like the rest of us, albeit with a special job that give them community leadership positions and some wealth. Now, bankers are widely perceived as creeps, men and women who will do anything for money, including destroying the world economy, and impoverishing their neighbors. So, there's not much sympathy for bankers these days, hence the bill.

This Financial Times article compares today's bankers with the kings and queens of yesteryear (Off with his head!), and the Russian oligarchs of more recent times. Not a very pleasant comparison, but one that invites more government regulation. Hopefully this is only the start.

Scarborough & Mika Suck Up to Immelt

On yesterday's "Morning Joe" Eliot Spitzer criticized the New York Fed's decision to have GE CEO Jeff Immelt as a public member of its board. On the show and in his column, Spitzer criticized Immelt for being a public representative because GE had benefited from the US government's largess. In his column, Spitzer says that by participating in program under which the US stands behind GE debt, GE saved billions of dollars that it would otherwise have incurred in issuing that debt. In the public mind, such largess is no doubt perceived as part of the "bailout" whether or not GE actually received cash, or just government guarantees.

Today, Joe and Mika made a totally suck up apology to Immelt for Spitzer's comments that did not actually deal with Spitzer's criticisms. First they talked about how handsome Immelt is. Then they read a GE statement that said GE has received no government bailout, but rather paid money to participate in a program that help liquidity and the commercial paper market. It did not deal with the question of whether by participating in this government [bailout] program it saved billions of dollars.

I was sort of enjoying "Morning Joe," although I was already put off my Mika's frequent unabashedly fawning praise of Joe. Now, they both prostrate themselves before the wonderful, mighty, faultless Jeff Immelt. It's more than I can take. I hope they get big bonuses; they lost at least one viewer. I wonder with Mika's father thinks about what she's doing. I'm sure he's happy she's making money; he may not be proud of her integrity.

Cowardice on Parade

The Congress' refusal to accept Gitmo detainees into US prisons is cowardice at its worse. I'm guessing that most of those voting to keep them in Gitmo never served in the US military. Clearly they have no confidence in their own prisons; they represent states that have incompetent law enforcement agencies; dishonest, stupid judges; worthless state governments that probably gave a start to their careers. They know how bad it is. They know that foreigners scare them to death; the only salvation is to torture them. Most have Newt Gingrich's view of government, that it is worthless; only the private sector can do anything right. Newt knows from experience; he was once the third highest federal government official, and he knows that he was absolutely incompetent to do anything. He hates government because it's made up of cowardly fools like him.

Israel Says Ignore Palestinians, Kill Iranians

During his Washington visit, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu tried to turn the discussion from Israel and its oppression of the Palestinians to the need to invade Iran. He successfully deflected a lot of the discussion, refusing to acknowledge the possibility of a Palestinian state, for example, but hopefully he did not beat Obama into embarrassing, fawning submission the way he did Bush and Cheney. In theory his argument is that America is too stupid or too poorly informed to understand the threat that Iran poses. (This begs the question, "Poses to whom?" Israel or America.) But once Netanyahu gets Obama to accept his premise, then his point is, "Send the American military to destroy Iran, or at least important parts of it." Jews love to send Gentiles to die for them. They successfully did it in Iraq, where the predominately Jewish neo-cons sent thousands of Americans to die in Iraq for a threat that was mainly of concern to Israel. In retrospect, however, Israeli intelligence was apparently just as bad as American intelligence on Iraq, and Israel ended up calling in a lot of favors with the Bush/Cheney administration for a war that probably did little to increase the security of Israel. For sure, it did little to increase the security of the US. The self-evident bankruptcy of this policy has caused Cheney to go on a public relations blitz, but while it might change some current opinions, Bush and Cheney will go down in history as some of the worst leaders in the history of the world. They still trail Hitler and Caligula and a few others, but they are in bad company. But Netanyahu, AIPAC, and the rest of the blood-thirsty, Jewish neo-Nazis loved them. (Is this anti-Semitic? I don't think all Jews are blood-thirsty neo-Nazis. There are many wise, decent Jews, John Stewart and Tom Friedman always come to mind, but the Jewish right wing is dangerous, rejoicing the deaths of Gentiles, whether they are Muslim Palestinians or Christian Americans. Comparing Jews to Nazis is supposed to be the ultimate anti-Semitic act, but if they don't want to be compared to Nazis, Jews shouldn't act like them. Richard Perle, William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Paul Wolfowitz, AIPAC, you have a lot of Chrsitian blood on your hands, along with fellow-traveler Dick Cheney.)

Another thing is that Obama tried to get Netanyahu to talk about peace, and while he mentioned it, it seems pretty clear from the general discussion that what Israel really wants is territory, i.e. settlements, not peace.

Why is Israel so important? It's a tiny country in terms of geography and population. But Jews are rich, successful, loud and in-your-face. When I was growing up, one of the main concerns about Jews was why they didn't fight back during the Holocaust. There was the Warsaw ghetto uprising, but it was brief and unsuccessful, much less of a threat to the Germans than the main Warsaw uprising, which was also put down by the Germans, but only after a much harder fought battle. Somehow, the Jews have now finessed this question, and nobody asks it anymore. Moreover, they seem to have tried to make up for not fighting during the Holocaust, by fighting the Arabs around Israel. But by moral standards, they're fighting at the wrong time and in the wrong place, and against the wrong people. They are mainly known for killing children, although they kill a lot of adults for every child.

Fortunately, Obama seems much more reasonable than I. The compassion and understanding that he showed at Notre Dame about abortion, no doubt applies to Israel as well. And he has a pretty zealous Jew, Rahm Emanuel, as his right-hand man. I think I was petty oblivious to the whole Jewish thing until two incidents brought it home. First, my dealings over a number of years with Richard Perle and his empire at Defense, where it seemed like we were on opposite sides of any issue that came up. Second, my experience at the American Embassy in Warsaw for the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, where the ceremonies were all-Holocaust, all the time. Since my dad fought in Europe in WW II, I felt slighted that the American government did not do more to recognize what the American troops did, and basically turned the operation over to the Jewish Holocaust leadership. In particular, I was disappointed that the one rabbi in Warsaw (and I think in all of Poland), whom I worked with and who was a very nice, religious guy, was replaced shortly afterwards with a much more radical, publicity-seeking rabbi, more concerned about vilifying Polish Christians than ministering to Polish Jews.

Maybe Israeli Spies Aren't Harmless

This Sic Semper Tyrannis blog has an example of a new intelligence case, Klingberg, which Israel perpetrated against the US to gain military intelligence. It also mentions the Pollard case, but it doesn't mention the USS Liberty, which is a clear example of Israel being willing to damage the US in order to further Israeli interests.