We Are Not Stupid and The Iran Sanction Saga Continues!

Newt is liberal when money is involved and conservative when politics is involved according to this WSJ editorial. (See 1 below.)
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We will never know whether GW's strategy of turning Iraq into a true American ally and a bastion against Iran will be realized and or evolve  However, the author believes there is a good chance. (See 2 below.)
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The Jones boy speaks up! (See 3 below.)
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Iranian sanction saga continues. (See 4 below.)
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I have always maintained, failure leads to distrust. Therefore, the more government tries to impose wrongheaded policies, which are doomed to  fail and/or meet their espoused goal at their intended cost projection,  the more we become distrustful of government. This is sad and dangerous if our Republic, as we know it, is to survive.

Thus, we are not stupid for disliking "Obamascare!" (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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1) Gingrich of Freddie Mac
The Speaker's defense is hurting him as much as his $1.6 million payday.

Newt Gingrich's opponents aren't letting up in their criticism of his lucrative ties to the failed mortgage giant Freddie Mac after he resigned as House Speaker in the late 1990s. More damaging to his Presidential candidacy is that Mr. Gingrich doesn't seem to understand why anyone is offended.

In his first response after news broke that he'd made $300,000 working for Freddie, Mr. Gingrich claimed he had "offered them advice on precisely what they didn't do." As a "historian," he said during a November 9 debate, he had concluded last decade that "this is a bubble," and that Freddie and its sister Fannie Mae should stop making loans to people who have no credit history. He added that now they should be broken up.

A week later Bloomberg reported that Mr. Gingrich had made between $1.6 million and $1.8 million in two separate contracts with Freddie between 1999 and 2008. The former Speaker stuck to his line that "I was approached to offer strategic advice" and had warned the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) to stop lending to bad credit risks.

Then on December 2 our colleagues at the Journal reported that as late as April 2007 Mr. Gingrich had defended Fannie and Freddie as examples of conservative governance. "While we need to improve the regulation of the GSEs, I would be very cautious about fundamentally changing their role or the model itself," Mr. Gingrich said in an interview at the time.

Mr. Gingrich added in that interview that there are times "when you need government to help spur private enterprise and economic development." He cited electricity and telephone network expansion. "It's not a point of view libertarians would embrace, but I am more in the Alexander Hamilton-Teddy Roosevelt tradition of conservatism," he said, adding "I'm convinced that if NASA were a GSE, we probably would be on Mars today."

Where to begin? One problem is the lack of candor. In Thursday's Sioux City debate, Mr. Gingrich repeated his claim that he had never done a favor for Fan and Fred. But as Speaker in 1995, according to news reports at the time, Mr. Gingrich helped to kill an effort by then House Budget Chairman John Kasich to impose user fees on Fannie and Freddie. The fees were intended to offset the cost advantage provided to the companies by their implicit government guarantee.

Mr. Gingrich also knows that many Republicans were fighting against furious opposition, and at great political risk, to reform Fan and Fred in the early and mid-2000s. The heroes included then Congressman Richard Baker, Senator Richard Shelby and Bush White House aide Kevin Warsh. We were at the barricades too, and Mr. Gingrich was never seen in the rear of the reform camp, much less on the front lines. The Georgian could only have been on the payroll because Freddie thought he could help influence other Republicans against reform.

As for the destructive duo's business model that Mr. Gingrich said he didn't want to change, this was precisely their problem. Far from a private-public partnership, they were private companies with a federal guarantee against failure. Their model was private profit but socialized risk. This produced riches on Wall Street and for company executives. But taxpayers bore the risk of loss—to the tune of $141 billion so far. Why does the historian think they were called "government-sponsored enterprises"?

The real history lesson here may be what the Freddie episode reveals about Mr. Gingrich's political philosophy. To wit, he has a soft spot for big government when he can use it for his own political ends. He also supported the individual mandate in health care in the 1990s, and we recall when he lobbied us to endorse the prescription drug benefit with only token Medicare reform in 2003.

As late as Thursday night's debate, Mr. Gingrich was still defending his Freddie ties as a way of "helping people buy houses." But that is the same excuse Barney Frank used to block reform, and the political pursuit of making housing affordable is what led Freddie to guarantee loans to so many borrowers who couldn't repay them. Yesterday's SEC lawsuit against former Fannie and Freddie executives for misleading investors about subprime-mortgage risks only reinforces the point.

***
If Americans elect a Republican in 2012, it will be someone who can make the case for reviving economic growth, but also for restraining and reforming government so it doesn't bankrupt the country. If Americans want more "bold" government experiments, they'll re-elect Barack Obama.

Mr. Gingrich would help his candidacy if he stopped defending his Freddie payday, admitted his mistake, and promised to atone as President by shrinking Fannie and Freddie and ultimately putting them out of business.
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2)What Obama Left Behind in Iraq
There's no need to fear the deference of Iraq's Shiites toward Iran.
By FOUAD AJAMI

'The tide of war is receding, and the soul of Baghdad remains, the soul of Iraq remains," Vice President Joe Biden said at Camp Victory, by the Baghdad airport, earlier this month, in the countdown to the official end of the Iraq war. In truth, the receding tide Mr. Biden glimpsed was that of American power and influence in Iraq and in the Greater Middle East.

This wasn't something the people of that region pined for. These are lands that crave the protection of a dominant foreign power as they feign outrage at its exercise. Nor was it decreed by the objective facts of American power, for this country still possesses all the ingredients of influence and prestige. It was, rather, a decision made in the course of the Obama presidency—the ebb of our power has become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

America was never meant to stay in Iraq indefinitely. In all fairness to President Obama, he had ridden the disappointment with Iraq from the state legislature in Illinois to the White House. He was not a pacifist, he let it be known. He did not oppose all wars. It was only "dumb" wars he was against. In every way he could, he kept Iraq at arm's length. He never partook of the view that we had secured strategic gains in that country worth preserving. It was thus awkward to watch the president on Monday, with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki by his side, explaining as we exit that "We think a successful, democratic Iraq can be a model for the entire region." The words rang hollow.

A president who understood the stakes would have had no difficulty justifying a residual American presence in Iraq. But not this president. At the core of Mr. Obama's worldview lies a pessimism about America and the power of its ideals and reach in the world.

The one exception to this strategic timidity is the pride Mr. Obama takes in prosecuting the war against terrorists. In a moment evocative of George W. Bush, Mr. Obama last week swatted away the charge that he had been appeasing America's enemies abroad: "Ask Osama bin Laden and the 22 out of 30 top Al Qaeda leaders who've been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement." Fair enough. But the world demands more than that, it begs for a larger strategic reading of things.

We shall never know with certainty what was possible and open to us in Iraq. On the face of it, the Iraqis wanted us out, and Mr. Maliki and his coalition had been unwilling to give our troops legal immunity from prosecution. But how we got there is less understood. The U.S. commanders on the ground thought that a residual presence of 20,000 soldiers would suffice to keep the order in Iraq and give the United States an anchor in that country. The White House had proposed a much lower figure, somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000. That force level would have been unsustainable, a target for the disgruntled and the conspirators.

No Iraqi government would run the gauntlet of a divided country, and a feisty parliament, for that sort of deal. Mr. Maliki may not be fully tutored in the ways of American democracy, but he is shrewd enough to recognize that this American leader was not invested in Iraq's affairs.

Six years ago, when this war was still young and its harvest uncertain, a brilliant Iraqi diplomat and writer, Hassan al-Alawi, wrote a provocative book titled "al-Iraq al-Amriki" ("American Iraq"). It was proper, he observed, to speak of an American Iraq as one does of a Sumerian, a Babylonian, an Abbasid, an Ottoman, then a British Iraq. He didn't think that America would stick around long in Iraq, but he thought the American impact would be monumental. Whereas British Iraq empowered the Sunnis, the Americans would tip the scales in favor of the Shiites.

All three principal communities in Iraq had a vested interest in American protection. The Kurds, the most pro-American population in the region, were desperate to have America remain—a balance to the power of Turkey, a buffer between their autonomous zone in the north and the Baghdad government. The Sunnis, the erstwhile masters of the country, had come around: An American presence with enough authority would be their shield against a sectarian, Shiite regime that would cut them out of the spoils.

Ironically, the Shiite majority, the followers of the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr aside, had a vested interest in an American deterrent on the ground. For all their edge in the politics of Baghdad, the Shiites are still given to a healthy measure of paranoia about the world around them. The Iraq midwifed by U.S. power had been delivered into a hostile neighborhood. The Sunni Arabs had yet to accept and make their peace with the rise of a Shiite-led government in Baghdad. And the rebellion in Syria added to the uncertainty, feeding the anxiety of Mr. Maliki and the Shiite political class over a Syrian regime to their west ruled by the Sunni majority. There is also Turkey, large and now with economic means and a view of itself as a protector of the Sunnis of the region.

And there remained Iran, to the east, with the traffic of commerce and pilgrimage, with the religious entanglements born of a common Shiite faith. For the Sunni Arabs—and for Americans who had opposed this war—Iraq is destined to slip, nay it has already slipped, into the orbit of the Persian theocracy. The American war, with all its sacrifices, had simply created a "sister republic" of the Persian state, it is said.

Those who love to organize an untidy world have spoken of a "Shiite crescent" that stretches from Iran, through Iraq, all the way to the Mediterranean and Syria and Lebanon. But the image is false. Iraq is a big and proud country, with a strong sense of nationalism, and oil wealth of its own. An Iraqi political class, with its vast oil reserves, has no interest in ceding its authority to the Iranians.

The Shiism that straddles the boundaries of the two countries divides them as well. The sacred lands of Shiism are in Iraq, and the Shiism of the Iraqis is Arab through and through. The pride of Najaf is great, I can't see it deferring to the religious authority of strangers.

One of our ablest diplomats, Ryan Crocker, then ambassador to Baghdad, now our envoy in Kabul, once pronounced the definitive judgment on these contested Iraqi matters: "In the end, what we leave behind and how we leave will be more important than how we came." It so happened that when it truly mattered, the president who called the shots on Iraq had his gaze fixated on the past and its disputations.

Mr. Ajami is a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and co-chair of Hoover's Working Group on Islamism and the International Order.
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3)Jim Jones bucks Obama on Keystone XL pipeline
By Josh Rogin

Former National Security Advisor Jim Jones called today for quick action on the Keystone XL pipeline construction, directly opposing the White House he worked for only a few months ago.

Jones, who rarely speaks in public and almost never contradicts his former boss President Barack Obama, lashed out against the administration in a press call and warned of grave consequences to U.S. national security if the project to build the pipeline doesn't move forward immediately. The call was sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute and Jones was joined on the call by API President and CEO Jack Gerard.

"In a tightly contested global economy, where securing energy resources is a national must, we should be able to act with speed and agility. And any threat to this project, by delay or otherwise, would constitute a significant setback," said Jones. "The failure to [move forward with the project] will prolong the risk to our economy and our energy security" and "send the wrong message to job creators."

The comments come at the worst possible moment for the Obama administration, which is trying to beat back an effort from congressional Republicans to attach language that would force a decision on the pipeline to legislation that extends unemployment insurance and the payroll tax holiday for middle class Americans.

Obama has promised to veto any bill that comes to his desk with the Keystone XL pipeline language, and the State Department has said that if it is forced to come to a quick decision on the pipeline, that decision would be no because there has not been enough time to properly evaluate environmental and logistical considerations.

The Cable asked Jones if he was getting paid by API for supporting its cause. Jones said he was not getting paid, and was speaking out because he believed in the pipeline cause.

"I've known Jack Gerard for a number of years... and when he called me a few days ago and asked me if I was willing to participate in this because of my interest in energy issues, I agreed to do so," Jones said.

Jones said the project was an important piece of the U.S.-Canada relationship and that if the United States doesn't act, Canada may decide to cancel the project and give its energy resources to the Chinese. He also said if they United States doesn't move forward with the pipeline, that would be another signal of fading U.S. leadership in the world.

"If we get to a point where the nation cannot bring itself to do, for whatever reason, those things that we all know is in our national interest... then we are definitely in a period of decline in terms of our global leadership and in terms of our ability to compete in the 21st century," said Jones.

Jones said that he was not in touch with the administration directly on this issue, but that he told Obama personally just before resigning that Obama had a chance to be the "energy president," but was failing to distinguish himself on the issue.

"I do not think the United States has a comprehensive strategy for energy writ large and that's a critical shortfall. Nor do I think we are properly organized," Jones said. "In my last few days I communicated that to the president."
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4)Obama and Barak discuss dwindling anti-Iran strike options as the US exits Iraq


US President Barack Obama's half-hour tête-a- tête with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak in Washington Friday, Dec. 16, was vitally concerned with the coming steps in the Syrian showdown and the latest developments in the controversy over Iran's nuclear weapons program, intelligence sources report.

Their conference was urgent because key events in the Middle East this week made early decisions necessary on both these issues.

Termination of the US military mission in Iraq has powerful ramifications for Israel, Iran and Syria as well as Iraq itself.

From Tehran's standpoint, the US military departure has removed a formidable obstacle from Israel's path to an attack on its nuclear installations: the US Air Force's control of Iraqi skies. Cleared of this shield, Iraqi air space offers Israel an open corridor for its air force to reach Iran without hindrance. Overflights through any other country, such as Saudi Arabia, would have been contingent on their governments' cooperation in the anti-Iran offensive.

Tehran delayed releasing word of the capture of the US stealth RQ-170 drone until Dec. 4, timing it for the final month of the US troop drawdown from Iraq, in order to demonstrate to Israel – and not just America – that the sophisticated electronic resources which downed the RQ-170 over the Afghanistan-Iranian border were still available to Tehran for downing Israeli flights entering Iraqi air space. Therefore, Israel's air force could no longer be sure of safely breaching Iraqi air space for its attack.

To put another spoke in Israel's plans for striking Iran, Tehran used Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's visit to Washington (Dec. 12-13 ) for sending the US President a conciliatory message: The Islamic rulers were willing to clear the air with the Obama administration and broach areas of discord - notwithstanding the ill will generated by the allegations of an al-Qods Brigades plot to murder the Saudi ambassador to Washington and the captured American stealth drone's intrusion into their airspace.

Iran reinforced the message of good will posted through al Maliki by four additional steps:

1. Monday, Dec. 12, its intelligence minister Heider Moslehi traveled to Riyadh and held talks with Saudi Crown Prince Nayef and intelligence chief Prince Muqrin. This was Tehran's way of informing Washington, Saudi Arabia was acceptable for a role in helping to reset the relationship, while Turkey, Obama's choice, was not.

The US preference for Turkey as its main Middle East facilitator was underlined in the two days US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta spent in Ankara Thursday and Friday.

2. Wednesday, Dec. 14, a Revolutionary Guards officer Gholamreza Jalali announced that most of ran's nuclear facilities had been relocated underground. Therefore, "Our vulnerability in the nuclear area has reached the minimum level," he said.

This information was intended to strengthen the Obama administration's argument that the odds on an Israeli attack on Iran having useful results had plummeted again.

3. Friday, Dec. 16, Iran's foreign minister Ali Akbar Salehi stated: "Within the next two months, the first fuel plate which is produced with the 20 percent enriched uranium will be placed in Tehran's research reactor."

Translation: Iran is complying with President Obama's requirement that Iran's highly-enriched uranium be set aside for research – not a nuclear bomb.

4. Saturday, Dec. 17, North Korea was reported to have agreed to suspend its enriched-uranium nuclear weapons program and Washington agreed to provide Pyongyang with up to 240,000 tonnes of food aid.

Since Iran and North Korea habitually walk in step on their nuclear strategy, Pyongyang's compliance with Washington's key demand may be taken as a pointer to the Islamic Republic's willingness to slow uranium enrichment in stages that match the lifting of sanctions.
The Syrian question loomed large in the Obama-Maliki talks this week because the US military's exit from Iraq opens another corridor, this one for Iran to exploit for the convenience of a direct military route to Syria for its warplanes and military vehicles.

The US president insisted emphatically that the Iraqi prime minister must not let this happen. Maliki refused to give any promises, excepting only that Baghdad would line up behind Arab League policy on the Assad regime and not violate the sanctions the League has imposed on Damascus.
In his briefing to Tehran, Maliki was able to report that while Obama was willing to look at Iran's proposals for slowing uranium enrichment, he would not hear of easing the pressure on President Bashar Assad.

What this means is that the door has been opened for Tehran to try and mend its fences with Washington - provided the ayatollahs are willing to throw Assad to the wolves. Before moving ahead on this, the Iranians will no doubt demand guarantees against an American or an Israeli attack on their nuclear program.

Israel's strategic state of health has taken a serious beating from these developments, its options against Iran shrinking substantially and the opening for military action narrowing.
The removal of most of Iran's nuclear facilities below ground, President Obama's willingness to heed conciliatory feelers from Tehran, and Baghdad's assumption of the role of go-between for Washington and Tehran are all bad news for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his defense minister.

Iran has again contrived to buy time and leeway for bringing its nuclear weapons program to completion.

Even the option of a clear run through Iraq for Israeli warplanes to strike Iran is likely to be short-lived: Tehran, which controls the Iraqi prime minister, will lose no time in placing its electronic warfare and intelligence systems in position for shutting that corridor to Israel.
Israel's vanishing options on Iran topped Ehud Barak's conversation with Barack Obama in Washington on Friday
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5)The long con: Obama officials say we don’t trust the government enough. Why would we?
By Michael Tanner

With ObamaCare still as unpopular as ever — the latest Rassmussen poll shows Americans favoring repeal of the new health-care law by a 53-40 margin — the Obama administration has developed a new theory as to why. We simply don’t trust government enough.
Donald Berwick, who is leaving his post this month as director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid services, told The New York Times that health-care reform was a lot like the moon shot. Americans weren’t rocket scientists, he noted. They didn’t understand everything the government was doing, but they still believed in the government’s ability to send men to the moon. Why couldn’t it be the same with health- care reform, he lamented.

Well, perhaps because NASA wasn’t trying to shoot most of us into space. On the other hand, all of us will be impacted by this health-care law. Indeed, health care involves some of the most personal, private and important decisions in our lives.
Or maybe its because we’ve already seen enough results of ObamaCare to have a pretty good idea that it’s not going to work.

For example, a recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows family premiums increasing by a whopping 9% this year, three times more than the previous year’s increase. The average family policy now costs more than $15,000 per year. Not only has ObamaCare failed to slow premium growth, but at least 2 percentage points of that increase is directly attributable to the health-care law’s provisions.

ObamaCare is also already reducing our health-insurance choices. The new law has already driven a number of insurance companies out of the market, meaning there will be less competition and fewer choices. Moreover, the new law has already cut back on flexible-spending accounts used by some 30 million workers, slashing permissible contributions in half and limiting what account funds can be used to pay for. And just released regulations from HHS may well eliminate most health savings accounts, effecting another 10 million workers and their families. And, of course, once the individual mandate kicks in, in 2014, assuming its not struck down by the Supreme Court, all of us will have to purchase a government-designed insurance plan, even if it is more expensive or contains benefits that we don’t want.

We also know that ObamaCare is going to cost us more in debt and taxes. A new study from the Congressional Budget Office concluded that the subsidies in the bill will add $1.36 trillion to the national debt over the first seven years after the bill is fully implemented. And at a time when 47% of Americans already pay no income tax, the bill’s tax credits will remove as many as 8.1 million more Americans from the tax rolls.

And we know that the health-care law will slash payments to physicians and hospitals, meaning it will be more difficult for us to find and see a physician. The government’s own actuaries estimate that these payment cuts could force as many as 15% of hospitals to close.
Finally, we should remember that ObamaCare contained a Ponzi scheme-like, long-term program, the CLASS Act, that was so actuarially unsound that even this administration had to pull the plug on it.

“Trust us,” just doesn’t seem like an adequate response to these problems.
On issue after issue, the Obama administration has made it clear that they believe they know better than the average American. We should just turn our lives over to them and trust them to
make decisions for us.

No doubt we all make mistakes in our lives. But in the last few years, we’ve seen the government invade a country that turned out not to have weapons of mass destruction, ran up $15 trillion in debt, all but bankrupted Medicare and Social Security and nudged us toward a housing bubble that nearly brought down the economy. Should we really trust a government that thought shipping guns to Mexican drug lords and giving $535 million to a money-losing solar panel company were good ideas?
In fact, that will ultimately be the big question in next year’s elections. Whom do you trust to run your life, yourself or the self-appointed experts from the government? And that’s not rocket science.

Michael D. Tanner is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute
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