Lamentations about what has become of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East miss the point. The remarkable thing about President Obama's diplomacy in the region is that it has come full circle—to the very beginning of his presidency. The promised "opening" to Iran, the pass given to Bashar Assad's tyranny in Syria, the abdication of the American gains in Iraq and a reflexive unease with Israel—these were hallmarks of the new president's approach to foreign policy.
Now we are simply witnessing the alarming consequences of such a misguided, naïve outlook.
Consider this bit of euphoria from a senior Obama administration official after the Oct. 16-17 negotiations in Geneva with the Iranians over their nuclear program: "I've been doing this now for about two years, and I have never had such intense, detailed, straightforward, candid conversations with the Iranian delegation before."
In Iran, especially, Mr. Obama believed that he would work his unique diplomatic magic. If Tehran was hostile to U.S. interests, if Iran had done its best to frustrate the war in Iraq, to proclaim a fierce ideological war against Israel's place in the region and its very legitimacy as a state, the fault lay, Mr. Obama seemed to believe, with the policies of his predecessors.
When antiregime protests roiled Iran in Mr. Obama's first summer as president, he stood locked in the vacuum of his own ideas. He remained aloof as the Green Movement defied prohibitive odds to challenge the theocracy. The protesters had no friend in Mr. Obama. He was dismissive, vainly hoping that the cruel rulers would accept the olive branch he had extended to them.
No one asked the fledgling American president to dispatch U.S. forces into the streets of Tehran, but the indifference he displayed to the cause of Iranian freedom was a strategic and moral failure. Iran's theocrats gave nothing in return for that favor. They pushed on with their nuclear program, they kept up the proxy war against U.S. forces in Iraq, they pushed deeper into Arab affairs, positioning themselves, through their proxies, as a power of the Mediterranean. This should have been Mr. Obama's Persian tutorial. Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had no interest in a thaw with the Great Satan.
Yet last month at the United Nations Mr. Obama hailed Khamenei for issuing a "fatwa" against his country's development of nuclear weapons. Even though there is no evidence that any such fatwa exists, the notion that the Iranian regime is governed by religious edict is naïve in the extreme. Muslims know—unlike the president, apparently—that fatwas can be issued and abandoned at the whim of those who pronounce them. In any event, Khamenei is not a religious scholar sitting atop Iran's theocracy. He is an apparatchik. As the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini himself put it in 1988, when his regime was reeling from a drawn-out war with Iraq: "Our government has priority over all other Islamic tenets, even over prayer, fasting and the pilgrimage to Mecca."
We must not underestimate the tenacity of this regime and its will to rule. We should see through the rosy Twitter messages of President Hasan Rouhani, and the PowerPoint presentations of his foreign minister, Mohammed Jawad Zarif. These men carry out the writ of the supreme leader and can only go as far as the limit drawn by the Revolutionary Guard.
In a lawyerly way, the Obama administration has isolated the nuclear issue from the broader context of Iran's behavior in the region. A new dawn in the history of the theocracy has been proclaimed, but we will ultimately discover that Iran's rulers are hellbent on pursuing a nuclear-weapons program while trying to rid themselves of economic sanctions.
True, the sanctions have had their own power, but they haven't stopped Iran from aiding the murderous Assad regime in Syria, or subsidizing Hezbollah in Beirut. And they will not dissuade this regime from its pursuit of nuclear weapons. In dictatorial regimes, the pain of sanctions is passed onto the underclass and the vulnerable.
Just as he has with Iran, President Obama now takes a lawyerly approach to Syria, isolating Assad's use of chemical weapons from his slaughter of his own people by more conventional means. The president's fecklessness regarding Syria—the weakness displayed when he disregarded his own "red line" on Assad's use of chemical weapons—was a gift to the Iranian regime. The mullahs now know that their nuclear program, a quarter-century in the making, will not have to be surrendered in any set of negotiations. No American demand will be backed by force or even by force of will.
The gullibility of Mr. Obama's pursuit of an opening with Iran has unsettled America's allies in the region. In Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates there is a powerful feeling of abandonment. In Israel, there is the bitter realization that America's strongest ally in region is now made to look like the final holdout against a blissful era of compromise that will calm a turbulent region. A sound U.S. diplomatic course with Iran would never have run so far ahead of Israel's interests and of the region's moderate anti-Iranian Arab coalition.
In Washington, the threats represented by Tehran's theocrats are forgotten in this time of undue optimism, as is the Assad regime's continued barbarity. With the Russian-brokered "deal" on Syria's chemical weapons, Mr. Obama has merely draped American abdication in the garb of reason and prudence.
Those who run the Islamic Republic of Iran and its nuclear program, like most others in the region, have taken the full measure of this American president. They sense his desperate need for a victory—or anything that can be passed off as one.
Mr. Ajami is a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and the author most recently of "The Syrian Rebellion" (Hoover Press, 2012).
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3)The collapse of ObamaCare is the tip of the iceberg for the magical Obama presidency.
By Daniel Henninger
From the moment he emerged in the public eye with his 2004 speech at the Democratic Convention and through his astonishing defeat of the Clintons in 2008, Barack Obama's calling card has been credibility. He speaks, and enough of the world believes to keep his presidency afloat. Or used to.
All of a sudden, from Washington to Riyadh, Barack Obama's credibility is melting.
Amid the predictable collapse the past week of HealthCare.gov's too-complex technology, not enough notice was given to Sen. Marco Rubio's statement that the chances for success on immigration reform are about dead. Why? Because, said Sen. Rubio, there is "a lack of trust" in the president's commitments.
© Images.com/Corbis
"This notion that they're going to get in a room and negotiate a deal with the president on immigration," Sen. Rubio said Sunday on Fox News, "is much more difficult to do" after the shutdown negotiations of the past three weeks.
Sen. Rubio said he and other reform participants, such as Idaho's Rep. Raul Labrador, are afraid that if they cut an immigration deal with the White House—say, offering a path to citizenship in return for strong enforcement of any new law—Mr. Obama will desert them by reneging on the enforcement.
When belief in the average politician's word diminishes, the political world marks him down and moves away. With the president of the United States, especially one in his second term, the costs of the credibility markdown become immeasurably greater. Ask the Saudis.
Last weekend the diplomatic world was agog at the refusal of Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah to accept a seat on the U.N. Security Council. Global disbelief gave way fast to clear understanding: The Saudis have decided that the United States is no longer a reliable partner in Middle Eastern affairs.
The Saudi king, who supported Syria's anti-Assad rebels early, before Islamic jihadists polluted the coalition, watched Mr. Obama's red line over Assad's use of chemical weapons disappear into an about-face deal with Vladimir Putin. The next time King Abdullah looked up, Mr. Obama was hanging the Saudis out to dry yet again by phoning up Iran's President Hasan Rouhani, Assad's primary banker and armorer, to chase a deal on nuclear weapons. Within days, Saudi Arabia's intelligence chief, Prince Bandar, let it be known that the Saudis intend to distance themselves from the U.S.
What is at issue here is not some sacred moral value, such as "In God We Trust." Domestic politics or the affairs of nations are not an avocation for angels. But the coin of this imperfect realm is credibility. Sydney Greenstreet's Kasper Gutman explained the terms of trade in "The Maltese Falcon": "I must tell you what I know, but you won't tell me what you know. That is hardly equitable, sir. I don't think we can do business along those lines."
Bluntly, Mr. Obama's partners are concluding that they cannot do business with him. They don't trust him. Whether it's the Saudis, the Syrian rebels, the French, the Iraqis, the unpivoted Asians or the congressional Republicans, they've all had their fill of coming up on the short end with so mercurial a U.S. president. And when that happens, the world's important business doesn't get done. It sits in a dangerous and volatile vacuum.
The next major political event in Washington is the negotiation over spending, entitlements and taxes between House budget chairman Paul Ryan and his Senate partner, Patty Murray. The bad air over this effort is the same as that Marco Rubio says is choking immigration reform: the fear that Mr. Obama will urge the process forward in public and then blow up any Ryan-Murray agreement at the 11th hour with deal-killing demands for greater tax revenue.
Then there is Mr. Obama's bond with the American people, which is diminishing with the failed rollout of the Affordable Care ActObamaCare is the central processing unit of the Obama presidency's belief system. Now the believers are wondering why the administration suppressed knowledge of the huge program's problems when hundreds of tech workers for the project had to know this mess would happen Oct. 1.
Rather than level with the public, the government's most senior health-care official, Kathleen Sebelius, spent days spewing ludicrous and incredible happy talk about the failure, while refusing to provide basic information about its cause.
Voters don't normally accord politicians unworldly levels of belief, but it has been Barack Obama's gift to transform mere support into victorious credulousness. Now that is crumbling, at great cost. If here and abroad, politicians, the public and the press conclude that Mr. Obama can't play it straight, his second-term accomplishments will lie only in doing business with the world's most cynical, untrustworthy partners. The American people are the ones who will end up on the short end of those deals.
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4)

Billionaire Soros Joins 'Ready for Hillary' Team


Liberal billionaire investor George Soros kicked in $25,000 to Ready for Hillary, the super PAC organizing support for a possible 2016 presidential run by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Politico reported Thursday.

Soros will be co-chair of the group's national finance council, Soros' political director Michael Vachon said in an emailed statement.

"George Soros is delighted to join more than 1 million Americans in supporting Ready for Hillary," Vachon said. "His support for Ready for Hillary is an extension of his long-held belief in the power of grass-roots organizing."

4a)AN ANALYSIS WORTH READING: 
by Dick Morris, former political advisor to President Bill Clinton

If you happen to see the Bill Clinton five minute TV ad for Hillary in
which he introduces the commercial by saying that he wants to share
some things we may not know about Hillary's background . .
beware

As I was there for most of their presidency and know them better than
just about anyone, I offer a few corrections;

Bill says: "In law school Hillary worked on legal services for the
poor."

The facts are: Hillary's main extra-curricular activity in law school
was helping the Black Panthers, on trial in Connecticut for torturing
and killing a federal agent. She went to court every day as part of a
law student monitoring committee trying to spot civil rights violations
and develop grounds for appeal.

Bill says: "Hillary spent a year after graduation working on a
children's rights project for poor kids."

The facts are: Hillary interned with Bob Truehaft, the head of the
California Communist Party. She met Bob when he represented the
Panthers and traveled all the way to San Francisco to take an
internship with him.

Bill says: "Hillary could have written her own job ticket, but she
turned down all the lucrative job offers."

The facts are: She flunked the DC bar exam, yes, flunked, it is a
matter of record, and only passed the Arkansas bar. She had no job
offers in Arkansas, none, and only got hired by the University of
Arkansas Law School at Fayetteville because Bill was already teaching
there. She did not join the prestigious Rose L aw Firm until Bill
became Arkansas Attorney General and was made a partner only after he
was elected Arkansas Governor.

Bill says: "President Carter appointed Hillary to the Legal Services
Board of Directors and she became its chairman."

The facts are: The appointment was in exchange for Bill's support for
Carter in his 1980 primary against Ted Kennedy. Hillary then became
chairman in a coup in which she won a majority away from Carter's
choice to be chairman.

Bill says: "She served on the board of the Arkansas Children's
Hospital."

The facts are: Yes she did. But her main board activity, not mentioned
by Bill, was to sit on the Wal-mart board of directors, for a
substantial fee. She was silent about their labor and health care
practices.

Bill says: "Hillary didn't succeed at getting heal th care for all
Americans in 1994 but she kept working at it and helped to
create the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) that provides
five million children with health insurance."

The facts are: Hillary had nothing to do with creating CHIP. It
was included in the budget deal between Clinton and Republican Majority
Leader Senator Trent Lott. I know; I helped to negotiate the deal. The
money came half from the budget deal and half from the Attorney
Generals' tobacco settlement. Hillary had nothing to do with either
source of funds.

Bill says: "Hillary was the face of America all over the world."

The facts are: Her visits were part of a program to get her out of town
so that Bill would not appear weak by feeding stories that Hillary was
running the White House. Her visits abroad were entirely touristic and
symbolic and there was no substantive diplomacy on any of them.

Bill says: "Hillary was an excellent Senator who kept fighting for
children's and women's issues."

The facts are: Other than totally meaningless legislation like changing
the names on courthouses and post offices, she has passed only four
substantive pieces of legislation. One set up a national park in Puerto
Rico. A second provided respite care for family members helping their
relatives through Alzheimer's or other conditions. And two were routine
bills to aid 911 victims and responders which were sponsored by the
entire NY delegation. Presently she is trying to have the US
memorialize the Woodstock fiasco of 40 years ago.

Here is what bothers me more than anything else about Hillary Clinton.
She has done everything possible to weaken the President and our
country (that's you and me!) when it comes to the war on terror.

1. She wants to close GITMO and move the combatants to the USA where
they would have access to our legal system.

2. She wants to eliminate the monitoring of suspected Al Qaeda phone
calls to/from the USA.

3. She wants to grant constitutional rights to enemy combatants
captured on the battlefield.

4. She wants to eliminate the monitoring of money transfers between
suspected Al Qaeda c ells and supporters in the USA.

5. She wants to eliminate the type of interrogation tactics used by the 
military &; CIA where coercion might be used
when questioning known terrorists even though such tactics might save
American lives

One cannot think of a single bill Hillary has introduced or a single
comment she has made that would tend to strengthen our country in the
War on Terror.

But, one can think of a lot of comments she has made that weaken our 
country and makes it a more dangerous situation for all of us.

Bottom line: She goes hand in hand with the ACLU on far too many issues 
where common sense is abandoned.
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