The purpose of the Iran nuclear deal isn't to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons technology – it's to assist Iran and prevent an Israeli military attack. The deal promises to help Iran modernize and protect its nuclear program while making it harder for Israel to disrupt the program through military means or sabotage.
This isn't a “bad deal,” as many keep saying — it's a dramatic shift in U.S. policy in favor of totalitarian Iran at the expense of democratic Israel. Leftists love authoritarian regimes that are virulently anti-American.
Far from restraining Iran, the deal cooked up by Barack Obama, John Kerry, and the U.S. negotiating team may be everything the ayatollah could have wished for. By the White House's own admission, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action merely extends Iran's “breakout time” to a bomb from the current 2-3 months to at least 12 months. However, that's assuming that Iran does not cheat.
The deal creates real obstacles to an Israeli military strike. After months of arduous negotiations, any Israeli military strike against Iran now would be seen as an act in defiance of the so-called P5+1 nations: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany. Israel would be condemned as a rogue state while Iran would be praised for cooperating. At a minimum, the P5+1 nations would respond to an attack by helping Iran rebuild and by considering retaliatory sanctions against Israel.
Clearly, the Iran nuclear deal's architects trust Iran. The deal calls for the P5+1 to help Iran modernize its nuclear facilities, improve its processes and procedures, and train its personnel. For example, Annex I specifies the creation of a working group to help Iran redesign and rebuild the Arak reactor and “subsidiary laboratories.” This will no doubt require P5+1 scientists and technicians to make frequent visits and even work onsite for extended periods, another element of the deal that will deter Israel from attacking. In fact, the deal practically transforms Iran's rogue nuclear program into a joint development project.
The Iran nuclear deal also calls for helping Iran enhance its nuclear research and development capabilities and defend its nuclear program against security threats such as sabotage. This includes helping to train what could be the next generation of Iranian nuclear experts.
Section 10.2 of Annex III could not be more explicit:
Co-operation through training and workshops to strengthen Iran's ability to protect against, and respond to nuclear security threats, including sabotage, as well as to enable effective and sustainable nuclear security and physical protection systems.
Clearly, the Iran nuclear deal's architects do not trust Israel.
Why they support Iran
To understand how a U.S. administration could engineer a nuclear deal that rewards Iran and punishes Israel, it helps to understand the mindset of arms control experts. Most identify themselves as progressives. They tend to believe that all wars are avoidable: you just need really smart leaders who are sympathetic to the other side's grievances, are willing to consider any compromise, and believe that the right words on paper can turn any foreign adversary into an ally.
Likewise, many arms control experts believe that Iran – the very same country that supports terrorism, denies the Holocaust, intervenes in other nations through armed proxies, and leads crowds in chants of “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!” – can be enticed by the right deal to rejoin the community nations.
Meanwhile, the deal's supporters ignore the fact that the Iranian regime has imprisoned three U.S. citizens and a Washington Post journalist with dual American-Iranian citizenship on trumped up charges. Iran knows that it has only to accuse prisoners of espionage to win the sympathy of leftists in the U.S. and Europe. That charge resonates with people who promote the myth that the U.S. overthrew Iran's popular government in the early 1950s.
Many progressives believe that Iran's hostility to the U.S. is totally justified. They cite the alleged CIA-engineered coup that overthrew Iran's democratically elected leader, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in 1953. However, they have their facts wrong, as explained here by Iranian journalist Amir Taheri. Iran was a constitutional monarchy at the time, and Mosaddegh was appointed Prime Minister in 1951 by the Shah, who came to power ten years earlier. Among other things, Mosaddegh dissolved one chamber of the Iranian parliament, shut down the other, and halted an election. He was dismissed from office by the Shah – not overthrown in a coup.
Contempt for anyone who opposes the deal
Supporters of the Iran nuclear deal have little if any sympathy for Israel. Some arms control experts politely argue that Israel's refusal to sign the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) makes it harder to stop Iran from acquiring nukes. Others join with Israel's enemies in demanding that Israel be forced to submit to anytime-anywhere nuclear inspections.
Supporters of the deal are quick to dismiss reports that Iran is being allowed to conduct self-inspections. And yet Max Fisher's article in Vox World, “The AP's controversial and badly flawed Iran inspections story, explained,” does nothing to disprove the accusation. In fact, Fisher's real gripe seems to be that the AP disclosed something that he and other supporters of the deal would rather hush up:
… this is all over a mild and widely anticipated compromise on a single set of inspections to a single, long-dormant site. The AP, deliberately or not, has distorted that into something that sounds much worse, but actually isn't. The whole incident is a fascinating, if disturbing, example of how misleading reporting on technical issues can play into the politics of foreign policy.
If you trudge through the entire article, you will find that the deal does in fact allow Iran to conduct self-inspections, but Fisher insists that it's nothing to worry about, because it's only one site (that we know of), no one has actually seen the final secret agreement, and both the IAEA and three people whom Fisher reverently refers to as “arms control experts” say it's OK. Fisher admits that the details might seem alarming to a layperson, but he reminds readers that “[n]o country likes foreign inspectors sniffing around a sensitive military complex.”
It's hard not to notice that while many of the deal's supporters are reluctant to criticize either Iran or Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, they exhibit no such restraint toward opponents of the deal. For example, “arms control expert” Jeffrey Lewis begins his article, “Chuck Schumer's Disingenuous Iran Deal Argument” in Foreign Policy, with a series of childish ad hominem attacks. First, he dismisses the U.S. Constitution's requirement that all foreign treaties be approved by the Senate with a gratuitous shot at Dick Cheney:
At the risk of out-Dicking former Vice President Cheney himself on the subject of executive authority, Congress is a “branch of government” in precisely the same way that college basketball fans are a “sixth man.” We don't let fans call plays, other than as some kind of preseason stunt. I am not particularly interested in congressional views about the Iran deal.
He then unloads on Schumer for opposing the Iran deal:
Schumer is one of the most powerful members of the Senate, which is not quite the same thing as saying he's dignified. Back in the 1990s, when he was a congressman, his House colleagues had a phrase for waking up to find he'd upstaged them in the media: to be “Schumed.”
Next he quotes Jon Corzine on Schumer just to add a touch of vulgarity:
Sharing a media market with Chuck Schumer is like sharing a banana with a monkey. Take a little bite of it, and he will throw his own feces at you.
When Lewis finally gets around to discussing the Iran deal, he takes Schumer to task for saying, “[T]he 24-day delay before we can inspect is troubling.” Lewis explains that there isn't a mandatory 24-day delay before inspections start, but Iran has the option of delaying an inspection up to 24 days. Lewis suggests we should be grateful that the deal's framers had the wisdom to place limits on Iranian stalling. “This arrangement is much, much stronger than the normal safeguards agreement.”
President Obama is also reluctant to criticize Iran – but is happy to level false charges against the deal's opponents. When Iranians took to the streets to protest fraudulent elections in 2009, President Obama resisted pressure for several days to criticize Iran's government. When he finally did criticize Iran, he quickly reassured the Iranian regime that he had no intention of meddling in their affairs. And yet he has the audacity to accuse others of making common cause with Iran's “hardliners.”
The Obama administration has been eager from the start to make friends with the dictators in Iran and Cuba. And the administration couldn't care less about where that leaves millions of Israelis.
Ira Brodsky is a writer and technology consultant based in the Midwest.
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2)
Obama’s vacuum helps Russia reverse 70 years of U.S.
Mideast policy.
For 70 years American Presidents from both parties have sought to thwart Russian influence in the Middle East. Harry Truman forced the Red Army to withdraw from northern Iran in 1946. Richard Nixon raised a nuclear alert to deter Moscow from resupplying its Arab clients during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Even Jimmy Carter threatened military force to protect the Persian Gulf after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
So it says something about the current Administration’s strategic priorities that it is having trouble deciding what to do about Vladimir Putin’s decision to send combat planes to Syria to prop up Bashar Assad’s faltering regime. Should the U.S. oppose the move—or join in?
Last month the Israeli website Ynet reported that the Kremlin planned to deploy combat aircraft to Syria to help the Assad regime. The Russians are also sending an “expeditionary force” of “advisers, instructors, logistics personnel, technical personnel, members of the aerial protection division, and pilots who will operate the aircraft.” That deployment is now underway.
The decision to intervene seems to have been made during a visit to Moscow last month by Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian general in charge of the Quds Force. The general, who armed anti-American Shiite militias in Iraq, now oversees Tehran’s efforts to save Mr. Assad. The Iran nuclear deal lifts international sanctions against Mr. Soleimani and the Quds Force.
So what is the Obama Administration to do? Secretary of State John Kerry warned Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov last week that Russian intervention could “further escalate the conflict” and “lead to greater loss of life,” as if human rights are the lodestar of the Kremlin’s foreign policy. Mr. Obama also weighed in Friday, saying the Russian intervention was “doomed to fail,” and that Moscow was “going to have to start getting a little smarter.”
Mr. Obama made similar tut-tutting remarks about Mr. Putin after the invasion of Ukraine, which hardly dented the Russian’s taste for foreign adventures. But that doesn’t mean the Administration has given up on the Russians.
“The options are to try to confront Russia inside Syria or, as some in the White House are advocating, cooperate with Russia there on the fight against Islamic State,” Bloomberg’s Josh Rogin reported last week. The thinking seems to be that the U.S. has a chance to turn a lemon into lemonade by accepting Russia’s intervention as a fait accompli while defeating a common enemy.
Now that would be a sight: American F-18 pilots becoming wingmen to Russian MiGs to help a blood-soaked dictator stay in power. Yet as far-fetched as that seems, it’s also hard to see this President taking steps that might run any risk of confronting Russia or irritating the Iranians so soon after the nuclear deal. The result is likely to be one more policy abdication: More sermonizing about Russia being on the wrong side of history, and perhaps a few additional economic sanctions.
Russian intervention will not defeat the Islamic State. But it might save the Assad regime, while giving Moscow a new sphere of influence in the Middle East. It will also reinforce the lesson—for Mr. Putin and other autocrats—that the U.S. under Mr. Obama is a pushover and that now is the time to seize their chances.
As for the U.S., Russia’s intervention is another strategic debacle that could have been avoided if Washington had intervened years ago, when Islamic State didn’t exist and we still had credible moderate allies in the country. Had the anti-interventionist wing of the GOP followed John McCain’s and Lindsey Graham’s advice to act forcefully at the start of the uprising, they wouldn’t now be fretting about the Syrian refugees now swamping Europe.
The best option now for the U.S. would be to work with Turkey, Israel and Jordan to establish no-fly zones along their respective borders with Syria, along with protected “no-drive” zones in designated civilian safe havens. The model is Operation Provide Comfort, which established a safe haven for Kurds after the 1991 Gulf War and created the basis for a stable Iraqi enclave that is now our ally against Islamic State.
Russian pilots will not lightly risk a confrontation against superior American firepower and technology. A no-fly zone would also put some teeth into Mr. Obama’s promise to continue to oppose Iran’s regional behavior. Even better would be for the Administration finally to get serious about arming and training a viable Syrian opposition force, but don’t hold your breath.
Still, there’s a chance for the next American President to learn lessons from Syria: Namely, that inaction has consequences, and weakness is provocative. Until then, don’t expect any respite from Mr. Putin’s power plays—in Syria, Ukraine or anywhere else where his ambitions can find an opening in Barack Obama’s weakness.
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3)
Opportunity Versus Outcomes
By Thomas Sowell
A hostile review of my new book -- "Wealth, Poverty and Politics" -- said, "there is apparently no level of inequality of income or opportunity that Thomas Sowell would consider unacceptable."
Ordinarily, reviewers who miss the whole point of a book they are reviewing can be ignored. But this particular confusion about what opportunity means is far too widespread, far beyond a particular reviewer of a particular book. That makes it a confusion worth clearing up, because it affects so many other discussions of very serious issues.
"Wealth, Poverty and Politics" does not accept inequality of opportunity. Instead, it reports such things as children raised in low-income families usually not being spoken to nearly as often as children raised in high-income families. The conclusion: "It is painful to contemplate what that means cumulatively over the years, as poor children are handicapped from their earliest childhood."
Even if all the doors of opportunity are wide open, children raised with great amounts of parental care and attention are far more likely to be able to walk through those doors than children who have received much less attention. Why else do conscientious parents invest so much time and effort in raising their children? This is so obvious that you would have to be an intellectual to able to misconstrue it. Yet many among the intelligentsia equate differences in outcomes with differences in opportunity. A personal example may help clarify the difference.
As a teenager, I tried briefly to play basketball. But I was lucky to hit the backboard, much less the basket. Yet I had just as much opportunity to play basketball as Michael Jordan had. But equal opportunity was not nearly enough to create equal outcomes.
Nevertheless, many studies today conclude that different groups do not have equal opportunity or equal "access" to credit, or admission to selective colleges, or to many other things, because some groups are not successful in achieving their goal as often as other groups are.
The very possibility that not all groups have the same skills or other qualifications is seldom even mentioned, much less examined. But when people with low credit scores are not approved for loans as often as people with high credit scores, is that a lack of opportunity or a failure to meet standards?
When twice as many Asian students as white students pass the tough tests to get into New York's three highly selective public high schools -- Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech -- does that mean that white students are denied equal opportunity?
As for inequality of incomes, these depend on so many things -- including things that no government has control over -- that the obsession with statistical "gaps" or "disparities" that some call "inequities" is a major distraction from the more fundamental, and more achievable, goals of promoting a rising standard of living in general and greater opportunity for all.
There was never any serious reason to expect equal economic, educational or other outcomes, either between nations or within nations. "Wealth, Poverty and Politics" examines numerous demographic, geographic, cultural and other differences that make equal outcomes for all a very remote possibility.
To take just one example, in the United States the average age of Japanese Americans is more than 20 years older than the average age of Puerto Ricans. Even if these two groups were absolutely identical in every other way, Japanese Americans would still have a higher average income, because older people in general have more work experience and higher incomes.
Enabling all Americans to prosper and have greater opportunities is a far more achievable goal than equal outcomes. Internationally, the geographic settings in which different nations evolved have been so different that there has been nothing like a level playing field among nations and peoples.
Comparing the standard of living of Americans at the beginning of the 20th century with that at the end shows incredible progress. Most of this economic progress took place without the kind of heady rhetoric, social polarization or violent upheavals that have too often accompanied heedless pursuits of unachievable goals like the elimination of "gaps," "disparities" or "inequities."
Such fashionable fetishes are not helping the poor.
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4)The Bin Laden Papers
Release the captured files on al Qaeda’s secret deals with Iran.
Unlike so many terrorists, Osama Bin Laden didn’t take all of his secrets to the grave. The Navy SEALs who hunted him down also brought back from his Abbottabad hideout many files on al Qaeda’s plans as well as its cooperation with Iran. The question is why the public hasn’t been allowed to see them.
In a speech at the American Enterprise Institute last week, Dick Cheney quoted former Defense Intelligence Agency Gen. Michael Flynn saying there are “letters about Iran’s role, influence and acknowledgment of enabling al Qaeda operatives to pass through Iran as long as al Qaeda did its dirty work against the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan.” The former DIA director has also said Congress should seek all bin Laden documents related to Iran because they are “very telling.”
Here’s an example from one file that has been released. In a memo to bin Laden, an al Qaeda operative talks about another who is ready to travel:
“The destination, in principle, is Iran, and he has with him 6 to 8 brothers that he chose. I told him we are waiting for final complete confirmation from you to move, and agree on this destination (Iran). His plan is: stay around three months in Iran to train the brothers there then start moving them and distributing them in the world for their missions and specialties.”
More than a decade ago the 9/11 Commission reported that though there was no evidence Tehran knew about al Qaeda’s attack on the American homeland, “there is strong evidence that Iran facilitated the transit of al Qaeda members into and out of Afghanistan before 9/11, and that some of these were future 9/11 hijackers.”
The State and Treasury Departments did highlight some of the Iran-al Qaeda link when they were trying to keep the sanctions pressure on Iran. Here’s a sample of public statements:
July 28, 2011 . Treasury sanctions six al Qaeda operatives working in Iran. “By exposing Iran’s secret deal with al-Qa’ida allowing it to funnel funds and operatives through its territory,” said Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David Cohen, “we are illuminating yet another aspect of Iran’s unmatched support for terrorism.”
December 22, 2011 : State announces a $10 million reward for Yasin al-Suri, who “under an agreement between al-Qa’ida the Iranian Government” moves “money and al Qa’ida recruits” through Iran.
February 6, 2012: Treasury designates the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security” for its support to terrorist groups, including al-Qa’ida.”
May 30, 2013 : State releases its country reports on terrorism. “Iran,” it says, “remained unwilling to bring to justice senior al-Qa’ida (AQ) members it continued to detain, and refused to publicly identify those senior members in its custody.” It also allowed AQ members to operate a “core facilitation pipeline through Iranian territory.”
February 6, 2014: Treasury confirms that Yasin al-Suri “has resumed leadership of al-Qa’ida’s Iran-based network after being temporarily detained there in late 2011.”
You get the picture.
Yet earlier this summer the State Department’s latest country report on terrorism said Iran had “previously” allowed al Qaeda “to operate a core facilitation pipeline through Iran,” implying this was a thing of the past. Less than a month later, President Obama announced the Iran nuclear deal.
With his deal now moving ahead, the least the President could do is release the other bin Laden files dealing with Iran. And if the President doesn’t release the documents, Congress ought to demand them.
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