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I had a long conversation with Bob Johnson today. He has been hard at campaigning and is pleased with his reception.
It has been a hard fought campaign and ugly but he remains upbeat and confident and , apparently, has a great number of volunteers working on his behalf in various counties.
I am going to be at Tybee all week beginning Saturday but will be with Bob on the 17th and am bringing another small check for his campaign.
Any additional help by way of contributions to his campaign would be welcome . Thanks in advance for any consideration shown this request.
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What's with Moldova? (See 1 below.)
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Is this time different in Gaza? (See 2 and 2a below.)
and
Pigeons coming home to roost for our turkey of a president assisted by his appointed Sec. Kerry's blunders! (See 2b and 2c below.)
Obama is interested in and served by chaos because chaos allows him to blame others and he can then appear helpless because of what he alleges they caused.
Obama's unwillingness to go to the scene of his own crimes is revealing and conclusive because this is the strategy of demagogues and, most particularly, this Nobel Noodnick of a president.
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And so it goes! Islamist terrorists love life, theirs!(See 3 below.)
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Lo and behold a federal Judge just ruled that the IRS works for us and not the other way round and must be forthcoming.
It is evident Obama's hack, Lois Lerner, who chose to hide behind her Fifth Amendment Right',s was up to her arm pits in targeting voices in opposition to Obama and hiding her act by sending e mails on an unregulated address.
Meanwhile, Obama has no time to visit the border but he has all the time in the world to raise campaign funds, play pool and make political speeches blaming everyone else.
With him everything is always politics first, the nation last.
His dubious request for funding his border policy disaster should be rejected out of hand. If Obama cannot investigate what he is seeking billions from taxpayers they should not be asked to fund his nonsense and further theft of our children's future.
Take the money from the department of education which should be closed in any event and then spend it on sending the Marines to stop the border leaks.
What a a pathetic president the unwashed elected.
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Dick
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1) Why Moldova Urgently Matters
By Robert D. Kaplan
"NATO's Article 5 offers little protection against Vladimir Putin's Russia," Iulian Fota, Romania's presidential national security adviser, told me on a recent visit to Bucharest. "Article 5 protects Romania and other Eastern European countries against a military invasion. But it does not protect them against subversion," that is, intelligence activities, the running of criminal networks, the buying-up of banks and other strategic assets, and indirect control of media organs to undermine public opinion. Moreover, Article 5 does not protect Eastern Europe against reliance on Russian energy. As Romanian President Traian Basescu told me, Romania is a somewhat energy-rich island surrounded by a Gazprom empire. The president ran his finger over a map showing how Romania's neighbors such as Bulgaria and Hungary were almost completely dependent on Russian natural gas, while Romania -- because of its own hydrocarbon reserves -- still has a significant measure of independence. In the 21st century, the president explained, Gazprom is more dangerous than the Russian army. The national security adviser then added: "Putin is not an apparatchik; he is a former intelligence officer," implying that Putin will act subtly. Putin's Russia will not fight conventionally for territory in the former satellite states, but unconventionally for hearts and minds, Fota went on. "Putin knows that the flaw of the Soviet Union was that it did not have soft power."
Thus, Moscow's strategy is about taking over countries from within. In this battle, it is precisely during the quiet periods, when an issue like Ukraine drifts off the front pages because of the Middle East, for example, that we should be worried. And remember that weak democracies can be more useful to Russia than strong dictatorships. A ruthless communist autocrat such as Josip Broz Tito in Yugoslavia was able to keep the Soviets out of his country during the Cold War. But a feeble polity, however democratic, such as Romania's neighbor Moldova, offers the Russians many local politicians to bribe.
With this in mind I traveled to Iasi on Romania's northeastern frontier with Moldova. There I met Iasi's county council president, Cristian Mihai Adomnitei, who reflected on how a relatively small group of Bolshevik conspirators had taken the great cities of Moscow and Saint Petersburg in November 1917. "Putin is heir to this tradition," Adomnitei said. "In his heart, he is a Bolshevik. He knows that you can conquer vast territories without big armies." Adomnitei took me inside Iasi's 19th-century National Theater, a little jewel dripping in gold leaf in celebration of the Rococo and Baroque styles, where Verdi's Traviata was to be performed in a few days. Alone with me in the empty theater, Adomnitei declared, "Here is Europe, here is its history and culture, its artistic values, and maybe soon its political values. Here is the borderland of the Habsburg Empire. We need your help to defend us."
From Iasi I crossed the Prut River into Moldova -- historic Bessarabia, a territory that has been traded back and forth through the centuries between Romania and Russia but that, since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, has been independent. Immediately the quality of the road deteriorated and the houses became marked by rust, scrap iron and undressed concrete -- like the Romania I had known from a generation before. I noticed that the houses along the road were connected to a natural gas pipeline network coming from Siberia, so that the quality of life was dependent upon Russia. Men and women in dusty fedoras and kerchiefs rolled by in leiterwagens, or wooden wagons. In the first town through which I passed, Ungheni, the park and sidewalks were devoured by weeds.
Almost a quarter century after the Soviet Empire's collapse, its legacy lives on not only through underdevelopment but also through corruption -- which in Moldova is the overwhelming fact of political life that dares not speak its name, so that nationality questions receive all the prominence. Because of strong ethnic Russian, ethnic Ukrainian, ethnic Bulgarian and ethnic Turkic elements, and an ethnic Romanian majority that until the end of the Cold War had used the Cyrillic alphabet to read and write, Moldova's very identity is still somewhat an issue, the prime minister, Iurie Leanca, admitted to me in a long interview.
Witness Balti, a city in northern Moldova, heralded by Soviet-era apartment buildings that resemble yellowing teeth. Here I met a local politician, Cecilia Graur, who told me that, "everyone is afraid. The situation in eastern Ukraine could happen here. We all know this because of our own divisions," political, ethnic and linguistic. "People talk about it all the time." Balti, with its pro-Russian sentiment, could become a Moldovan Donetsk, a Western diplomat warned me. While Graur was pro-European and spoke Romanian, Alexander Nesterovskii, another politician I met in Balti, was pro-Russian and spoke Russian. He said that local support for Putin represented a rational choice. "People could never afford to have Russia slow down natural gas deliveries or cease buying the region's agricultural products." Communism no longer meant Communism per se, but an advantageous economic relationship with Russia.
Comrat, in southern Moldova, is home to the Christian Orthodox and Russian-speaking Turkic Gagauz -- a potential fifth column that Putin could use to undermine Moldova. Vitaliy Kyurkchu, a local Gagauz politician, told me that with 160,000 Gagauz in Moldova and 40,000 over the border in Ukraine, "we have ongoing kitchen discussions -- discussions mainly among ourselves, I mean -- about the creation of a Greater Gagauzia" should Moldova and Ukraine weaken or ever collapse. This was dangerous irredentism, of course. The Gagauz themselves are uncertain about their origins. Local identity is so complex that Georgetown's Charles King, among the leading experts in the field, calls nationality in Moldova a "decidedly negotiable proposition."
Then there is Transdniestria, a sliver of territory east of the Dniester River that is officially part of Moldova but that, with its heavily ethnic Russian population, seceded from Moldova after a brief war in the early 1990s. Transdniestria is now packed with Russian troops to act as a hammer against Moldova should the latter ever want to pivot toward the West. Transdniestria is the kind of legally murky, ill-defined smugglers' paradise that Putin wants to see multiply in eastern Ukraine.
For weeks I traveled around Moldova. Indeed, the common theme everywhere was that Russia is a reality while the West is only a geopolitical concept. Ultimately, this is why even many of the ethnic Romanians are resigned to the fact that Russia must be engaged.
I cannot help but recall the dark political landscape in Yugoslavia while reporting there in the 1980s in advance of the violent breakup of that country in the 1990s. My writing apparently helped influence a White House policy of inaction from 1993 to 1995. Yet it is only the darkest landscapes where intervention is ever required in the first place: You should know the worst about a place before you craft the most humanistic policy toward it. I am not here providing a fully fleshed-out policy toward Moldova or the other states facing Russia. I am saying only that there are incalculable human costs to Western inaction. And Western action must mean a whole-of-government approach -- political, intelligence, economics and so forth -- in order to counter what the Russians are doing.
Time may be short. Russian officials have reportedly held meetings with Moldova's ethnic minorities to get them to demand even more autonomy after Moldova goes ahead with the association agreement with the European Union signed at the end of June. The Russians know that Moldova is more than just a borderland: It is an unwieldy mix of peoples constituting multiple borderlands within a small and weak state. I fear for Moldova.
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Operation Protective Edge may look like its predecessors–Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9 and Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012–in that it is a response to Palestinian terrorism launched from Gaza against Israeli civilians. The previous two rounds of the conflict ended with Hamas still in power in the Gaza Strip, weakened but able to re-arm over time and to project a strategic threat. There are five reasons, however, this time may be different.
1. By Attacking Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Hamas Has Invited Its Own Destruction. By launching its Iranian-and Syrian-made missiles against Israel’s two major cities–especially Tel Aviv, normally a safe distance from conflict–Hamas has broken the unwritten rules of the game. It has long been known that Hamas in the south and Hezbollah in the north had the ability to reach those cities. But those groups had not exercised it.
Now that Hamas has shown it is willing to attack Israel’s commercial, spiritual, and political centers, the terror group has left Israel no choice but to destroy it completely. There is no way Israel can accept life under an active threat of rockets, enjoying safety only at Hamas’s whim. Attacking border towns like Sderot–or even, as in 2006, a northern city like Haifa–is one thing. Attacking Tel Aviv is a provocation Israel cannot ignore.
In particular, Netanyahu must maintain Israel’s deterrent. While he needs to keep forces at the ready in case of an attack from Hezbollah, or a more direct escalation by Iran, he knows that if he fails to show that Israel is ready to defend itself, he will strengthen Tehran. With nuclear negotiators just days away from their deadline for a (bad) deal, Netanyahu needs to maintain pressure on Iran–and remind the U.S. it can act on its own.
2. Obama Is on the Wrong Side–and Irrelevant. On the first day of Operation Protective Edge, President Obama published an op-ed in the left-wing dailyHa’aretz calling for “restraint” and a Palestinian state. As if to make clear that the publication was not an accident of timing, a senior Obama adviser gave a harsh speech to a peace conference in Tel Aviv the same day at which he blasted Israel for continuing to occupy the West Bank.
These gestures–informed, as usual, by misleading Palestinian demographic statistics that falsely predict Arab majorities in the near future–send the message that the White House disapproves of Israel’s operation and its general strategic posture. Normally, that would be very bad news for Israel. But it may help, ironically, because Obama has already alienated Israel to such an extent that the Israeli government feels at liberty to ignore him.
In addition, Israel previously held back due to political considerations in the U.S., cutting Cast Lead short in time for Obama’s inauguration, and postponing Pillar of Defense until Obama’s re-election campaign was over. This time conflict has erupted at the height of the midterm elections, meaning that anything Obama tries to do to stop Israel will boost Republican criticism of his foreign policy, and place Democrats in a tough spot.
3. None of Hamas’s Usual Allies Are Going to Help. Egypt, which as of last year was controlled by a very Hamas-friendly Muslim Brotherhood, is now run by Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who led a military coup that pushed the Muslim Brotherhood out of power, cutting off a critical source of military and diplomatic support. The fact that Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood means Sisi has no love for the organization.
Iran might normally be expected to help, especially by smuggling weapons and stirring up Hezbollah to create a potential second front for Israel in Lebanon. However, Iran is tied down in fighting to defend the Assad regime in Syria and the Maliki regime in Iraq. Syria has long since expelled Hamas from Damascus, and Jordan is too preoccupied with the threat of ISIS to care. Even ISIS is too busy to make Israel a priority. Hamas is on its own.
4. Iron Dome Has Neutralized Hamas’s Offensive Arsenal. Though Hamas targeted Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, those two cities have (thus far) emerged unscathed, thanks to the effectiveness of Israel’s Iron Dome system, which tracks and destroys small, short-range projectiles. (Here the Obama administration will try to take some credit for Israel’s security, although the project had U.S. support before Obama came to power.)
The other weapon Hamas still retains is kidnapping. It is still a potent threat, as last month’s abduction and murder to three Israeli teens shows. Yet to carry out that threat, Hamas must either rely on infiltrating from Gaza, which has become very difficult, or on activating terror cells in the West Bank, where the Israeli military operates relatively freely. There is a reason Hamas is resorting to its best weapons first: it is rather desperate.
5. There is Israeli Support for Invading Gaza. Or, rather, Netanyahu will pay a political price if he fails to do what is necessary to oust Hamas. That could include re-occupying Gaza for some time–not re-introducing the settlements that were abandoned in the 2005 disengagement, but enforcing stability and preventing Hamas from operating militarily or politically in the Strip, withdrawing only once its terror infrastructure is destroyed.
The Israel peace camp has become a joke. On Tuesday, attendees at a conference of peace activists physically assaulted one of Israel’s conservative leaders. Though a few die-hards–including Israel’s outgoing President Shimon Peres–will stress the importance of negotiations and a two-state solution, the more potent political threat is on Netanyahu’s right, ready to exploit impressions that he has not done enough to secure Israel.
Hamas TV song:
"Fire your rockets, make them explode...
victory is from Allah...
O Martyrdom-seeker, O blaze, hurry,
blow up Tel-Aviv"
by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik
In a song on Al-Aqsa TV, Hamas promises to launch more rockets at Israel and encourages Palestinians to seek Martyrdom death for Allah through suicide bombings in cafés and buses.
The song calls to "destroy" and "blow up Tel-Aviv" and to "return" the Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon to Palestinians, while the video shows rockets being fired.
Addressing Hamas' military wing, the Izz A-Din Al-Qassam Brigades, the song affirms that "victory is from Allah" and that "in Paradise there is a Garden [for Martyrs] calling to you." The video shows a café and a bus destroyed by a suicide bomber, along with the words, "Martyrdom-seeker (i.e., suicide bomber), O blaze, hurry, blow up Tel Aviv."
The following is the text of the song entitled "O [Izz A-Din] Al-Qassam [Brigades], Fire Your Rockets":
"O [Hamas'] Al-Qassam [Brigades],
Fire without asking on (southern Israel's) Eshkol
To return (the Israeli city) Ashkelon
Let the thieving [Israeli] army lament and go down to the shelters
Let them go down to the shelters
O Al-Qassam, fire your rockets
Make them explode and write your history
O Al-Qassam, victory is from Allah
In Paradise there is a Garden [for Martyrs] calling to you
Fajar 5 [rocket], O blaze, hurry, destroy Tel Aviv
O Martyrdom-seeker (i.e., suicide bomber), O blaze, hurry, blow up Tel Aviv
(Image: a café and a bus destroyed by a suicide bomber)
The free [Hamas'] Al-Qassam say: 'Allah willing, we will hit and will not fail'"
[Al-Aqsa TV (Hamas), July 9, 2014]
2b) From the Middle East to Russia to our own southern border, Obama’s bills are coming due.
by Victor Davis Hanson
Often, crazy things seem normal for a time because logical catastrophes do not immediately follow.A deeply suspicious Richard Nixon systematically and without pushback for years undermined and politicized almost every institution of the federal government, from the CIA and the FBI to the IRS and the attorney general’s office. Nixon seemed to get away with it — until his second term. Once the public woke up, however, the eventual accounting proved devastating: resignation of a sitting president, prison sentences for his top aides, collapse of the Republican party, government stasis, a ruined economy, the destruction of the Vietnam peace accords that had led to a viable South Vietnam, the end of Henry Kissinger’s diplomatic breakthroughs, and a generation of abject cynicism about government. Did Nixon ever grasp that such destruction was the natural wage of his own paranoia?
In the post-Watergate climate of reform, for nearly three years a naïve Jimmy Carter gave utopian speeches about how American forbearance would end the Cold War and create a new world order based on human rights — until America’s abdication started to erode the preexisting global order. Scary things followed, such as the fall of the shah of Iran, the rise of Iranian theocracy, the taking of American hostages in Tehran, revolutions and insurrection throughout Central America, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, radical Islamists taking over Mecca, more gas lines, continued stagflation, and China invading Vietnam. Did the puritanical Carter ever understand what might be the consequences of his own self-righteousness in an imperfect world?
Barack Obama likewise has done some crazy things that seemed for years to have no ramifications. Unfortunately, typical of the ways of Nemesis (a bitter goddess who waits until the opportune moment to demand payment for past hubris), suddenly the bills for Obama’s six years of folly are coming due for the American people.
When a president occasionally fails to tell the truth, you get a scandal like the monitoring of the Associated Press reporters. When a president serially fails to tell the truth, you get that plus the scandals involving the IRS, the NSA, the VA, Benghazi, and too many others to mention.
The same is true abroad. The American public hardly noticed when Obama recklessly withdrew every peacekeeper from Iraq. Did he not boast of “ending the Iraq War”? It did not mind when the U.S. posted dates for withdrawal from Afghanistan. Trashing all the Bush–Cheney anti-terrorism protocols, from Guantanamo to renditions, did not make much sense, when such policies had worked and, in fact, were of use to Obama himself. But again, most Americans took no note. Apparently the terrorists did, however, and they regrouped even as the president declared them “on the run.”
Lecturing Israel while praising Islamist Turkey was likewise ignored. America snoozed as its president insidiously redefined its role in the Middle East as secondary to the supposed pivot to Asia. Each new correction in and of itself was comparatively minor; but in aggregate they began to unravel the U.S.-inspired postwar global order.
At first, who cared whether Iran serially violated every Obama deadline on halting nuclear enrichment? Did we worry that Libya, where Obama was proud of having led from behind, was descending into Somalia? Few Americans were all that bothered over Obama’s empty order to Syrian president Bashar Assad to step down, or over Obama’s later vacuous red-line threats that bombs would follow any use by Assad of chemical weapons.
Few noted that Obama lied to the nation that a video had caused the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, that Obama had known who the real terrorist perpetrators were but had ordered no immediate action to kill or capture them, and that Americans had been engaged in mysterious and still unexplained covert activities in Benghazi. After all that, we still shrugged when the president traded five top terrorist leaders for an alleged American deserter.
Trashing George W. Bush’s policy toward Vladimir Putin while promising a new reset approach (illustrated with a plastic red button) to an aggressive dictator raised few eyebrows at the time. Nor did many Americans worry that our Pacific allies were upset over Chinese and North Korean aggression that seemed to ignore traditional U.S. deterrence.
We were told that only Obama-haters at home had catalogued the president’s apologies abroad, his weird multicultural bowing to authoritarians, his ahistorical speeches about mythical Islamic achievements, his surreal euphemisms for radical Islam, terrorism, and jihadism, his shrill insistence about civilian trials for terrorists and closing Guantanamo, or the radical cutbacks at the Pentagon, coupled with the vast increase in entitlement spending.
But after six years of all that, our allies have got the message that they are on their own, our enemies that there are few consequences to aggression, and neutrals that joining with America does not mean ending up on the winning side. The result is that the Middle East we have known since the end of World War II has now vanished
Supposedly crackpot fantasies about a worldwide “caliphate” are becoming reified. What were once dismissed as conspiracy theories about an “Iranian arc” — from a nuclear Tehran through Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon to the borders of Israel to the Shiite minorities in the Gulf kingdoms — do not seem so crazy.
The idea of visiting the Egyptian pyramids or hoping to reengage with a reforming Libya is absurd. The best of the Middle East — Israel, Jordan, Kurdistan — no longer count on us. The worst — ISIS, Iran, Syria — count on us to remain irrelevant or worse. Old allies in the Gulf would probably trust Israel or Russia more than the Obama administration. In the next two years, if Obama continues on his present course, we are going to see things that we could not have imagined six years ago in the Middle East, as it reverts to premodern Islamic tribalism.
The same trajectory has been followed on the home front. Americans at first were amused that the great conciliator — and greatest political recipient on record of Wall Street cash — went after the rich with an array of hokey epithets and slurs (fat cats, corporate-jet owners, Vegas junketeers, limb-lopping and tonsil-pulling doctors, business owners who should not profit, or should know when they have made enough money, or should admit they didn’t build their own businesses). Few connected the dots when the polarizing attorney general — the John Mitchell of our time — referred to African-Americans as “my people” and all the rest of the nation as “cowards.” Did we worry that the craziest things seem to come out of the president’s own mouth — the Trayvon-like son he never had, the stereotyping police, the absence of a “smidgen” of corruption in the Lois Lerner IRS scandal, or the mean Republicans who “messed” with him?
The president before the 2012 elections lamented to Latino groups that he did not have dictatorial powers to grant amnesty but urged them in the meantime to “punish our enemies” — a sort of follow-up to his 2008 “typical white person” incitement. Who was bothered that with “a pen and a phone” Obama for the first time in American history emasculated the U.S. Border Patrol, as part of a larger agenda of picking and choosing which federal laws the executive branch would enforce?
Those choices seemed to be predicated on two extralegal criteria: Did a law contribute to Obama’s concept of social justice, and did it further the progressive political cause? If the answer was no to either, the statute was largely unenforced. No president since World War II has done more to harm the U.S. Constitution — by ordering the executive branch not to enforce particular laws, by creating by fiat laws never enacted by Congress, by monitoring the communications of journalists and average Americans, by making appointments contrary to law — to the apparent yawns of the people.
Too few also seemed to care that almost everything the president had promised about Obamacare — keep your health plan, retain your doctor, save money on your premiums, sign up easily online, while we were lowering the annual deficit and reducing medical expenditures — was an abject lie. In such a climate, Obama felt no need to issue accurate data about how many Americans had lost their health plans, how many had simply transferred to Obamacare from Medicaid, how many had actually paid their premiums, or how many were still uninsured. The media ignored the serial $1 trillion deficits, the chronic high unemployment and low growth, the nonexistence of the long-promised “summer of recovery,” and the nonappearance of “millions of shovel-ready and green jobs.” The fact that electrical-power rates, gasoline prices, and food costs have soared under Obama as wages have stagnated has never really been noticed. Nor have the record numbers of Americans on food stamps and disability insurance.
Meanwhile, as Obama has refused to enforce immigration law, the result is chaos. Tens of thousands of children are flooding across our border illegally, on the scent of Obama’s executive-order amnesties. Advocates of open borders, such as progressive grandees Mark Zuckerberg and Nancy Pelosi, assume that these impoverished Third World children will not enroll in the private academies attended by their children or grandchildren, or need housing in one of their vacation estates, or crowd their specialists’ waiting rooms. They do not worry about the effects of illegal immigration on the wages of low-income Americans. Dealing first-hand with the ramifications of open borders is for unenlightened, illiberal little people.
Obama’s economic legacy is rarely appreciated. He has institutionalized the idea that unemployment between 6 and 7 percent is normal, that annual deficits over $500 billion reflect frugality, that soaring power, food, and fuel costs are not proof of inflation, that zero interest rates are the reward for thrift, that higher taxes are always a beginning, never an end, and that there is no contradiction when elite progressives — the Obamas, the Clintons, the Warrens — trash the 1-percenters, while doing everything in their power to live just like them.
We are the roost and, to paraphrase the president’s former spiritual adviser, Obama’s chickens are now coming home to us.
While Israel is focused right now on dealing with a Hamas missile barrage that has continued for three days, the threat of an Iranian nuclear weapon cannot be entirely forgotten. But if Israelis are concerned about the mixed messages its American ally has been sending to the Palestinians, they have to be even more worried about what the U.S. might do in the talks with Tehran.
As the Wall Street Journal reported today, the P5+1 process is currently stalemated with a July 20 deadline looming over the negotiators. Iran and the West appear to be far apart on issues such as Tehran’s “right” to enrich uranium and the number of centrifuges it would be allowed to keep in the future, the future of its plutonium nuclear plant as well as its mountainside Fordow plant where enrichment activities continue. That list doesn’t even include issues such as Iran’s secret military research facilities that have not been visited by United Nations inspectors or its ballistic missile program that might provide the ayatollahs with a delivery system for a bomb.
Going into the final weeks of talks (though the negotiations can always be extended by both sides), the Iranians have been sounding confident about their ability to stick to their existing positions that would guarantee them the ability to build a bomb despite Western concerns.
The Obama administration gave up much of its leverage over Iran last fall when it decided to loosen sanctions in an interim agreement that granted implicit recognition of Iran’s right to both enrichment and a formidable nuclear infrastructure. The Iranians were required to convert their stockpile of nuclear fuel to a state that couldn’t be used for a bomb. But that could be quickly reversed if the Islamist regime decided to attempt a “break out” to a weapon. Indeed, after beginning the process of unraveling the sanctions that had taken years to put in place, the U.S. position on the Iranian threat has been reduced to one that attempts to lengthen the break out period rather than forcing Tehran to give up its enrichment or, as President Obama pledged in 2012, the end of its nuclear program.
Iran’s confidence also has to be boosted by the announcement that the P5+1 foreign ministers, a group that includes Secretary of State John Kerry, will be joining the talks in Vienna this week. That’s an ominous development since the weak interim agreement was only reached after Kerry parachuted into those talks in November.
Kerry’s presence is worrisome because he explained the U.S. retreat last fall as being motivated by his belief that even the weak deal he signed was better than no deal at all. To those who wondered why he had accepted Iran’s insistence on keeping its nuclear infrastructure, he merely replied that sticking to America’s demands was impossible. With Iran’s leaders insisting that they will never accept a major reduction in the number of centrifuges available to them, it’s hard to believe that Kerry will hold the line on that issue after his previous retreat.
Kerry’s blunders in the talks between Israel and the Palestinians should also raise alarms for those wondering how he will manage the Iranians in the coming weeks. Throughout that process, Kerry not only disregarded Israel’s security requirements but also continually backed down from demands made on the Palestinians, even those that were purely symbolic such as their need to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state. Kerry was also heedless of the consequences of his all-but-certain failure. The current violence can be directly traced not only to his foolish initiative but his decision not to hold the Palestinian Authority accountable for its decision to ally itself with Hamas rather than making peace with Israel.
At a time when, as Forbes’ Business Insider reports, European governments are already gutting sanctions on Iran even before the talks are concluded, Tehran heads into the final days of negotiations feeling it has the wind at its back. Just as Kerry helped set the stage for the revival of Hamas and a new round of violence, his zeal for a deal with Iran may lead to even more serious disasters in the negotiations that are about to unfold.
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We’ve declassified this aerial photo of Gaza from last night in order to show the world how Palestinian terrorists use their homes as command centers and endanger their neighbors. Share this and help us spread the truth.
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