I will not write anything original until I dig out from under other than to cheer Atty Gen. Holder's resignation
He has been the most divisive and corrupt Atty. General I have known and that says a lot.
and
to make these few observations:
Now that we are at 'war' with ISIS we are told by many of the same Democrats, who were scathing in their criticism of G.W for doing the same thing, we must rally around the president. This is the same president who cannot bring himself to utter the word 'war' as if we are engaged in a 'workplace sanitation effort.'
However, unlike G.W, who never told the enemy what our intentions or plans were, Obama not only does but also repeats we will not put "booties" on the ground. Can Obama ever get serious about defeating an enemy?
Obama's stopping Iran from going nuclear remains the ultimate test which, I predict, he will fail in doing so.
Furthermore, don't expect the press to report our attacks in the same manner as they reported Israel's against Hamas, because they do not have similar access but mostly, because they are biased against Israel and protective of Obama. The Pentagon and the administration are in control of the 'war' in order to deny Obama is a 'war' president.
Rest assured, as accurate, good and careful as our Air Force is, bombs and rockets go astray and cause collateral damage and kill innocents.
Finally, deter and defeat are two separate words. Until Obama is ready to stop playing politics and gets serious and committed, ISIS will not be stopped. Disrupted yes, but not defeated. Perhaps you cannot defeat terrorism because it is amoebic and spreads like a virus but you can do more than Obama will eventually do and I doubt he will listen to his military advisors, as GW did, because Obama has never played a contact sport, been in the military and , thus, is not tough and cannot think in a military manner.
He is a pathetic and prime example of the downside of "affirmative action."
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Click On: 1955 Song and http://www.youtube.com/watch?
and finally: https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10202804003885630&fref=nf
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"I sure love my Race Card! It comes in handy whenever I find myself in a mess I've made. I just bring it out and 'voila', the mess is overlooked.
===In fact, there's no limit on how many times I can use it! I highly recommend the Race Card. Don't leave home without it." BHO(Also endorsed by Al $harpton, Je$$ie Jackson, Jeremiah White, Charles Rangel and Eric Holder.)
LTE upon my return:
I have just returned from a busman's holiday to Wisconsin with friends and what a magnificent and clean state and what wonderful and friendly people the "Cheeseheads" are.
While gone Mr. Carter believes, since he owns all of downtown Savannah, he can impose his bad taste on our beautiful and historic city, while the powers that be sit on their thumbs. Maybe they all need to visit Milwaukee and stay at The Pfister Hotel.
Meanwhile, our president remains unable to say the word "war'"as he follows G.W's path to 'deter' radical terrorists who are engaged in 'work place violent beheadings' which now have come to our own country.
However, unlike G.W, Obama cannot refrain from indicating what we will and will not do when it comes to 'booties' on the ground and other indications of our 'deterrent' intentions.
Then we have the resignation of Mr.. Holder - the most racist, divisive and lying Attorney General's I have witnessed in my 80 plus years and there have been several who have preceded him..
Finally, I daresay the press and media folks will not report Obama's new war as they did Israel's engagement with Hamas because their bias against Israel and their desire to protect their anointed president is so readily evident.
I would like to wish all the happiest and healthiest and peaceful New Years, if that is achievable, as The Jewish New Year begins
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1) )Why Do Most Jews Stay with Obama?
Posted By Arnold Steinberg
It was implausible to me that Barack Obama never knew Rev. Jeremiah
Wright hated Jews. At best, Obama made a deal with this anti-Semitic racist [1], who helped Obama launch his political career.
Still, back in 2008, Jews — displaying the cognitive dissonance of a captive
Democratic voter bloc — gave Obama the benefit of the doubt for the same
reason most Jews continue to support him: he’s (half) black. Jews favor
underdogs and victims (though really, Obama is neither).
As many Jews assimilated into America over the last century, some
downplayed their Jewish identity — changing names, intermarrying and,
most of all, converting… to the secular religion of liberalism. Although
Jews became leaders in the civil rights movement, black anti-Semitism
persists; leftist Jews don’t see to care that the Congressional Black Caucus
is largely anti-Israel, as was the last Democratic National Convention.
There is a double standard. Obama’s first foreign policy act was his
“apology tour” to the Arab world. Obama then favored the Islamist Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt and opposed its moderate successor government.
Secretary of State John Kerry similarly snubbed moderate Arabs countries
and bypassed the Palestinian Authority to curry favor with Hamas. Imagine
if Secretary of State Jim Baker had done the same thing during George
H.W. Bush’s presidency.
Following World War II, the myth had persisted among Jews that FDR was
a bold leader who helped save Jews, when, in fact, he was a feckless
polemicist who was indifferent to the Holocaust. Republican Sen. Robert
Taft’s principled opposition to the ex post facto Nuremberg trials
was misinterpreted. That same older generation of Jews also thanked Democrat Harry Truman in 1948 for recognizing Israel and faulted Republican Dwight
Eisenhower for pressuring Israel during the 1956 Suez crisis.
To this day, few Jews recognize that at Israel’s greatest time of existential
threat — the 1973 surprise attack known as the Yom Kippur War —
Golda Meir called in the middle of the night; Nixon unilaterally overruled
the Pentagon to airlift massive military supplies to our beleaguered ally.
More background — the Holocaust itself had produced a postwar
disaffection among Jewish baby-boomers who were raised by parents in
permanent recovery mode. These Jews, now middle-aged and older, tacitly
rebelled against Judaism; how could God permit the extermination of
millions of their pious ancestors? At the risk of irreverence, I would
suggest that Jews in Europe should have been less trusting and better
armed, and maybe God now wants American Jews to support the Second
Amendment and oppose gun control.
Jews have long been seduced into generational mythology. It’s true that
many European Christians hated Jews and collaborated with the Gestapo,
as did many Polish Catholics, and the Polish government which oppressed
Jews. But the Christian tradition in America is different, and also Catholics
here are not hostile to Jews. Given the support for Israel among
evangelical Christians, conservatives still cannot understand how “prayer
in schools” sent alarm bells to some Jews who irrationally saw the slippery
slope of a theocracy.
Also, how convenient for liberal Jews to forget that Nazis were national socialists [3]who defamed the free market [4] as Jew-profiteering and that Mussolini’s fascism was a corporatist state [5], much like what Obama envisions with his crony capitalism.
In fact, the European “far right” and American conservatism are mutually exclusive.
Indeed, a free market economy in a pluralistic society is uniquely hospitable to Jews, but many Jews, despite the Jewish roots of Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman and an array of Jewish free market economists, do not yet get it.
In the last generation or two, many younger, alienated Jews, raised in post-Holocaust cynicism and ignorant of Mideast history, have fallen victim to the propaganda that Zionists are colonialists and racists who unjustly occupy Palestinian territory. At some point, hopefully not too late, they will learn that Islamists (as the Nazis did) want to kill all Jews, even politically correct Jews who are Israel-bashers. The silver lining is that perhaps the attacks on Jews in Europe will awaken Jews here to their heritage and its political derivative, American conservatism. After all, many of the major American figures in libertarian philosophy and the conservative movement were Jewish.
But for now, many “Jews” attend the Progressive Church, or they remain atheists, agnostics or religiously unobservant. Indeed, compared to others, Jews have the lowest affiliation or attendance rate with a house of worship. Generally, the more orthodox (religiously observant) a Jew, the more likely he is a conservative or a Republican. While the ranks of orthodox Jewry grow, they remain very small.
I would more likely find support for Israel today in an evangelical Christian church than in a reform (politically liberal, nontraditional) synagogue, which is preoccupied with trendy causes. Even worse is the most leftist “reconstructionist” shul, where a heroic figure in the congregation likely would be a teachers’ union leader who, after several abortions, outed herself as a lesbian and, with her Latina partner, works with “people of color” lobbying for the fourth generation of perennial Palestinian refugees and, in her spare time, fights the NRA.
Liberalism, discredited, is now repackaged as progressivism. America historically and uniquely has enfranchised liberty and opportunity for Jews; yet, many Jews — seemingly inexplicably — reject American exceptionalism in favor of Obama transforming our nation into an egalitarian bore, an economy lacking organic growth. So Obama’s plunge into mediocrity with mandated income redistribution is a good fit, especially for Jews who feel guilty about their own material success.
But if we continue to degenerate into a secular Europe, devoid of values and hostile to Jews, will American Jews finally realize Obama’s dream is their nightmare? Even in the totalitarian Soviet Union, Jews who never thought of themselves as Jews asserted their identity when the communists, after the 1967 6-Day War, targeted “Zionists” and outlawed Hebrew as a political language.
For too many young American Jews, Israel’s founding is ancient history. It seems all-powerful. Obama’s statement last week that he “does not worry about Israel’s survival” was more than a Freudian slip. It lent credence to the apathy among young Jews. Iron Dome seems to confirm Israel’s invulnerability, so why worry about Israel, or probe the origins and implications of Obama’s bumbling?
It is disheartening to me that Israel is unimportant to many Jewish university
graduates in the last decade or two. With Israel, as with the world, these relatively younger Jews have no institutional memory and a scant knowledge of history. After all, like the rest of America’s college students, they often are indoctrinated by leftist professors who hate America and its allies, especially Israel. A counter-trend:
Sheldon Adelson and other Jewish philanthropists fund Birthright, which pays for American Jews under age 25 to visit Israel. My talks with these young adults suggest they come back both pro-Israel and pro-American.
Liberalism/progressivism repudiates Judaism, because it rejects the permanent things, especially tradition and prudence and, most of all, the ordered liberty that posits this: an individual must be free to choose virtue, not coerced into it by government. “Tikkun Olam” (Hebrew for “repairing the world) has become the Jewish equivalent of the humanism of the National Council of Churches or the liberation theology of activist Catholics. Simply put, the political Jews, like the political Protestants and political Catholics, see social justice as defining not the relations between man and man, but between man and government.
In other words, many leftist Jews who do attend synagogue are like many
leftist Christians who attend church. They repudiate religious teachings that
urge “you” to pursue a virtuous life. Instead, they want government to do it all.
And that’s why many of them are sticking with Barack Obama.
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2)The Unwisdom of Barack Obama
2)The Unwisdom of Barack Obama
Is he weak? Arrogant? Ambivalent? Don't overthink the president.
By Peggy Noonan
Sept. 18, 2014 5:45 p.m. ET
At this dramatic time, with a world on fire, we look at the president and ponder again who he is. Mr. Obama himself mocked how people see him, according to a remarkable piece this week by Peter Baker in the New York Times. NYT -0.75% "Oh, it's a shame when you have a wan, diffident, professorial president," he reportedly said, sarcastically, in a meeting with journalists before his big Syria speech. Zbigniew Brzezinski told Mr. Baker the president's critics think he's a "a softy. He's not a softy."
Actually, no one thinks he's a softy. A man who personally picks drone targets, who seems sometimes to enjoy antagonizing congressional Republicans, whose speeches not infrequently carry a certain undercurrent of political malice, cannot precisely be understood as soft.
But we focus on Mr. Obama's personality and psychology—he's weak or arrogant or ambivalent, or all three—and while this is interesting, it's too fancy. We are overthinking the president.
His essential problem is that he has very poor judgment.
And we don't say this because he's so famously bright—academically credentialed, smooth, facile with words, quick with concepts. (That's the sort of intelligence the press and popular historians most prize and celebrate, because it's exactly the sort they possess.) But brightness is not the same as judgment, which has to do with discernment, instinct, the ability to see the big picture, wisdom that is earned or natural.
Mr. Obama can see the trees, name their genus and species, judge their age and describe their color. He absorbs data. But he consistently misses the shape, size and density of the forest. His recitations of data are really a faux sophistication that suggests command of the subject but misses the heart of the matter.
You can run down the list. His famous "red line" comment was poor judgment. He shouldn't have put himself or his country in that position, threatening action if a foreign leader did something. He misjudged the indelible impression his crawl-back would make on the world.
Last month it was the "I don't have a strategy" statement on the Islamic State. That's not something an American president attempting to rouse the public and impress the world can say. But he didn't know.
ObamaCare top to bottom was poor judgment. It shouldn't have been the central domestic effort of his presidency, that should have been the economy and jobs. He thought his bill could go forward without making Republicans co-own it, thought it would be clever to let Congress write it, thought an overextended and undertalented federal government could execute it. He thought those who told him the website would work were truthful, when he should have been smoking out agendas, incompetence and yes-sir-ism. He shouldn't have said if you like your doctor you can keep him. That was his domestic red-line comment. It was a product of poor judgment.
The other night, at the end of his Syria speech, he sang a long, off-point aria to the economy. Supposedly it would be ringing and rousing, but viewers looked at each other and scratched their heads. It didn't belong there. It showed a classic misjudging of his position. The president thinks people are depressed because they don't understand how good the economy is. Actually right now they are depressed because he is president. It was like Jimmy Carter's malaise speech. It wasn't a bad speech, but he wasn't the person who could give it because voters weren't thinking malaise was the problem, they were thinking Mr. Carter was. He couldn't relieve public unhappiness because people had come to think he was the source of it.
Mr. Obama misjudged from day one his position vis-à-vis Republicans on Capitol Hill. He thought they were out to kill him. Some were! That's Washington. But Republicans in 2009 were more desperate than he understood, and some could have been picked off, because they thought he was the future and they didn't want to be on the wrong side of history. To get their support on health care he would have had to make adjustments, bend a little so they could play ball without losing all standing and self-respect. He couldn't do it. He didn't see their quandary. He allowed them to stand against him with integrity. That was poor judgement!
Libya? Poor judgment. A nation run by a nut was turned into a nation run by many nuts, some more vicious than the dictator they toppled. Russia? The president misread it, which would only have been a mistake, if a serious one, if it hadn't been for his snotty high-handedness toward those who'd made warnings. To Mitt Romney, in debate, in October 2012: "The 1980s—they're now calling to ask for their foreign policy back."
He misjudged public reaction to the Snowden revelations, did not understand Americans were increasingly alarmed about privacy and the government.
He can read a poll, but he can't anticipate a sentiment.
On scandals, and all administrations have them, he says something ringing, allows the withholding of information, and hopes it will all go away. Does Benghazi look to you like it's going away? Was the IRS's reputation buttressed by his claims that there wasn't a "smidgen of corruption" within it, or was its reputation ruined by its stonewalling?
In his handling of the Islamic State the president has been slow to act, slow to move, inconsistent in his statements, unpersuasive, uninspiring. No boots on the ground, maybe boots on the ground but not combat boots, only advisory boots. He takes off the table things that should be there, and insists on weird words like "degrade"—why not just "stop and defeat"?—and, in fact, "ISIL." The world calls it ISIS or Islamic State. Why does he need a separate language? How does that help?
In another strange, off-point aria, reported by the Times's Mr. Baker, the president told the journalists that if he were "an adviser" to ISIS, he would have told them not to do the beheadings but to send the hostages home with a note instead. Can you imagine FDR ruminating about how if Hitler wanted to win over Americans he wouldn't have invaded Poland, he would have softly encircled it and then thrown an unusually boisterous Oktoberfest?
Meanwhile time passes. The president's own surrogates this week seemed unsure, halting, sometimes confused. A month ago there was a chance to hit the Islamic State hard when they were in the field and destroy not just their arms but their mystique. At this point we are enhancing it. It is the focus of all eyes, the subject of the American debate. Boy do they make us nervous, maybe they're coming across our borders.
Maybe all this is the president's clever way of letting time pass, letting things play out, so that in a few months the public fever to do something—he always thinks the public has a fever—will be over. And he will then be able to do little, which perhaps is what he wants.
But none of this looks clever. It looks like poor judgment beginning to end.
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3) Obama’s Sort-of War
In his mercifully brief address to the nation about ISIS, President Obama assured Americans that the military action he has in mind will differ from the action we took under President Bush in Iraq and Afghanistan. In those campaigns, we used U.S. ground troops. In the upcoming campaign, we will not, relying instead on Iraqi forces and Kurds in Iraq and the Free Syrian Army in Syria.
3) Obama’s Sort-of War
In his view, the current debacle has nothing to do with his own errors and omissions.
By Victor Davis Hanson
How can we account for the apparent flip-flopping of the Obama administration about what we are doing, or might do further, to the Islamic State?
At times the secretary of defense seems at odds with the secretary of state. The administration seems not to be reacting to its own intelligence information about the Islamic State. Nor is it heeding the professional advice of the Joint Chiefs or top-ranking military officers in the field. Instead, in the run-up to the midterm elections, Obama appears to be guided largely by a stubborn adherence to his own past political truisms, and that explains the current inability to articulate a strategy or craft a coalition.
In anti-empirical fashion, the following axioms must be true — and thus the facts on the ground in Syria and Iraq must be massaged to reflect these beliefs.
1. The growth of the Islamic State has little if anything to do with the total withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011. Our departure did not prompt the Maliki government to backslide into religious oppression, free the skies for foreign powers, and open the countryside to resurgent Islamists.
2. The success of the Islamic State has nothing to do with the past failure to aid anti–Bashar Assad groups in Syria that once upon a time may have also opposed the Islamic State.
3. The current ascendancy of the Islamic State has nothing to do with a sense that the credibility of the United States in the region is diminished, or that enemies in the Middle East are emboldened by past non-enforcement of loudly announced red lines, step-over lines, or deadlines. Nor does it have to do with the situation on the ground after the bombing of Libya, or with the promise to vacate Afghanistan, or with the shunning of our old allies in the Gulf and Egypt.
4. The administration’s current Middle East plan of reaching out to the Islamic world — from the euphemisms about terrorism to the proclamations of underappreciated Islamic achievement to outreach to Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Iranians — has largely worked and therefore should be continued. Hence, the statement that the Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam.
5. The principal source of the ongoing violence is past U.S. presidents — especially George W. Bush — who stirred up the hornets’ nests by bombing Iraq. The upheaval in the Middle East cannot be blamed on Barack Obama, who simply inherited a mess and so cannot be faulted for matter-of-factly trying to pass it on to the next president.
6. The American people are horrified by the televised beheading of American journalists and want something done. Indeed, they are seething at videos of the innocent people slaughtered by sadistic jihadist bullies. But they are also exhausted by Iraq and Afghanistan and sick of the Middle East — enemies, neutrals, and perhaps even allies alike. Therefore, a loud but limited bombing campaign may soothe angry American feelings without making long-term costly commitments that could turn unpopular. The Islamic State can be waited out.
7. The United States’ drastically improved energy picture makes intervention in the Middle East, or even support for oil-producing monarchies, less important. The administration believes that it can afford to weather this storm and return to its policy of benign neglect of the Middle East.
8. Are we really that much in danger? The administration assumes that it is unlikely that, for all its braggadocio, the Islamic State can hit the continental United States as al-Qaeda did 13 years ago, and therefore there is no need to conduct careful reviews of visas from the Middle East, or to plan a long-term strategy to deny the Islamic State resources, or to ratchet back up the Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols. The jihadists will soon deflate after blowing their last bursts of hot air.
9. The debate over the U.S. reaction to the Islamic State is terribly unfair to Nobel Laureate Barack Obama. He has made it clear that he is not so interested in foreign affairs. He has emphasized to Middle Eastern journalists his own father’s Islamic pedigree and has apologized for past American behavior and promised a different future ethos. Someone in the Middle East is not appreciating the fact that Obama neither sounds nor looks like a typical American president, and such obtuseness is terribly insensitive and exasperating, and interferes with what Obama is trying to accomplish. It is hardly fair that those who are not looking for war should be found by it.
10. Hope-and-change rhetoric can still do much to solve the crisis. Declaring the Islamic State a jayvee amateurish force, only to upgrade it later, or deprecating the Syrian Free Army as little more than a fantasy of inexperienced professionals and then counting on it for support, or suggesting that we are at war and not at war — all these are sort-of strategies to keep narratives changing as rapidly as are events on the ground. There is no need for consistency in judgment, given that things happen, and the press will largely not collate past assertions with present contradictions. In short, teleprompted rhetoric, with plenty of let-me-be-perfectly-clear emphatics, can sound enough like a foreign policy that enough Americans will believe something is being done while the crisis naturally abates.
If we keep all the above assumptions in mind, then what the Obama administration has said, and will say tomorrow, has a certain logic and consistency. And that is the problem, as potential allies sit tight, all too aware that should they join the cause of the administration they may well be left high and dry, or worse, when Obama turns his brief attention span elsewhere. Theirs is a dangerous assumption, but an understandable one as well.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals.
3a) Obama again comes up short
In his mercifully brief address to the nation about ISIS, President Obama assured Americans that the military action he has in mind will differ from the action we took under President Bush in Iraq and Afghanistan. In those campaigns, we used U.S. ground troops. In the upcoming campaign, we will not, relying instead on Iraqi forces and Kurds in Iraq and the Free Syrian Army in Syria.
While some may find Obama’s distinction reassuring, we should not forget that the action President Bush took in Iraq and Afghanistan accomplished its primary mission. Saddam Hussein’s forces were routed and his regime fell. The Taliban was routed and its regime fell.
Obama says his mission against ISIS is intended to achieve a similar goal — the degradation and destruction of that outfit. Will it succeed, absent the commitment of U.S. ground forces? There is plenty of reason to doubt that it will.
Let’s start with Iraq. There, the boots on the ground will be supplied, Obama hopes, by Kurds and the Iraq government. Are these forces, supported by the U.S. from the air, capable of destroying ISIS or, alternatively, driving it out of Iraq?
There is little reason to believe they are. It took a substantial U.S. troop commitment to drive al Qaeda in Iraq, ISIS’s earlier incarnation, out of Anbar province in 2007. And al Qaeda in Iraq was a smaller, less battle hardened, and less well-armed force than ISIS.
Syria seems even more problematic. There, Obama will rely not on a regular army (as in Iraq), but on a group that just last month he ridiculed as a collection of former doctors, farmers, and pharmacists.
Actually, the Free Syrian Army did not deserve that level of ridicule. Its core, as I understand it, consists of former elements of Assad’s army.
Nonetheless, Obama may well have been right when, in the same remarks, he described as “fantasy” the idea that this force, even if armed with sophisticated U.S. weapons, could prevail in the Syrian civil war.
Keep in mind first that the Free Syrian Army exists to fight the Assad regime, not to serve as a U.S. proxy force against ISIS. Second, by all accounts the Free Syrian Army has steadily lost strength and influence thanks in part to Obama’s failure, for years, to support it.
Will the provision of U.S. arms and air support at this late date reverse this trend? Possibly.
But will the reversal be dramatic enough to enable the Free Syrian to fight off Assad forces (backed by Hezbollah and Iran) and degrade and defeat ISIS? Doubtful. I fear that we’ll be lucky if the weapons we supply don’t fall into the hands of ISIS and/or other forces hostile to our interests.
Speaking of Assad, does Obama plan to use air power against his regime if necessary to protect the Free Syrian Army and keep it viable as our proxy in the fight against ISIS? I don’t know. Perhaps Obama hopes to make a side deal with Assad and Iran to protect the Free Syrian Army in exchange for its giving up the fight against Assad.
Or maybe Obama has no strategy to deal with this contingency.
More broadly, we are left to wonder how real Obama’s campaign against ISIS actually will be. Will Obama actively work to keep his proxy forces, such as they are, engaged in the fight against ISIS? Does he have a Plan B? Or was Obama simply checking a few boxes tonight in the hope of stopping the political bleeding his presidency and his Party is experiencing?
I don’t know. I was not reassured, however, when Obama, compared his strategy for dealing with ISIS to the one he has employed in Yemen and Somalia. For one thing, as I argued here, ISIS is not analogous to the terrorists we are dealing with in Yemen and Somalia. Beyond that, the U.S. hasn’t destroyed the terrorists in those two countries. In fact, things seem to be going rather badly in Yemen.
At best, then, we have a president who, though finally taking ISIS seriously, has failed to devise a fully serious strategy. At worst, we have a president who still doesn’t take ISIS very seriously except as a matter of domestic politics.
3b) Obama’s self-defeating fight
As the women described it, the hardest part about joining the jihad is breaking the news to your parents back home. But, as one recruiter soothed, “As long as you are firm and you know that this is all for the sake of Allah then nothing can shake you inshalah.”
Even if the US were to secure its southern border, it would still be unable to prevent these jihadists from returning to attack. The policy of the US government is to deny the existence of a jihadist threat by, among other thing, denying the existence of the ideology of Islamic jihad.
When President Barack Obama insisted last Wednesday that Islamic State is not Islamic, he told all the Westerners who are now proud mujihadin that they shouldn’t worry about coming home. They won’t be screened. As far as the US is concerned their Islamic jihad ideology doesn’t exist.
Whereas every passenger arriving in the US from Liberia can be screened for Ebola, no one will be screened for exposure to jihadist thought.
And this brings us to the second problem IS poses to the US.
Clearly this remains the case today.
Moreover, as Angelo Codevilla explained last month in The Federalist, to truly dry up the swamp feeding IS, it is necessary to take the war to its state sponsors – first and foremost Turkey and Qatar.
And this leaves us with the administration’s plan to assemble a coalition of the willing that will provide the foot soldiers for the US air war against Islamic State.
After a week of talks and shuttle diplomacy, aside from Australia, no one has committed forces. Germany, Britain and France have either refused to participate or have yet to make clear what they are willing to do.
Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan will either cheer the US on from a distance, or in the best-case scenario, provide logistical support for its operations.
It isn’t just that these states have already been burned by Obama whether through his support for the Muslim Brotherhood and the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Gaddafi. And it isn’t simply that they saw that the US left them hanging in Syria.
They see Obama’s “strategy” for fighting IS – ignoring the Islamic belief system that underpins every aspect of its existence, and expecting other armies to fight and die to accomplish the goal while the US turns a blind eye to Turkey’s and Qatar’s continued sponsorship of Islamic State. They see this strategy and they are convinced America is fighting to lose. Why should they go down with it?
3b) Obama’s self-defeating fight
Caroline Glick — September 16, 2014
The United States has a problem with Islamic State. Its problem is that it refuses to acknowledge why Islamic State is a problem.
The problem with Islamic State is not that it is brutal. Plenty of regimes are brutal.
Islamic State poses two challenges for the US. First, unlike the Saudis and even the Iranians, IS actively recruits Americans and other Westerners to join its lines.
This is a problem because these Americans and other Westerners have embraced an ideology that is viciously hostile to every aspect of Western civilization.
Last Friday, Buzz Feed published a compilation of social media posts by Western women who have left Chicago and London and other hometowns to join IS in Syria.
As these women’s social media posts demonstrate, the act of leaving the West and joining IS involves rejecting everything the West is and everything it represents and embracing a culture of violence, murder and degradation.
In the first instance, the women who leave the West to join IS have no qualms about entering a society in which they have no rights. They are happy covering themselves in black from head to toe. They have no problem casting their lot with a society that prohibits females from leaving their homes without male escorts. They have no problem sharing their husband with other wives.
They don’t mind because they believe that in doing so, they are advancing the cause of Islam and Allah.
As the women described it, the hardest part about joining the jihad is breaking the news to your parents back home. But, as one recruiter soothed, “As long as you are firm and you know that this is all for the sake of Allah then nothing can shake you inshalah.”
Firm in their belief that they are part of something holy, the British, American and European jihadistas are completely at ease with IS violence. In one post, a woman nonchalantly described seeing a Yazidi slave.
“Walked into a room, gave salam to everyone in the room to find out there was a yazidi slave girl there as well.. she replied to my salam.”
Other posts discussed walking past people getting their hands chopped off and seeing dead bodies on the street. Islamic State’s beheadings of American and British hostages are a cause for celebration.
Their pride at the beheadings of James Foley and others is part and parcel of their hatred for the US and the West. As they see it, destroying the US and the West is a central goal of IS.
As one of the women put it, “Know this Cameron/ Obama, you and your countries will be beneath our feet and your kufr will be destroyed, this is a promise from Allah that we have no doubt over…. This Islamic empire shall be known and feared world wide and we will follow none other than the law of the one and the only ilah!” These women do not feel at all isolated. And they have no reason to. They are surrounded by other Westerners who joined IS for the same reasons they did.
In one recruitment post, Western women were told that not knowing Arabic is no reason to stay home.
“You can still survive if you don’t speak Arabic. You can find almost every race and nationality here.”
The presence of Westerners in IS, indeed, IS’s aggressive efforts to recruit Westerners wouldn’t pose much of a problem for the US if it were willing to secure its borders and recognize the root of the problem.
But as US President Barack Obama made clear over the summer, and indeed since he first took office six years ago, he opposes any effort to secure the US border with Mexico. If these jihadists can get to Mexico, they will, in all likelihood, have no problem coming to America.
Even if the US were to secure its southern border, it would still be unable to prevent these jihadists from returning to attack. The policy of the US government is to deny the existence of a jihadist threat by, among other thing, denying the existence of the ideology of Islamic jihad.
When President Barack Obama insisted last Wednesday that Islamic State is not Islamic, he told all the Westerners who are now proud mujihadin that they shouldn’t worry about coming home. They won’t be screened. As far as the US is concerned their Islamic jihad ideology doesn’t exist.
Whereas every passenger arriving in the US from Liberia can be screened for Ebola, no one will be screened for exposure to jihadist thought.
And this brings us to the second problem IS poses to the US.
As a rising force in the Middle East, IS threatens US allies and it threatens global trade. To prevent its allies from being overthrown and to prevent shocks to the international economy, at a minimum, the US needs to contain IS. And given the threat the Westerners joining the terror army constitute, and Washington’s unwillingness to stop them at the border, in all likelihood, the US needs to destroy IS where it stands.
Unfortunately, there is no reason to believe that the US is willing or able to either contain or defeat IS.
As US Maj. Gen. (ret.) Robert Scales wrote over the weekend in The Wall Street Journal, from a military perspective, IS is little different from all the guerrilla forces the US has faced in battle since the Korean War. Scales argues that in all previous such engagements, the outcomes have been discouraging because the US lacks the will to take the battle to the societies that feed them or use its firepower to its full potential out of fear of killing civilians.
Clearly this remains the case today.
Moreover, as Angelo Codevilla explained last month in The Federalist, to truly dry up the swamp feeding IS, it is necessary to take the war to its state sponsors – first and foremost Turkey and Qatar.
In his words, “The first strike against the IS must be aimed at its sources of material support. Turkey and Qatar are very much part of the global economy… If…the United States decides to kill the IS, it can simply inform Turkey, Qatar, and the world it will have zero economic dealings with these countries and with any country that has any economic dealing with them, unless these countries cease any and all relations with the IS.”
Yet, as we saw on the ground this weekend with US Secretary of State John Kerry’s failed mission to secure Turkish support for the US campaign against IS, the administration has no intention of taking the war to IS’s state sponsors, without which it would be just another jihadi militia jockeying for power in Syria.
And this leaves us with the administration’s plan to assemble a coalition of the willing that will provide the foot soldiers for the US air war against Islamic State.
After a week of talks and shuttle diplomacy, aside from Australia, no one has committed forces. Germany, Britain and France have either refused to participate or have yet to make clear what they are willing to do.
The Kurds will not fight for anything but Kurdistan.
The Iraqi Army is a fiction.
The Iraqi Sunnis support IS far more than they trust the Americans.
Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan will either cheer the US on from a distance, or in the best-case scenario, provide logistical support for its operations.
It isn’t just that these states have already been burned by Obama whether through his support for the Muslim Brotherhood and the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Gaddafi. And it isn’t simply that they saw that the US left them hanging in Syria.
They see Obama’s “strategy” for fighting IS – ignoring the Islamic belief system that underpins every aspect of its existence, and expecting other armies to fight and die to accomplish the goal while the US turns a blind eye to Turkey’s and Qatar’s continued sponsorship of Islamic State. They see this strategy and they are convinced America is fighting to lose. Why should they go down with it?
Islamic State is a challenging foe. To defeat it, the US must be willing to confront Islamism. And it must be willing to fight to win. In the absence of such determination, it will fight and lose, in the region and at home, with no allies at its side.
09.17.2014 - 3:20 PM
One of the key narratives of the American Civil War was President Abraham Lincoln’s long search for a general who could fight and win battles and put a war-winning strategy into action. But when historians look back on the country’s current conflicts in the Middle East, that formula may be reversed. Instead of lacking generals who wish to engage the enemy and defeat them, what the nation may need more is a president who is as committed to victory as his soldiers. That’s the conclusion many observers are drawn to after listening to the testimony of General Martin Dempsey yesterday when he told a Senate committee that he may yet recommend the use of U.S. ground forces against ISIS even though that is something that President Obama has explicitly rejected.
The president repeated his vow that American troops would not fight the terrorists on the ground today when he spoke to an audience of soldiers at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. While trying, not always successfully, to sound appropriately belligerent, the president made it abundantly clear that that his vow to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the terror group is conditional on finding local proxies to fight the war he has been dragged into by circumstance and the shifting tides of public opinion. The purpose of the speech and, indeed, a rare all-out lobbying push in Congress by a normally diffident White House, was to convince the country of the need to fund American participation in the conflict. But the contrast between the recommendations he has reportedly been getting from his military advisors and his adamant refusal to even leave the door open to U.S. action on the ground makes it hard to believe that he is really serious about winning this war.
As Eli Lake and Josh Rogin report today in the Daily Beast, Dempsey’s statement is not the only instance of military men urging the president to keep an open mind about how best to win the war. Other advisers, including General John Allen, who has been appointed to lead the anti-ISIS effort, not only criticized the administration for its foolish decision to abandon Iraq that gave ISIS the opening it needed but has been calling for a “robust” effort against ISIS for months.
Some may interpret this disconnect as a standoff between trigger-happy generals and a thoughtful president who thinks carefully before acting (Obama’s cherished self-evaluation of his leadership style that he never tires of extolling). But that is both inaccurate as well as misleading. Generals and admirals are always the last ones to wish to see their cherished institutions and infrastructure hauled into a fight whose outcome is always uncertain. Rather, it is the fact that having found themselves tasked with the winning of a war against a terrorist threat that the American people now rightly think essential, the military understands that this requires a war-winning strategy.
The president embarrassed himself earlier this month when he said that he was still searching for a strategy to defeat ISIS, a position he reversed last week when he announced his order for the campaign. But by setting absolute limits on the willingness of the United States to actually fight and win the conflict, he sent ISIS a signal that he was not as committed to battle as they were.
The point here isn’t necessarily to advocate that the use of American troops in Iraq or Syria is a good or necessary thing. It is to note, as General Dempsey did in a rare moment of complete candor in congressional testimony, that it is not possible to rule their use out if the U.S. actually wants to win rather than merely manage the conflict. You don’t have to be another Lincoln, let alone a Napoleon or Alexander, to understand that when a political leader telegraphs the enemy that his country won’t commit to fighting them on the ground, it will encourage that foe to hang on. If the fight with ISIS is as vital to U.S. security as Obama now says it is—and he’s right about that—it’s fair to ask why he isn’t willing to keep all options on the table.
Pretending that the U.S. can beat ISIS by leading from behind with foreign proxies doing the hard slog on the ground is a formula for stalemate at best and possibly defeat. U.S. air power can influence the outcome of the battle and even do serious damage to ISIS. But such wars are won with troops on the ground pursuing counterinsurgency tactics.
President Obama is burdened with serious political constraints in a war-weary country and untrustworthy and often unsavory allies who are also opposed to ISIS. But even as we make allowances for the handicaps that he is laboring under, there is no disguising his lack of enthusiasm for the task as well as his lack of commitment to victory. What America lacks is not a strategy but a president who is ready to lead the country to victory. That will have to change if U.S. forces are to have any hope of success.
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4)- How Peace Negotiator Martin Indyk Cashed a Big, Fat $14.8 Million Check From Qatar
One Middle Eastern nation does indeed pay to influence U.S. foreign policy. Hint: It's not Israel.By Lee Smith
The New York Times recently published a long investigative report by Eric Lipton, Brooke Williams, and Nicholas Confessore on how foreign countries buy political influence through Washington think tanks. Judging from Twitter and other leading journalistic indicators, the paper’s original reporting appears to have gone almost entirely unread by human beings anywhere on the planet. In part, that’s because the Times’ editors decided to gift their big investigative scoop with the dry-as-dust title “Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Tanks,” which sounds like the headline for an article in a D.C. version of The Onion. There is also the fact that the first 10 paragraphs of the Times piece are devoted to that highly controversial global actor, Norway, and its attempts to purchase the favors of The Center for Global Development, which I confess I’d never heard of before, although I live in Washington and attend think-tank events once or twice a week.
4)- How Peace Negotiator Martin Indyk Cashed a Big, Fat $14.8 Million Check From Qatar
One Middle Eastern nation does indeed pay to influence U.S. foreign policy. Hint: It's not Israel.By Lee Smith
The New York Times recently published a long investigative report by Eric Lipton, Brooke Williams, and Nicholas Confessore on how foreign countries buy political influence through Washington think tanks. Judging from Twitter and other leading journalistic indicators, the paper’s original reporting appears to have gone almost entirely unread by human beings anywhere on the planet. In part, that’s because the Times’ editors decided to gift their big investigative scoop with the dry-as-dust title “Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Tanks,” which sounds like the headline for an article in a D.C. version of The Onion. There is also the fact that the first 10 paragraphs of the Times piece are devoted to that highly controversial global actor, Norway, and its attempts to purchase the favors of The Center for Global Development, which I confess I’d never heard of before, although I live in Washington and attend think-tank events once or twice a week.
Except, buried deep in the Times’ epic snoozer was a world-class scoop related to one of the world’s biggest and most controversial stories—something so startling, and frankly so grotesque, that I have to bring it up again here: Martin Indyk, the man who ran John Kerry’s Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, whose failure in turn set off this summer’s bloody Gaza War, cashed a $14.8 million check from Qatar. Yes, you heard that right: In his capacity as vice president and director of the Foreign Policy Program at the prestigious Brookings Institution, Martin Indyk took an enormous sum of money from a foreign government that, in addition to its well-documented role as a funder of Sunni terror outfits throughout the Middle East, is the main patron of Hamas—which happens to be the mortal enemy of both the State of Israel and Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party.
But far from trumpeting its big scoop, the Times seems to have missed it entirely, even allowing Indyk to opine that the best way for foreign governments to shape policy is “scholarly, independent research, based on objective criteria.” Really? It is pretty hard to imagine what the words “independent” and “objective” mean coming from a man who while going from Brookings to public service and back to Brookings again pocketed $14.8 million in Qatari cash. At least the Times might have asked Indyk a few follow-up questions, like: Did he cash the check from Qatar before signing on to lead the peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians? Did the check clear while he was in Jerusalem, or Ramallah? Or did the Qatari money land in the Brookings account only after Indyk gave interviews and speeches blaming the Israelis for his failure? We’ll never know now. But whichever way it happened looks pretty awful.
Or maybe the editors decided that it was all on the level, and the money influenced neither Indyk’s government work on the peace process nor Brookings’ analysis of the Middle East. Or maybe journalists just don’t think it’s worth making a big fuss out of obvious conflicts of interest that may affect American foreign policy. Maybe Qatar’s $14.8 million doesn’t affect Brookings’ research projects or what the think tank’s scholars tell the media, including theNew York Times, about subjects like Qatar, Hamas, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other related areas in which Qatar has key interests at stake. Maybe the think tank’s vaunted objectivity, and Indyk’s personal integrity and his pride in his career as a public servant, trump the large piles of vulgar Qatari natural gas money that keep the lights on and furnish the offices of Brookings scholars and pay their cell-phone bills and foreign travel.
But people in the Middle East may be a little less blasé about this kind of behavior than we are. Officials in the Netanyahu government, likely including the prime minister himself, say they’ll never trust Indyk again, in part due to the article by Israeli journalist Nahum Barnea in which an unnamed U.S. official with intimate knowledge of the talks, believed to be Indyk, blamed Israel for the failure of the peace talks. Certainly Jerusalem has good reason to be wary of an American diplomat who is also, or intermittently, a highly paid employee of Qatar’s ruling family. Among other things, Qatar hosts Hamas’ political chief Khaled Meshaal, the man calling the shots in Hamas’ war against the Jewish state. Moreover, Doha is currently Hamas’ chief financial backer—which means that while Qatar isn’t itself launching missiles on Israeli towns, Hamas wouldn’t be able to do so without Qatari cash.
Of course, Hamas, which Qatar proudly sponsors, is a problem not just for Israel but also the Palestinian Authority. Which means that both sides in the negotiations that Indyk was supposed to oversee had good reason to distrust an American envoy who worked for the sponsor of their mutual enemy. In retrospect, it’s pretty hard to see how either side could have trusted Indyk at all—or why the administration imagined he would make a good go-between in the first place.
Indeed, the notion that Indyk himself was personally responsible for the failure of peace talks is hardly far-fetched in a Middle East wilderness of conspiracy theories. After all, who benefits with an Israeli-PA stalemate? Why, the Islamist movement funded by the Arab emirate whose name starts with the letter “Q” and, according to the New York Times, is Brookings’ biggest donor.
There are lots of other questions that also seem worth asking, in light of this smelly revelation—like why in the midst of Operation Protective Edge this summer did Kerry seek to broker a Qatari- (and Turkish-) sponsored truce that would necessarily come at the expense of U.S. allies, Israel, and the PA, as well as Egypt, while benefiting Hamas, Qatar, and Turkey? Maybe it was just Kerry looking to stay active. Or maybe Indyk whispered something in his former boss’ ear—from his office at Brookings, which is paid for by Qatar.
It’s not clear why Indyk and Brookings seem to be getting a free pass from journalists—or why Qatar does. Yes, as host of the 2022 World Cup and owner of two famous European soccer teams (Barcelona and Paris St. Germain), Doha projects a fair amount of soft power—in Europe, but not America. Sure, Doha hosts U.S. Central Command at Al Udeid air base, but it also hosts Al Jazeera, the world’s most famous anti-American satellite news network. The Saudis hate Doha, as does Egypt and virtually all of America’s Sunni Arab allies. That’s in part because Qataris back not only Hamas, but other Muslim Brotherhood chapters around the region and Islamist movements that threaten the rule of the U.S.’s traditional partners and pride themselves on vehement anti-Americanism.
Which is why, of course, Qatar wisely chose to go over the heads of the American public and appeal to the policy elite—a strategy that began in 2007, when Qatar and Brookings struck a deal to open a branch of the Washington-based organization in Doha. Since then, the relationship has obviously progressed, to the point where it can appear, to suspicious-minded people, like Qatar actually bought and paid for John Kerry’s point man in the Middle East, the same way they paid for the plane that flew U.N. Sec. Gen. Ban Ki-Moon around the region during this summer’s Gaza war.
Indeed, the Doha-Brookings love affair has gotten so hot that it may have pushed aside the previous major benefactor of Brookings’ Middle East program, Israeli-American businessman Haim Saban. The inventor of the Power Rangers will still fund the annual Saban forum, but in the spring Brookings took his name off of what was formerly the Haim Saban Center for Middle East Policy, so that now it’s just Center for Middle East Policy. Maybe the Qatari Center For Middle East Policy didn’t sound objective enough.
Another fact buried deep inside the Times piece is that Israel—the country usually portrayed as the octopus whose tentacles control all foreign policy debate in America—ranks exactly 56th in foreign donations to Washington think tanks. The Israeli government isn’t writing checks or buying dinner because—it doesn’t have to. The curious paradox is that a country that has the widespread support of rich and poor Americans alike—from big urban Jewish donors to tens of millions of heartland Christian voters—is accused of somehow improperly influencing American policy. While a country like Qatar, whose behavior is routinely so vile, and so openly anti-American, that it has no choice but to buy influence—and perhaps individual policymakers—gets off scot free among the opinion-shapers.
It turns out that, in a certain light, critics of U.S. foreign policy like Andrew Sullivan, John J. Mearsheimer, and Stephen Walt were correct: The national interest is vulnerable to the grubby machinations of D.C. insiders—lobbyists, think tank chiefs, and policymakers who cash in on their past and future government posts. But the culprits aren’t who the curator of “The Dish” and the authors of The Israel Lobby say they are. In fact, they got it backwards. And don’t expect others like Martin Indyk to correct the mistake, for they have a vested interest in maintaining the illusion that the problem with America’s Middle East policy is the pro-Israel lobby. In Indyk’s case, we now know exactly how big that interest is.
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5)Turkey Must Tread Carefully Against Islamic State
Summary
As the United States begins its full assault against the Islamic State in Syria, backed by Arab allies, the absence of NATO ally Turkey is drawing attention and comment. Just days before the Sept. 22 beginning of U.S. airstrikes, Turkey managed to broker a deal with the Islamic State to return 49 diplomats held in Iraq for 101 days. Contrary to diplomatic and media speculation, however, Turkey is not supporting the transnational, Syria- and Iraq-based jihadist movement known as the Islamic State.
While the details of just how Ankara retrieved its diplomats are sketchy, Ankara likely negotiated their release through its contacts among the Iraqi Sunni community and its ally, Qatar. This influence, especially among Sunni locals in not just Iraq but also Syria, will be critical if Turkey is going to be able to manage the jihadist threat long after the United States declares mission accomplished and moves on.
While the details of just how Ankara retrieved its diplomats are sketchy, Ankara likely negotiated their release through its contacts among the Iraqi Sunni community and its ally, Qatar. This influence, especially among Sunni locals in not just Iraq but also Syria, will be critical if Turkey is going to be able to manage the jihadist threat long after the United States declares mission accomplished and moves on.
Analysis
Rumors have long circulated that Turkey has been aiding Islamic State fighters. A New York Times article suggesting Turkey was tolerating an Islamic State recruiting center went viral, as did the subsequent war of words between the government and New York Times management. Another argument heard is that Ankara sees the Syrian Kurds gaining their own autonomous enclave in northeastern Syria as an intolerable security threat for the Turks — making the Islamic State the lesser evil. More recently, Turkey's unwillingness to join the U.S.-led international effort against the Islamic State was also seen as being driven by Turkey's dealings with the jihadist group.
Such perceptions have been reinforced now that the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government has secured the release of 49 diplomats abducted by the group from the Turkish consulate in the northern Iraqi town of Mosul after the militants seized control of the city. Turkey's dealings with the Islamic State are much more nuanced than has generally been understood. Last year in July, Stratfor shed light on this dynamic, analyzing how the Turks were caught between two very threatening realities — both demanding simultaneous management — on their southern flank: jihadists of various stripes and Syrian Kurdish separatists.
Managing the very difficult geopolitical battle space that is Syria required Ankara to develop relations within both the jihadist and Kurdish landscapes south of their border. Turkey also understands that it cannot allow itself to be a launchpad for an international effort against the Islamic State, the outcome of which is extremely uncertain. Turkey is all too aware of how Pakistan even today, nearly two generations after it agreed to serve as the staging ground for the U.S.-led effort to counter Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan, continues to deal with the fallout of that war, which has not yet ended.
From the Turks' viewpoint, the Americans and their Western and regional allies (with the exception of Jordan) all have the option of walking away from the conflict in Syria. Not only does Turkey feel that it will have to deal with the mess in Syria long after other stakeholders have moved on, it also knows that the United States expects Turkey to manage the Syrians as well as other regional matters. Turkey has not forgotten how, during the days of President Turgut Ozal, Ankara cut Iraq's export pipeline in 1990 at the behest of the United States in the run-up to the 1991 Gulf War but was later left with the aftermath as promises of aid disappeared with the subsequent change of U.S. administrations. This bitter experience informed Turkey's 2003 decision to refuse Washington access to Turkish territory for a northern invasion of Iraq. At the same time Turkey is deeply worried about being caught between Saudi Arabia and Iran, who are engaged in a vicious proxy sectarian war.
It is against this geopolitical backdrop that the Turkish move to negotiate the release of its diplomats must be considered. In an ideal world, one in which the Islamic State does not exist, Turkey would be the lead player with influence among the Sunnis in both Syria and Iraq and in much better shape to dominate Syria and give considerable competition to Iran in Iraq. But in the real world, not only does the Islamic State exist, it is actually in competition with Turkey for influence among the Sunni Arabs to the south of the Turkish Republic.
While the Sunni majority in Syria is much more fragmented than its sectarian kinsmen in Iraq, the neighboring Sunni minority has sought to empower itself by leveraging the Islamic State. This means that the Turks will have to delicately handle weeding out the Islamic State from within the Iraqi Sunni community. But that is a long-term work in progress, while the immediate task has been to secure the release of their diplomats.
The Turks knew that the way in which they dealt with this hostage crisis would greatly determine their ability to shape the behavior of Iraqi Sunnis. Building upon their existing links with Sunni tribes, former Baathists and other political players, they likely negotiated with the Islamic State. It should be noted that Turkey has had close ties with former Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, who was sentenced to death by Nouri al-Maliki's administration in 2012 for alleged links to terrorism. Al-Hashimi, who has been spending a great deal of time in Turkey, openly supported the Sunni insurrection that began in June.
Al-Hashimi is also very close to Turkey's main Arab partner, Qatar. Al-Hashimi periodically frequents Doha, which has significant influence among a range of jihadist groups and very likely played a key role in the release of the diplomats, which happened just days after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited Qatar. While there is no evidence of a ransom payment, and Turkish officials deny such, it cannot be ruled out that money changed hands. Meanwhile, reports are surfacing that there may have been a prisoner swap in which Ankara secured the release of some Islamic State members. Hurriyet Daily News reported Sept. 23 that the Turkish government was able to convince Syrian rebel group Liwa Al Tawhid to release 50 Islamic State prisoners being held by the Salafist-jihadist organization, which is a joint Turkish-Qatari proxy. And Erdogan obliquely hinted on Sept. 21 at the possibility of a prisoner exchange when he remarked, in response to a journalist's question, "Whether there was or wasn't a swap — [the consulate] personnel were returned to Turkey."
Clearly Erdogan is not worried about any fallout from a prisoner exchange, especially since the United States recently released five high-profile Afghan Taliban detainees from the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay in exchange for an American soldier, a deal also mediated by Qatar. This experience allows the Turkish spy service to enhance its influence among the Sunnis and develop intelligence on the Islamic State. Between this release of the diplomats from Iraq and the buffer zone that the Turkish military is working to create on the border with Syria, the Turks are looking beyond the U.S.-led airstrikes against the Islamic State and the arming of Syrian rebels on the ground.
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6) Iran Has Obama Cornered on Nuclear Issue
6b) Iran used military base to secretly test nuclear detonation technology, Israel says - Israel's eye on IranIsrael News - Haaretz Israeli News source
Such perceptions have been reinforced now that the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government has secured the release of 49 diplomats abducted by the group from the Turkish consulate in the northern Iraqi town of Mosul after the militants seized control of the city. Turkey's dealings with the Islamic State are much more nuanced than has generally been understood. Last year in July, Stratfor shed light on this dynamic, analyzing how the Turks were caught between two very threatening realities — both demanding simultaneous management — on their southern flank: jihadists of various stripes and Syrian Kurdish separatists.
Managing the very difficult geopolitical battle space that is Syria required Ankara to develop relations within both the jihadist and Kurdish landscapes south of their border. Turkey also understands that it cannot allow itself to be a launchpad for an international effort against the Islamic State, the outcome of which is extremely uncertain. Turkey is all too aware of how Pakistan even today, nearly two generations after it agreed to serve as the staging ground for the U.S.-led effort to counter Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan, continues to deal with the fallout of that war, which has not yet ended.
From the Turks' viewpoint, the Americans and their Western and regional allies (with the exception of Jordan) all have the option of walking away from the conflict in Syria. Not only does Turkey feel that it will have to deal with the mess in Syria long after other stakeholders have moved on, it also knows that the United States expects Turkey to manage the Syrians as well as other regional matters. Turkey has not forgotten how, during the days of President Turgut Ozal, Ankara cut Iraq's export pipeline in 1990 at the behest of the United States in the run-up to the 1991 Gulf War but was later left with the aftermath as promises of aid disappeared with the subsequent change of U.S. administrations. This bitter experience informed Turkey's 2003 decision to refuse Washington access to Turkish territory for a northern invasion of Iraq. At the same time Turkey is deeply worried about being caught between Saudi Arabia and Iran, who are engaged in a vicious proxy sectarian war.
It is against this geopolitical backdrop that the Turkish move to negotiate the release of its diplomats must be considered. In an ideal world, one in which the Islamic State does not exist, Turkey would be the lead player with influence among the Sunnis in both Syria and Iraq and in much better shape to dominate Syria and give considerable competition to Iran in Iraq. But in the real world, not only does the Islamic State exist, it is actually in competition with Turkey for influence among the Sunni Arabs to the south of the Turkish Republic.
While the Sunni majority in Syria is much more fragmented than its sectarian kinsmen in Iraq, the neighboring Sunni minority has sought to empower itself by leveraging the Islamic State. This means that the Turks will have to delicately handle weeding out the Islamic State from within the Iraqi Sunni community. But that is a long-term work in progress, while the immediate task has been to secure the release of their diplomats.
The Turks knew that the way in which they dealt with this hostage crisis would greatly determine their ability to shape the behavior of Iraqi Sunnis. Building upon their existing links with Sunni tribes, former Baathists and other political players, they likely negotiated with the Islamic State. It should be noted that Turkey has had close ties with former Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, who was sentenced to death by Nouri al-Maliki's administration in 2012 for alleged links to terrorism. Al-Hashimi, who has been spending a great deal of time in Turkey, openly supported the Sunni insurrection that began in June.
Al-Hashimi is also very close to Turkey's main Arab partner, Qatar. Al-Hashimi periodically frequents Doha, which has significant influence among a range of jihadist groups and very likely played a key role in the release of the diplomats, which happened just days after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited Qatar. While there is no evidence of a ransom payment, and Turkish officials deny such, it cannot be ruled out that money changed hands. Meanwhile, reports are surfacing that there may have been a prisoner swap in which Ankara secured the release of some Islamic State members. Hurriyet Daily News reported Sept. 23 that the Turkish government was able to convince Syrian rebel group Liwa Al Tawhid to release 50 Islamic State prisoners being held by the Salafist-jihadist organization, which is a joint Turkish-Qatari proxy. And Erdogan obliquely hinted on Sept. 21 at the possibility of a prisoner exchange when he remarked, in response to a journalist's question, "Whether there was or wasn't a swap — [the consulate] personnel were returned to Turkey."
Clearly Erdogan is not worried about any fallout from a prisoner exchange, especially since the United States recently released five high-profile Afghan Taliban detainees from the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay in exchange for an American soldier, a deal also mediated by Qatar. This experience allows the Turkish spy service to enhance its influence among the Sunnis and develop intelligence on the Islamic State. Between this release of the diplomats from Iraq and the buffer zone that the Turkish military is working to create on the border with Syria, the Turks are looking beyond the U.S.-led airstrikes against the Islamic State and the arming of Syrian rebels on the ground.
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6) Iran Has Obama Cornered on Nuclear Issue
09.19.2014 - 5:05 PM
They good news out of the White House is that President Obama has no plans at present to meet with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani next week at the meeting of the United Nations General Assembly. If such a meeting were being touted, it might signal an impeding agreement between the two nations that would likely do little to avert the Iranian nuclear threat. The bad news is that Iran’s open display of defiance heading into the talks that began this week in New York is a sign that American economic and military leverage over the Islamist regime is now so slight that the most likely outcome of this latest round of diplomatic futility is for the negotiations to continue to be strung out indefinitely, something that will lead inevitably to the Iranian bomb Obama has vowed to stop.
As I wrote earlier this week, the European Union has already signaled that it is preparing for yet another extension of the talks past November by appointing current foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton to continue to represent the EU in negotiations with Tehran. These are, of course, the talks that were supposed to have a six-month time limit so as to prevent Iran from continuing its delaying tactics that have worked so well over the past decade. But that time limit — an integral part of the interim nuclear accord signed last November by the United States and its allies with Iran — was already extended once over the summer.
That ought to mean the current talks being held in New York ought to be make or break time for an administration that spiked Congress’s attempt to strengthen economic sanctions on Iran last winter by promising that diplomacy could work without the extra leverage tougher restrictions on doing business with Tehran would give it. But in the last year the administration’s diplomatic efforts have gone nowhere on the nuclear issue. The loosening of the sanctions in the interim accord removed the West’s ace in the hole against the ayatollahs and signaled the world that Iran would soon be open for business again.
Combined with the tension between Russia and the West after the invasion of Ukraine that provided Iran with a crucial friend and you have a formula that left Tehran feeling strong enough to resist President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry’s entreaties to make a deal and inaugurate a new era of U.S.-Iran détente. Throw in the fact that the U.S. and Iran are allegedly now on the same side in the struggle against ISIS in Iraq and Syria (where Tehran’s ally Bashar Assad has survived and also, as Kerry said, “played footsie with ISIS”) and Iran has zero incentive to give an inch on nuclear issues.
With little hope of progress this week, Rouhani can go to New York and thumb his nose on the nuclear issue at the U.S. with impunity. That leaves President Obama’s promises about stopping Iran and letting diplomacy work without Congressional interference look hollow if not mendacious. The Iranians feel they have Obama right where they want him, knowing he has even less appetite for a confrontation with them than he does with ISIS. The terrorist group presents a clear and present danger to the nation that the administration is right to begin to address. But by neglecting the even more deadly peril from an Iranian nuke and allowing Tehran to think they have nothing to lose by stiffing the West in the talks, Obama is endangering U.S. security and setting himself up for a legacy of foreign policy catastrophe.
6a)
World believes Israeli military threat against Iran no longer realistic.
As Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu departed to address the UN General Assembly in New York on Sunday, and to meet with US President Barack Obama, the fear in Israel was mounting with regard to the warming ties between Iran and the United States. Amid the struggle against Islamic State, there were more and more indications that the US and the Western powers were willing to relax their position regarding Iran's nuclear program. This impression became stronger following the reports that the US is coordinating with Iran in its aerial assaults on Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
Israel is worried that the offers made to Iran in the negotiations over its nuclear program, which Iran has rejected as unsatisfactory, demonstrate the world powers' willingness to accept the Islamic Republic as a "threshold nuclear power" just a screws-turn away from possessing a nuclear bomb. Israel's anxiety was apparent on Wednesday when Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz revealed classified information with the permission of a military censor that is friendly to the government and more strict to the media. Steinitz revealed that Iran has used its Parchin military base as the site for secret tests of technology that could be used only for detonating a nuclear weapon.
The reason why Steinitz came out with the information was to influence the world powers in the nuclear talks to delay the signing of an agreement with Iran that will leave Iran with significant capabilities to enrich uranium. The negotiations with the powers – the US, France, Britain, Russia, Germany and China- are supposed to end with a permanent agreement in around two months. Over the last week, senior officials in the Obama administration have leaked some ideas that could form the basis of an agreement with Iran.
One idea is that Iranian centrifuges will not be dismantled but will rather be disconnected from the system that fuels them and connects them together. Another idea under consideration is to allow Iran to keep some 5000 centrifuges, which would put Tehran in a good position to enrich high level weapons-grade uranium in the future if it chose to do so. These offers that are unsatisfactory to Iran have infuriated Jerusalem.
Israel's position was that in any agreement Iran would have to dismantle all its centrifuges or only be able to keep around 1000 which would prevent it from enriching uranium to a high level. The latest developments in the Middle East have hardened Iran's bargaining positions in the nuclear talks. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and the moderates around him are interested in a permanent agreement on the nuclear issue that will remove the painful sanctions against their economy.
On the other hand, as the masters of "bazaar-style" negotiating, Tehran senses that it can reach a better deal for Iran if it stands firm. Iran feels that the West wants to see it a de facto partner in the coalition that is forming against ISIS. Even the accomplishments of the Shi'ites in Yemen, who currently control large parts of the capital Sana'a, encourage the Iranians and give them hope that regional events and time are in their favor.
And because for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyhu relations between Iran and Israel are a zero sum game, any Iranian achievement and any Western concession to Iran is a loss for Israel. In Netanyahu's speech at the General Assembly on Monday and in his meeting with Obama, the prime minister will try to minimize the negative fallout for Israel. It is doubtful that he will succeed. The world knows that the military threats that Israel wielded successfully from 2011-2013 are no longer realistic.
6b) Iran used military base to secretly test nuclear detonation technology, Israel says - Israel's eye on IranIsrael News - Haaretz Israeli News source
Israel gave no specific dates for such testing, saying only that it occurred during what it called the 2000-2001 construction of a nuclear weaponization test site in Iran's Parchin military base.
REUTERS – Israel said on Wednesday that Iran has used its Parchin military base as the site for secret tests of technology that could be used only for detonating a nuclear weapon.
The Jewish state has been a severe critic of six big powers' negotiations with Iran on restraining its nuclear program, suspecting Tehran is only trying to buy time to master sensitive nuclear know-how and would evade the terms of any final deal.
The Islamic Republic says allegations that it is seeking a nuclear weapons capability are false and baseless. Tehran says it is Israel's assumed atomic arsenal that is a destabilizing threat to the Middle East.
A statement from Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz, issued a day before Iranian President Hassan Rohani – the architect of Tehran's diplomacy with the big powers - was to address the UN General Assembly, said internal neutron sources such as uranium were used in nuclear implosion tests at Parchin.
Israel, his statement said, based its information on "highly reliable information", without elaborating.
It gave no specific dates for such testing, saying only that it occurred during what it called the 2000-2001 construction of a nuclear weaponization test site in Parchin.
An annex to an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report in 2011, which included information received from member states, indicated that Iran may have conducted such alleged experiments but did not specify where they had taken place.
"It is important to emphasize that these kinds of tests can have no 'dual use' explanation, since the only possible purpose of such internal neutron sources is to ignite the nuclear chain reaction in nuclear weapons," the Israeli statement said.
"Dual use" technology, materials or know-how can be applied to producing either civilian nuclear energy or nuclear bombs.
Iran has long denied UN nuclear inspectors access to the Parchin base outside Tehran where the IAEA has said it has observed, via satellite imagery, ongoing construction and revamping activity.
Western officials believe Iran once conducted explosive tests at Parchin of relevance in developing a nuclear weapon and has sought to "cleanse" the compound of evidence since then.
Iran says Parchin is a conventional military facility, and that the country's nuclear program is for peaceful energy purposes only.
The landslide election of the relatively moderate Rohani last year raised hopes of a solution to Iran's nuclear stand-off with the world powers after years of rising tension and fears of a new Middle East war.
Israel critical of dialogue with Iran
An interim accord was reached between Iran and the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany in Geneva last November. But the two sides did not meet a self-imposed July target date for a long-term agreement and now face a new deadline of November 24.
Steinitz's intervention on the alleged Parchin tests issue came against a backdrop of sharp Israeli criticism of the powers' strategy of seeking to remove the risks posed by Iran's nuclear program through negotiations.
In an interview published on Wednesday in the Israel Hayom newspaper, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was "worried ... (by) signs that the powers will agree to accept Iran as a nuclear threshold state".
Israel has said it would better to tighten isolating international sanctions against Iran, rather than loosen some of them as has been done as part of the interim deal. The Jewish state has also threatened to bomb the nuclear installations of its arch-enemy if it deems the negotiations ultimately futile.
The IAEA report in 2011 cited intelligence indicating Iran had a nuclear weapons research program that was halted in 2003 when it came under increased international pressure. The intelligence suggested some activities may have resumed later.
The report identified about 12 specific areas that it said needed clarification, including alleged work on a neutron initiator that could be used to trigger an atomic explosion, and explosive tests at Parchin.
The information was in part based on information received from IAEA member states. The Vienna-based UN agency did not name them but experts and diplomats say much of it is believed to come from Israel and Western powers.
Iran has dismissed the allegations as fabricated.
While the six powers seek to limit the size of Iran's future nuclear program - and thereby extend the time it would need for any bid to amass fissile material for a weapon - the IAEA is investigating alleged research and experiments in the past that could have been applied to constructing the bomb itself.
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