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What the extension can mean. More concessions make any meaningful deal more unlikely. I ran will be allowed to go nuclear. Another meaningless red line. Chamberlain would ne proud!. (See 2 below.)
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This was sent to me by Ben Payne, headmaster of Savannah Classical Academy, unsolicited and he said I could post.
This is what education and great administration is all about!
Savannah Classical Academy is setting the bar high for Chatham County's schools and doing it with less red tape, an enthusiastic faculty which is paid less than their peers.
If government and unions would get out of the way America could return to educating our next generation in a meaningful way and providing a challenging curriculum in a safe environment.. Children going to SCA come from the same matrix of households as the general population.
"So as my son was getting his IV placed Wednesday evening, we decided as a distraction to review what they were doing in class. The staff was blown away by his knowledge of the skeletal system, digestive system (including naming the parts), The Incas, Aztecs and Mayans in addition to Mesopotamia and reciting a couple of poems. They sent people in the room to hear how smart this "little 6 year old boy is". I told them I couldn't take credit for it as I merely review what his teacher imparts into him on a daily basis and that he simply goes to the best school in Savannah with the best staff and of course the best principal ever known to parents!!! Thanks Savannah Classical and Mr. Payne for providing my children with the best education around! #SavannahClassocalAc
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Dick
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1)
Beyond Obama
Michael Auslin of the American Enterprise Institute writes:
Iranians chant slogans in an anti-U.S. demonstration in front of the former U.S. Embassy, during the holy day of Ashoura, in Tehran, Iran, Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2014. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)
At an annual gathering of government, business, academic, and civil-society leaders from democratic nations here, one theme emerged clearly: The world has moved beyond Barack Obama. Whereas debate over Obama and his policies figured heavily in previous gatherings of the Halifax International Security Forum (full disclosure: I am on the Forum’s agenda committee), this year’s sessions were notable for the absence of any real discussion or passion about the American president. . . .There was no hope entertained that Obama had solutions to any of the myriad problems facing the world, no presumption of any new initiatives coming from the Obama White House, nor much interest in supposedly on-going priorities, such as the pivot to Asia or trade pacts such as TTIP or TPP. No one, it seemed, had much interest in the U.S. president, nor much anticipation that he would do anything of note over the next two years.
There isn’t any celebration over America’s retreat. Auslin writes, “Underlying this absence was a palpable sense of resignation on the part of many who once had high hopes for Obama, and a regretful sense of vindication for those who never expected much in the first place. The collective feeling of the 300 participants seemed to be that he had his shot, messed it up, and will be lucky to get out of office without a major catastrophe occurring.”
Unfortunately, this has been the sentiment both in the U.S. foreign policy community and among international allies for some time. Back in June, Dick and Liz Cheney wrote about their experience overseas:
In a trip to the Middle East this spring, we heard a constant refrain in capitals from the Persian Gulf to Israel, “Can you please explain what your president is doing?” “Why is he walking away?” “Why is he so blithely sacrificing the hard fought gains you secured in Iraq?” “Why is he abandoning your friends?” “Why is he doing deals with your enemies?”In one Arab capital, a senior official pulled out a map of Syria and Iraq. Drawing an arc with his finger from Raqqa province in northern Syria to Anbar province in western Iraq, he said, “They will control this territory. Al Qaeda is building safe havens and training camps here. Don’t the Americans care?”
The absence of U.S. leadership and the not-coincidental uptick in violence in the Middle East, increased Russian aggression in Europe and China’s muscle-flexing in Asia should dispel some long-held nostrums of the left and isolationist right. The U.S. makes things worse. Multilateral institutions can handle this stuff. We spend more on defense than practically anyone else, so we should cut back. The Palestinian-Israeli peace process is the most important issue in the region.
In fact, our allies think when America retreats very bad things happen. And they are right. None of the current travails, be they in Iran (boasting now it has brought America to its knees) Ukraine or Asia, result from a failure of U.S. strength. In all three cases, foes have read us as unserious, uncommitted and desperate to avoid conflict even at the risk of our own vital self-interest.
In fact, multilateral institutions are generally useless (as in the Syrian civil war) without U.S. leadership. They don’t take initiative on their own and, if left to their own devices, they act in ways contrary to the interests of Western democracies (most especially in their constant vilification of Israel).
In fact, our reduction in defense capacity has been a signal to other powers that they can out-compete us for influence in the world. We spend more because we have global interests and responsibilities. And when we neglect the hard power that under-girds our diplomacy, we limit our capacity to influence events and stave off bigger problems.
In fact, the trouble in the Middle East has virtually no relation to Israel, except insofar as Iran seeks nuclear weapons in order to destroy the Jewish state. But of course, the nation’s ambitions in the region and efforts to undermine Sunni states would go on with no Israel. Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other terrorist groups that are seeking to undermine the international order don’t care if Israel leaves the West Bank. They want to establish a caliphate and exterminate all non-believers, many of whom are Muslims.
As Cliff May writes that while Hamas and the Islamic State — are not a “single entity or even overtly allied,” they are both committed to “the imperative of Islamic conquest and domination. Both target noncombatants as a means toward that end, and both embrace an ideology based on a supremacist and bellicose interpretation of Islamic scripture. The so-called international community pretends not to perceive these parallels.” And worse, it expects Israel to use kid gloves in dealing with the local manifestation of Islamist terror, Hamas.
Therefore, it should be clear that detente with Iran, the sponsor of the Shi’a terrorist side, is an impossibility. To the contrary, we should be seeking to undermine and ultimately change that regime. In the near term, as argued in a task force report co-chaired by former Obama adviser Dennis Ross , we must “compete” much more intensely with Iran:
[A]s elements of its nuclear program have slowed under the interim deal, Tehran has continued its efforts to shift the balance of power on the ground in the Middle East. . . . . To arrest Iran’s regional power play and counter this dangerous perception of retrenchment, the United States could enforce the U.N. arms embargo against Iran, including by intercepting arms shipments to Iraq, Syria (via Iraq) and elsewhere. (The U.S. Navy was prepared to do just that in March 2014 against a ship smuggling Iranian-origin arms through the Red Sea, before the Israeli Navy apprehended the vessel.) Iran is subject to the legally-binding U.N. Security Council Resolution 1747 (2007) prohibiting it from supplying, selling or transferring arms or related materiel directly or indirectly. By assuaging U.S. allies’ fears of Iran’s growing regional influence, such actions could present a more united front against Tehran at the negotiating table, and make a final deal more acceptable to them. By showing that the United States is willing resort to measures beyond just negotiating, such actions could also magnify Iran’s concerns about the costs of diplomacy’s failure.
As Republicans are looking to formulate a post-Obama foreign policy, they would do well to avoid Obama’s fundamental errors. Like our Western allies, Republicans must go beyond Obama. It will fall to them to re-establish American influence, lead and not follow multilateral bodies, restore defense spending and recommit to the eradication of Islamist terror in all its manifestations.
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2)
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2)
Extending Extensions
The ‘complex’ negotiations with Iran.
Predictably, President Barack Obama and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei have decided to extend again the Joint Plan of Action, the interim nuclear deal they concluded in November 2013. Unlike the last extension, which was for four months, this one is for seven months; the “political” parts of the deal, Secretary of State John Kerry assures us, should be done by March, while further “technical and drafting” details may take until July.
This is an odd situation: Obama agreed to the first, shorter extension last July, when little progress on the big issues had been made. Yet after 10 rounds of negotiations and numerous side meetings, in which, per Secretary Kerry, “progress was indeed made on some of the most vexing challenges that we face,” we now need a longer extension? This is necessary, the secretary suggests, because the great progress made is just so “complex” that it requires, as he put it, an “incredible amount of rigorous technical analysis of concepts.”
Let us suggest a different narrative. More time is required for more complex negotiations because the Obama administration continues to make concessions to the Iranians that it attempts to justify with technical alchemy. Let us look at centrifuges, perhaps the hardest “technical” issue.
It really wouldn’t require long, rigorous negotiations if the American position were still the position the Obama administration inherited from the U.N. Security Council when it came into office: no enrichment of uranium. If Tehran could not maintain a single cascade of centrifuges to produce fissile material in bomb-grade quantity or stockpile enriched uranium, either as a gas or a reversible solid oxide, sufficient for a single nuclear weapon, matters would be relatively clear.
Constraining uranium enrichment becomes more complex when Washington starts conceding to the clerical regime thousands of centrifuges and a larger uranium stockpile. When Khamenei declines our offers—which it appears he’s done repeatedly since November 2013—President Obama’s response has been to allow Iran more centrifuges or SWUs (measures of uranium enrichment). Both Western and Iranian media report a current American benchmark of around 4,500 machines; Revolutionary Guard-affiliated media have mentioned 6,000 centrifuges.
The recently leaked American plan to leave several thousand centrifuges spinning but disconnect the piping for most of the cascades at the Natanz enrichment sites and mothball these “excess” centrifuges was a pristine example of American technicians and diplomats trying to work around the supreme leader’s literalism. Since Khamenei had declared that not a single machine could be dismantled, then why not aim at the piping that makes a cascade? Such a plan could, of course, easily become a minefield of technical abuse. With the nuclear infrastructure of Natanz essentially intact, Iranian engineers could rapidly reconnect newer, much more efficient machines, thus presenting the United States with a shorter break-out time for a bomb.
Iranian press reports suggest that the piping proposal (fortunately) didn’t pass muster. It appears the supreme leader, who when it comes to all things American is neither curious nor forbearing, wasn’t sufficiently impressed. We hadn’t conceded enough. It’s a good guess that however many centrifuges we’d conceded as of November 24, the old deadline, the number will be increased in the next seven months, further complicating the challenge of devising a way to give Khamenei what he wants while maintaining a modicum of American integrity.
And what’s so complex and time-consuming about the heavy-water reactor at Arak? If it is converted to a light-water reactor, as the United States and Europe have requested, the extraction of plutonium becomes a very difficult task (though inspectors would still have to monitor closely the extremely hot, but extractable, spent fuel). Arak only becomes diplomatically complex and time-consuming when the Iranians refuse to accept this downgrade, thereby preserving the possibility of more easily producing a weapon. The plutonium path to an A-bomb has probably been a secondary concern for Iranian nuclear engineers since the clandestine facility was revealed in 2002, as a plutonium break-out is difficult to conceal. And yet the Iranians have proven decidedly obstreperous on Arak.
And is Fordow difficult to solve? Buried beneath a mountain, this site was clandestine until 2009. The president once insisted that it be shut down. Apparently, no longer. As a centrifuge research and development facility, Fordow is likely to become for inspectors a cavernous tarpit, where the Iranians constantly push the envelope of what is allowed and what is stoppable under any nuclear deal. The recent incident at the Natanz Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant, when the Iranians loaded an advanced IR-5 centrifuge with uranium hexafluoride gas—almost certainly a violation of the Joint Plan of Action—was a small foretaste of what is coming. (Note: The administration has intentionally made it very difficult for Congress to review the classified annexes to the Joint Plan of Action, so it is challenging to know what is, and is not, a violation.) The U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency discovered the action and lodged a protest, and the Iranians backed off. Secretary Kerry and his minions, by contrast, doggedly maintain that Tehran hasn’t violated the interim accord, while it’s pretty clear that it did. This is to be expected. The requisite sanctity and momentum of the process encourage good men to fib.
In all probability, Ali Akbar Salehi, the MIT-educated chief of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, who is close to the supreme leader, meant to test the IAEA and the West. The IAEA passed; Washington failed. It’s quite likely that Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, under whose amiable spell Secretary Kerry and the other American principals have all fallen, knew nothing of Salehi’s activities. For cause: Zarif, who has no power in the Iranian political system beyond what the supreme leader gives him, is irrelevant to, and probably mostly ignorant of, his country’s nuclear-weapons program. The IR-5 incident, like the recent illicit installation of an advanced IR-8 centrifuge, suggests Fordow’s future as an R&D site. Secretary Kerry is right to underscore the “complexity” of his diplomacy: He is birthing a nightmare.
And we haven’t even gotten to the Additional Protocol Plus, an inspections regime derived from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and IAEA practice that would allow IAEA inspectors to go anywhere, anytime without negotiating access with the clerical regime. Without such monitoring authority, any agreement isn’t worth its weight in wood pulp. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps oversees the nuclear program. It has been the primary organization responsible for concealing nuclear-weapons research since the 1980s. Salehi’s Atomic Energy Organization deserves honorable mention for its mendacity, especially with IAEA inspectors, who are often on precarious ground when they are inside Iran trying to ferret out the truth. But it’s the Corps that physically controls the sites. Parchin, where the IAEA and Western intelligence services are pretty sure that Tehran has experimented with nuclear triggers, is a Revolutionary Guard Corps base. Iran’s ballistic-missile programs are also under the control of the guards. The administration has already agreed not to bring up intercontinental ballistic-missile research and development in the nuclear negotiations, instead making the development of nuclear warheads its primary concern. The lead nuclear negotiator, Wendy Sherman, hasn’t yet explained how Washington can verify that Iran isn’t developing a nuclear warhead—and no country has ever experimented with ICBMs and not developed an atomic warhead to put on them—without access to Revolutionary Guard sites, ballistic-missile engineers, and the piles of paperwork behind these projects. She should.
Olli Heinonen, the former number two at the IAEA and now at Harvard, is convinced Iran has illicitly imported enough carbon fiber to manufacture 5,000 advanced IR-2 centrifuges, more than enough for a rapid, clandestine nuclear “sneak-out.” The IAEA doesn’t know where this carbon fiber is; the regime refuses to reveal verifiably its location and use. Without an Additional Protocol Plus married to full disclosure by Tehran of its research and development into the militarization of its nuclear work (the IAEA calls this the “PMDs,” or “possible military dimensions,” of the atomic program), the United States is simply incapable of ascertaining whether and how Tehran may be cheating. Yet Iran’s former foreign minister and current adviser to the supreme leader, Ali Velayati, and the deputy to foreign minister Zarif in the nuclear negotiations, Abbas Araghchi, have both made it crystal clear that Iran will not allow anytime, anywhere inspections. Needless to say, since Khamenei has said that the Islamic Republic isn’t developing a nuclear weapon, he’s unlikely to say now, “Oops, I forgot.”
All of this Iranian negativity, of course, makes the nuclear negotiations more “complex,” requiring considerable American ingenuity to explain how it’s possible to verify Iranian compliance. This is why the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, General Michael Hayden, is on record that he could not, if he were still in office, verify the intelligence integrity of a final agreement unless an Additional Protocol Plus and PMDs were included. The Iranians’ refusal to countenance effective verification all by itself would, if the administration were serious, collapse these talks.
Secretary Kerry offered an ingenious solution to this conundrum in his Vienna press conference: “We’re not telling.” The administration is attempting to maintain total secrecy about what has transpired in the negotiations, claiming that such secrecy is absolutely essential to the success of its diplomacy.
But how exactly is this true? On the Iranian side, the supreme leader and senior commanders of the Revolutionary Guards know all. They hold Zarif’s leash. They, and they alone, determine the red lines. For them there are no nuclear surprises, no compromises that need to be hidden from a hostile, veto-rendering parliament. Secrecy in these negotiations is intended to hobble only one party: Congress.
And Congress so far has taken it. Hardly a word came out of the institution when the White House established CIA-like ground rules for the perusal of the Joint Plan of Action, which prohibit congressmen from having their own copies of the classified annexes, where the juicy details are buried. This may change when the Republicans assume control of both houses in January. It should. A thorough public debate can only help clarify the good and the bad of what has transpired.
It’s pretty clear now that the administration would like to extend the interim accord to the end of Obama’s presidency—if it can figure out a way to do so. So let us publicly, on the floors of Congress, debate whether that’s a good idea. No matter what happens, a united American front is surely preferable tactically for dealing with Tehran. The Iranians have been adamant throughout the talks that they want sanctions lifted quickly. The president has so far wisely resisted these demands, knowing full well that sanctions are the only real leverage he has. The president may fear that, if he denies Congress a say on one of the most important national-security questions confronting the country, he won’t hold the Democrats necessary to override a veto. His discretionary authority to waive sanctions in these negotiations might get clipped. An ugly Iran debate could actually break what’s left of the president’s reputation and power overseas. If the president can win on the Hill, however, he and the country will be a lot better off.
President Hassan Rouhani, in whose “moderation” the administration has placed all its hopes, does offer a way out. In his nuclear memoirs and in his many speeches defending his time as Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator between 2003 and 2005, Rouhani tells us clearly that the Western threat of sanctions and the Iranian fear of war with the United States spooked Tehran, rendering the clerical regime amenable to negotiations and a pause in its push for nuclear weapons. Congress and the president need to follow Rouhani’s advice. Increase the pressure. Don’t be scared of Ali Khamenei. We still hold the high ground. Use it—or lose it. Iranian research and development continue to advance.
Reuel Marc Gerecht is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
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