Will The Coming Iranian Disaster Be Ignored Because It Comes From Israel?

I seldom get a chance to gloat.  WE WON!

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Krauthammer and I remain on the same page.  (See 1 below.)
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This author assumes a breakdown in negotiations with Iran and failure to conclude a deal will work a hardship on Iran.  I believe he is naive.

Then a a warning which should, but will not, be heeded.(See 2 and 2a below.)
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Tuesday, liberals lost more than just numbers.  They lost many of the cards they love playing, ie. racial, wars on women etc.

Their defeat was encompassing and on many levels.  They lost their recently elected youth and now must find replacements because they have fewer new faces and thus it will take time to rebuild what  turned out to be nothing more than Obama's JV Team.

Republicans, meanwhile,  elected youth, blacks, females, a raft of governors.  OUCH!

I am bemused by those like Juan Williams and the president who make light of the defeat his radical policies produced.

Now our sullen president seems he is going to try arrogance and defiance.

The man just continues to believe he can drink his own bath water with abandon.

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Dick
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1) Seize The Day, Control The Agenda!

By Charles Krauthammer 

Memo to the GOP. You had a great night on Tuesday. But remember: You didn’t win it. The Democrats lost it.

This is not to say that you didn’t show discipline in making the election a referendum on six years of Barack Obama. You exercised adult supervision over the choice of candidates. You didn’t allow yourself to go down the byways of gender and other identity politics.

Charles Krauthammer writes a weekly political column that runs on Fridays. View Archive

It showed: a gain of probably nine Senate seats, the largest Republican House majority in more than 80 years, and astonishing gubernatorial victories, including Massachusetts, Maryland and Illinois, the bluest of the blue, giving lie to the Democrats’ excusethat they lost because the game was played on Republican turf.

The defeat — “a massacre,” the Economist called it — marks the final collapse of Obamaism, a species of left liberalism so intrusive, so incompetently executed and ultimately so unpopular that it will be seen as a parenthesis in American political history. Notwithstanding Obama’s awkward denials at his next-day news conference, he himself defined the election when he insisted just last month that “these [i.e. his] policies are on the ballot — every single one of them.”

They were, and America spoke. But it was a negative judgment, not an endorsement of the GOP. The prize for winning is nothing but the opportunity for Republicans to show that they can govern — the opportunity to seize the national agenda.

Five weeks ago, I suggested a series of initiatives that would be like the 1994 “Contract with America” but this time post facto. It’s not rocket science. Mitch McConnell, the incoming Senate majority leader, and Speaker John Boehner are already at work producing such an agenda.

It needs to be urgent, determined and relentless. Say, a bill a week for the first 10 weeks. Start with obvious measures with significant Democratic support, like the Keystone XL pipeline.

Like fast-track trade negotiation authority that Harry Reid killed and that Obama, like all presidents, wants. Republicans should propose and pass it, thereby giving Obama a victory and demonstrating both bipartisanship and magnanimity (as well as economic good sense).

Then a simple, targeted bill to repatriate the $2 trillion of assets being held by U.S. corporations overseas, a bill to authorize and expedite the export of liquid natural gas and crude oil (the latter banned by an obsolete 1975 law) and a strong border security bill.

As for Obamacare, a symbolic abolition that Obama will immediately veto is less important than multiple rapid-fire measures to kill it with a thousand cuts. Repeal of the medical device tax. Repeal of the individual mandate. Repeal of the employer mandate. Repeal of the coverage mandate, thereby reinstating Obama’s broken promise that “If you like your health-care plan, you can keep it.” And repeal the federal bailout for insurers on the Obamacare exchanges.

If Obama issues vetoes, fine. Let the Democrats defend them for the next two years.

Then go big and go positive: a sweeping reform of the tax system, both corporate and individual, abolishing loopholes and lowering rates, like the historic Reagan-O’Neill 1986 reform or Obama’s own abandoned Simpson-Bowles commission. And go large: Invite the other side into immediate negotiations with the aim of producing a tax bill by spring.

How will Obama react? My guess — with the petulance and denial he displayed in his post-election news conference. Moreover, he will try to regain control of the national agenda with executive amnesty for illegal immigrants.

Final memo to the GOP: That would be naked impeachment bait. Don’t take it. Use the power of the purse to defund it. Pledge immediate repeal if Republicans take the White House in 2017. Denounce it as both unconstitutional and bad policy. But don’t let it overwhelm and overtake the GOP agenda. That’s exactly what Obama wants. It is his only way to regain the initiative.

The 2014 election has given the GOP the rare opportunity to retroactively redeem its brand. The conventional perception, incessantly repeated by Democrats and the media, is that Washington dysfunction is the work of the Party of No. Expose the real agent of do-nothing. Show that, when Harry Reid can no longer consign House-passed legislation to oblivion, Congress can actually work.

Pass legislation. When Obama signs, you’ve shown seriousness and the ability to govern. When he vetoes, you’ve clarified the differences between party philosophies and prepared the ground for 2016.

Tuesday’s victory was big. But it did nothing more than level the playing field and give you a shot. Take it.

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2)  IRAN POISED TO CHOOSE POVERTY OVER NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT

As the Nov. 24 deadline for Iran and the great powers to negotiate a comprehensive nuclear agreement approaches, both sides may be confronted with momentous choices. What happens if the decade-long search for an arms-control accord falters? Although there is little evidence that the West is contemplating alternative strategies, important actors in Iran are beginning to consider life after diplomatic failure.

Since the exposure of its illicit nuclear program in 2002, the Islamic republic has wrestled with a contradictory mandate: how to expand its nuclear infrastructure while sustaining a measure of economic growth. The reformist president Mohammad Khatami avoided debilitating economic sanctions by suspending nuclear activities. Then came the tumultuous presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which privileged nuclear empowerment over economic vitality. Current president Hassan Rouhani has succeeded in negotiating an interim agreement — the Joint Plan of Action — but he faces diminishing prospects for a final accord. Iran has finally come to the crossroads, and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and many hard-line elements seem ready to forge ahead with their nuclear ambitions even if they collide with economic imperatives.

During the past few years, Khamenei has been pressing his concept of a resistance economy whereby Iran would shed its need for foreign contracts and commerce. “Instead of reliance on the oil revenues, Iran should be managed through reliance on its internal forces and the resources on the ground,” he said last month. Writing in the conservative daily Khorasan last year, commentator Mehdi Hasanzadeh went further: “An economy that relies on domestic [production] rather than preliminary agreement or the lifting of a small part of sanctions or even all sanctions will bring a great economic victory.” In the impractical universe of conservatives, Iran can meet the basic needs of its people by developing local industries. Iran’s reactionaries seem to prefer national poverty to nuclear disarmament.

The notions of self-sufficiency and self-reliance have long been hallmarks of conservative thinking in Iran. Since the 1980s, a central tenet of the hard-liners’ foreign policy perspective has been that Iran’s revolution is a remarkable historical achievement that the United States can’t accept or accommodate. Western powers will always conspire against an Islamic state that they cannot control, this thinking goes, and the only way Iran can secure its independence and achieve its national objectives is to lessen its reliance on its principal export commodity. Hard-liners believe that isolation from the international community can best preserve Iran’s ideological identity. This siege mentality drives Iran’s quest for nuclear arms and their deterrent power.

Although many in the West may privately hope that the interim accord will simply roll on in absence of a comprehensive agreement, Iranian adherence is hardly assured. The history of Iran’s nuclear diplomacy suggests that it will abandon the agreement when it has sufficient technological capacity to carry out a rapid surge of its program. Between 2003 and 2005, while the Europeans negotiated a suspension of Iran’s program, Tehran continued to accumulate nuclear materials and hone its research skills and, when it was ready, abandoned its pledges.

Ali Akbar Salehi, head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, has already established the pretense for introducing speedier centrifuges. “New centrifuges will be used for production of vaccines,” he noted last month. Then, in an uncharacteristically honest moment, Salehi acknowledged that “such kinds of machines cannot be purchased at the world market. They are not sold as they are said to be of dual use.” And it is precisely that duality that attracts Iran to machines that can produce highly enriched uranium with speed and efficiency. Once Iran’s skilled scientists are confident of their mastery of the new machines, the Joint Plan of Action is likely to meet the fate of the other agreements that Tehran has negotiated with European powers.

In the coming weeks, the ebb and flow of the high-wire negotiations are sure to capture headlines. We will see furious diplomacy and foreign ministers journeying back and forth to European capitals. But it already seems clear that Khamenei and the hard-liners are poised to choose nuclear power over economic prosperity — a decision that would probably prove catastrophic for their country. Rouhani may yet be able to temper, for a while, such rash impulses. But by loudly contemplating alternative strategies should diplomacy exhaust itself, Iran seems to be crossing a dangerous threshold.

Ray Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

2a) Why a potential Iran deal is a disaster

By Jennifer Rubin

In a must-read report from the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) task force on Iran, co-chaired by former ambassador Eric Edelman and former Obama adviser Dennis Ross, the authors warn about entering into one of the suggested arrangements leaked from the Iran P5+1 talks. They write:

As this Task Force laid out in a September paper, one such possibility would be to limit the total output of Iran’s enrichment facilities (as measured in Separative Work Units, or SWU). Since then, U.S. officials reportedly have considered another route, whereby Iran would disconnect the links between some or all of its thousands of installed centrifuges. . . [A]s with the SWU approach, Iran would maintain a latent nuclear weapons capability, and could even expand and upgrade its existing nuclear infrastructure without violating a final deal.

The authors proceed to explain how hard it would be to monitor compliance if we don’t also deal with “dismantlement of key elements of [Iran's] existing enrichment infrastructure — specifically centrifuges — and verifiable limits on centrifuge output, number and types of operating and installed centrifuges, research and development (R&D) activities, and enrichment levels and facilities, among others. Without these additional restrictions, Iran could expand its latent enrichment capability while adhering to a final deal.”

But the authors’ broader conclusion is applicable not only to a SWU-based deal or a deal unlinking centrifuges, but also to any sort of deal that doesn’t do what we have reiterated over two presidencies. In short, we cannot “contradict statements by Administration officials since the [Joint Plan of Action] was agreed that Iran must dismantle significant amounts of its nuclear infrastructure, and that it must close its Fordow enrichment facility.” If we did so, we would virtually guarantee that Iran “would never agree to dismantle a single centrifuge or to close Fordow.” That, in turn, makes enforcement of any alternative deal a mirage:

This would limit U.S. credibility when it comes to enforcing adherence to a comprehensive agreement. Promises to punish violations – whether by Iran, other countries or companies eager for the lifting of sanctions – would likely gain less traction if the United States was attempting to uphold a deal whose terms it had previously said were unacceptable. Furthermore, were Iran ever to decide to reconnect the tubes, the potential difficulties for the United States and its diplomatic partners of detecting such activities, discerning whether they constitute a clear violation and agreeing to an appropriate punishment before Iran had completed the process, could all compound the challenges stemming from limited credibility at the outset of the final deal.

The administration doesn’t like the choice, but it really is the only one it must face at this juncture: Will the administration stick to its position and pressure Iran to accept it by additional sanctions or threat of military force, or will it capitulate? I fear I know the answer, but I hope I am wrong.

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