Stephens' "America in Retreat." Obama Sad Both For His Race and For Our Nation! More Concessions and Beheadings!

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I am about 1/3 of the way through Bret Stephens', "America In Retreat," and what makes it fascinating , since the title tells you where he is going, is the linkage of history to today.

Stephens is no fan of Obama. What is both undeniable and fascinating  is Stephens' connection of Obama to a philosophy of 'weak power' projection and its implementation as an ineffective 'moralist' president who comes across as  a preaching community organizer.

What I find ironic is that, in truth,  Obama , the radical leftist, comes across philosophically as  a conservative in the vein of Wallace and Taft. Obama obviously believes American engagement and the historical results achieved have proven destructive at best. Obama is comfortable with what he deems is the correct role for America -  RETREAT.

To date, Obama's approach is proving the wrong prescription but I would not expect empirical evidence of such will dawn upon him and/or cause him to mend his ways.  Even were Obama to modify, he is unlikely to do so in a manner that will be acceptable and goal driven. Obama just does not believe winning is worth the coinage.

Interview with Steve Forbes:Simply Click Here to Watch the Video Interview
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Joe Lieberman, always measured.  (See 1 below.)
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Three crisis are deferred but can/will resurface. (See 2 below.)
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Sowell on Guiliani and Obama.

Regardless of what Guilani had to say, Obama has to be an embarrassment to any black voter who has pride in his race and country. It is truly a shame and sad that the first black president has turned out to be so incompetent and disconnected from the great nation that we are.

In my book, Obama proves why "affirmative action" was an appealing idea on an emotional level but, as with so many progressive ideas and PC'ism, all too often turns out to be an abject failure.

Shortcuts undercut substantive learning and experience. (See 3 below.)
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More concessions. (See 4 below.)
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More beheadings ahead! But what difference does it make? (See 5 below.)
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More humor:

These are actually from a book called "Disorder in the Court" and are things people actually said in court, word for word, taken down and published by court reporters that had the torment of staying calm while the exchanges were taking place.

ATTORNEY: What was the first thing your husband said to you that morning?
WITNESS: He said, 'Where am I, Cathy?'
ATTORNEY: And why did that upset you?
WITNESS: My name is Susan!
_______________________________

ATTORNEY: What gear were you in at the moment of the impact?
WITNESS: Gucci sweats and Reeboks.
____________________________________

ATTORNEY: Are you sexually active?
WITNESS: No, I just lie there.
____________________________________

ATTORNEY: What is your date of birth?
WITNESS: July 18th.
ATTORNEY: What year?
WITNESS: Every year.
_____________________________________

ATTORNEY: How old is your son, the one living with you?
WITNESS: Thirty-eight or thirty-five, I can't remember which.
ATTORNEY: How long has he lived with you?
WITNESS: Forty-five years.
_________________________________

ATTORNEY: This myasthenia gravis, does it affect your memory at all?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: And in what ways does it affect your memory?
WITNESS: I forget.
ATTORNEY: You forget? Can you give us an example of something you forgot?
______________________________________

ATTORNEY: Now doctor, isn't it true that when a person dies in his sleep, he doesn't know about it until the next morning?
WITNESS: Did you actually pass the bar exam?
____________________________________
ATTORNEY: The youngest son, the 20-year-old, how old is he?
WITNESS: He's 20, very close to your IQ.
________________________________________

ATTORNEY: She had three children, right?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: How many were boys?
WITNESS: None.
ATTORNEY: Were there any girls?
WITNESS: Your Honor, I need a different attorney. Can I get a
new attorney?
________________________________________

ATTORNEY: Can you describe the individual?
WITNESS: He was about medium height and had a beard.
ATTORNEY: Was this a male or a female?
WITNESS: Unless the Circus was in town I'm going with male.
_____________________________________

ATTORNEY: Is your appearance here this morning pursuant
to a deposition notice which I sent to your attorney?
WITNESS: No, this is how I dress when I go to work.
______________________________________

ATTORNEY: Doctor, how many of your autopsies have you
performed on dead people?
WITNESS: All of them. The live ones put up too much of a fight.

_________________________________________

ATTORNEY: ALL of your responses MUST be oral, OK? What school did you attend?
WITNESS: Oral.
_________________________________________

ATTORNEY: Do you recall the time that you examined the body?
WITNESS: The autopsy started around 8:30 PM.
ATTORNEY: And Mr. Denton was dead at the time?
WITNESS: If not, he was by the time I finished.
_________________________________________

ATTORNEY: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for blood pressure?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for breathing?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: How can you be so sure, Doctor?
WITNESS: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
ATTORNEY: I see, but could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?
WITNESS: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law.

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Dick
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1)Hear out Israel’s leader

By Joseph I. Lieberman

Last week, 23 House Democrats asked Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to postpone Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to a joint meeting of Congress scheduled for March 3. But it is absolutely clear that the speaker will neither postpone nor rescind his invitation. The prime minister will be there to speak.

Therefore, I appeal to those 23 individuals and any other undecided members of Congress to go to the joint meeting and hear what the prime minister has to say. Let me suggest some good reasons why:

● Go because this is about determining how best to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons and not just another Washington test of partisan and political loyalty.

● Go because — regardless of what you think of the leaders involved or their actions in this case — you are a strong supporter of America’s alliance with Israel, and you don’t want it to become a partisan matter.

● Go because you know that the Constitution gives you, as a member of Congress, the power to “regulate commerce with foreign nations,” “define and punish . . . offenses against the law of nations,” “declare war,” “raise and support armies” and “provide and maintain a Navy,” and Netanyahu might say some things that will inform your exercise of those great powers.

● Go because you know that Israel is one of our closest and most steadfast allies and you feel a responsibility to listen to its leader speak about developments that he believes could threaten the safety, independence and even existence of his country, as well as that of our closest allies in the Arab world.

● Go because you worry that it is not just the security of Israel and the Arab nations but the security of the United States that will be threatened if a bad agreement is made with Iran that enables it to build nuclear weapons it could put on its increasingly capable long-range missiles.

● Go because you are concerned about nuclear weapons proliferation and believe that a faulty deal with Iran will not only put it on the road to becoming a nuclear power but will also lead some of Iran’s Arab neighbors to acquire nuclear weapons as soon as possible.

In sum, there is too much on the line in the negotiations with Iran for members of Congress to decide not to listen to what Netanyahu, or any other ally, has to say on this subject. Just as British Prime Minister David Cameron deserved respectful attention when he called individual members of Congress recently to ask them to delay adopting more sanctions on Iran, and the foreign ministers of Germany, France and Britain deserved respectful reading when they made the same appeal to Congress in an op-ed in The Post, so too does the prime minister of Israel deserve to be listened to respectfully by members of Congress when he speaks next week.

At this very unstable moment in history, we cannot and must not avert our attention from what remains the greatest threat to the security of America and the world.

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2)

The Intersection of Three Crises

By Reva Bhalla

Within the past two weeks, a temporary deal to keep Greece in the eurozone was reached in Brussels, a cease-fire roadmap was agreed to in Minsk and Iranian negotiators advanced a potential nuclear deal in Geneva. Squadrons of diplomats have forestalled one geopolitical crisis after another. Yet it would be premature, even reckless, to assume that the fault lines defining these issues are effectively stable. Understanding how these crises are inextricably linked is the first step toward assessing when and where the next flare-up is likely to occur.

Germany and the Eurozone Crisis

Germany has once again become the victim of its own power. As Europe's largest creditor, it has considerable political leverage over debtor nations such as Greece, whose entire livelihood now depends on whether German Chancellor Angela Merkel is willing to sign another bailout check. Lest we forget, Germany is exporting more than half of its GDP, and most of those exports are consumed within Europe. Thus, the institutions Germany relies on to protect its export markets are the very institutions Berlin must battle to protect Germany's national wealth.

Many have characterized the recent Brussels deal as a victory for Berlin over Athens as eurozone finance ministers, including the Portuguese, Spanish and French, stood behind Germany in refusing Greece the right to circumvent its debt obligations. But Merkel is also not about to gamble an unlimited amount of German taxpayer funds on flimsy Greek pledges to cut costs and impose structural reforms on a population that, for now, still views the ruling Syriza party as its savior from austerity. Within four months, Greece and Germany will be at loggerheads again, and Greece will likely still lack the austerity credentials that Berlin needs to convince its own Euroskeptics that it has the institutional heft and credibility to impose Germanic thriftiness on the rest of Europe. The more time Germany buys, the more inflexible the German and Greek negotiating positions become, and the more seriously traders, businessmen and politicians alike will have to take the threat of a so-called Grexit, the first in a chain of events that could shatter the eurozone.

The Role of the Crisis in Ukraine

In order to steer Germany through an escalating eurozone crisis, Merkel needs to calm her eastern front. It is no wonder, then, that she committed herself to multiple sleepless nights and an incessant travel schedule to put another Minsk agreement with Russia on paper. The deal was flawed from the start because it avoided recognizing the ongoing attempts by Russian-backed separatists to smooth out the demarcation line by bringing the pocket of Debaltseve under their zone of control. After several more days of scuffling, the Germans (again leveraging their creditor status — this time, against Ukraine) quietly pushed Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to accept the battlefield reality and move along with the cease-fire agreement. But even if Germany on one side and Russia on the other were able to bring about a relative calm in eastern Ukraine, it would do little in the end to de-escalate the standoff between the United States and Russia.

The Connection Between Ukraine and Iran

Contrary to popular opinion in the West, Russian President Vladimir Putin is not driven by crazed territorial ambitions. He is looking at the map, just as his predecessors have for centuries, and grappling with the task of securing the Russian underbelly from a borderland state coming under the wing of a much more formidable military power in the West. As the United States has reminded Moscow repeatedly over the past several days, the White House retains the option to send lethal aid to Ukraine. With heavier equipment comes trainers, and with trainers come boots on the ground.

From his perspective, Putin can already see the United States stretching beyond NATO bounds to recruit and shore up allies along the Russian periphery. Even as short-term truces are struck in eastern Ukraine, there is nothing precluding a much deeper U.S. probe in the region. That is the assumption that will drive Russian actions in the coming months as Putin reviews his military options, which include establishing a land bridge to Crimea (a move that would still, in effect, leave Russia's border with Ukraine exposed), a more ambitious push westward to anchor at the Dnieper River and probing actions in the Baltic states to test NATO's credibility.

The United States does not have the luxury of precluding any one of these possibilities, so it must prepare accordingly. But focusing on the Eurasian theater entails first tying up loose ends in the Middle East, starting with Iran. And so we come to Geneva, where U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif met again Feb. 22 to work out the remaining points of a nuclear deal before March 31, the date by which U.S. President Barack Obama is supposed to demonstrate enough progress in negotiations to hold Congress back from imposing additional sanctions on Iran. If the United States is to realistically game out scenarios in which U.S. military forces confront Russia in Europe, it needs to be able to rapidly redeploy forces that have spent the past dozen years putting out fires ignited by sprouting jihadist emirates and preparing for a potential conflict in the Persian Gulf. To lighten its load in the Middle East, the United States will look to regional powers with vested and often competing interests to shoulder more of the burden.

A U.S.-Iranian understanding goes well beyond agreeing on how much uranium Iran is allowed to enrich and stockpile and how much sanctions relief Iran gets for limiting its nuclear program. It will draw the regional contours of an Iranian sphere of influence and allow room for Washington and Tehran to cooperate in areas where their interests align. We can already see this in effect in Iraq and Syria, where the threat of the Islamic State has compelled the United States and Iran to coordinate efforts to contain jihadist ambitions. Though the United States will understandably be more cautious in its public statements while it tries to limit Israeli anxiety, U.S. officials have allegedly made positive remarks about Hezbollah's role in fighting terrorism when speaking privately with their Lebanese interlocutors in recent meetings. This may seem like a minor detail on the surface, but Iran sees a rapprochement with the United States as an opportunity to seek recognition for Hezbollah as a legitimate political actor.

A U.S.-Iranian rapprochement will not be complete by March, June or any other deadline Washington sets for this year. Framework agreements on the nuclear issue and sanctions relief will necessarily be implemented in phases to effectively extend the negotiations into 2016, when Congress could allow the core sanctions act against Iran to expire after several months of testing Iranian compliance and after Iran gets past its parliamentary elections. Arrestors could arise along the way, such as the death of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but they will not deter the White House from setting a course toward normalizing relations with Iran. The United States, regardless of which party is controlling the White House, will rank the threat of a growing Eurasian conflict well ahead of de-escalating the conflict with Iran. Even as a nuclear agreement establishes the foundation for a U.S.-Iranian understanding, Washington will rely on regional powers like Turkey and Saudi Arabia to eat away at the edges of Iran's sphere of influence, encouraging the natural rivalries in the region to mold a relative balance of power over time.

Circling Back

Germany needs a deal with Russia to be able to manage an existential crisis for the Eurozone; Russia needs a deal with the United States to limit U.S. encroachment on its sphere of influence; and the United States needs a deal with Iran to refocus its attention on Russia. No conflict is divorced from the other, though each may be of a different scale. Germany and Russia can find ways to settle their differences, as can Iran and the United States. But a prolonged eurozone crisis cannot be avoided, nor can a deep Russian mistrust of U.S. intentions for its periphery.

Both issues bring the United States back to Eurasia. A distracted Germany will compel the United States to go beyond NATO boundaries to encircle Russia. Rest assured, Russia — even under severe economic stress — will find the means to respond.

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3) Giuliani Versus Obama

By Thomas Sowell 

The firestorm of denunciation of former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, for having said that he did not think Barack Obama loved America, is in one sense out of all proportion to that remark -- especially at a time when there are much bigger issues, including wars raging, terrorist atrocities and a nuclear Iran on the horizon.

Against that background of strife and dangers on the world stage, it may seem as if Barack Obama's feelings, or Rudolph Giuliani's opinion about those feelings, should not matter so much, especially when it is hard to know with certainty how anyone feels. Yet when someone is the leader of a great nation at a historic juncture, it is more than idle curiosity to know what drives him.

It is not clear what the basis was for so much outrage at Mayor Giuliani's opinion about President Obama. Was it that what Giuliani said was demonstrably false? Was it that Barack Obama is supposed to be considered innocent until proven guilty?

Anyone who simply looks at the factual evidence as to whether Obama loves America, or does not, will find remarkably little to suggest love and a large amount of evidence, over a long period of years, showing his constant close association with people fiercely hostile to this country. Jeremiah Wright was just one in a long series of such people.

Barack Obama's campaign promise to "fundamentally change the United States of America" hardly suggests love. Nor did his international speaking tour in 2009, telling foreign audiences that America was to blame for problems on the world stage.

President Obama's record in the White House has been more of the same. Among his earliest acts were offending our oldest and closest allies, Britain and Israel, and betraying the country's previous commitments to provide anti-missile defenses to Poland and the Czech Republic.

Obama's refusal to let Ukraine have weapons with which to defend itself from Russian invasion was consistent with this pattern, and consistent with his whispered statement -- picked up by a microphone that was still on -- to tell "Vladimir" that, after the 2012 election was over, he would be able to "have more 'flexibility.'"

Conceivably, these might all have been simply blunders. But such a string of blunders would require someone very stupid, and Barack Obama is by no means stupid. The net effect is that in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, America's allies and America's interests face far more setbacks and dangers today than when Obama took office.

His policies have been publicly criticized by two of his own former Secretaries of Defense, by two retired four-star generals who served during his administration, and a retired four-star admiral who also served in the Middle East during the Obama administration has called his policies "anti-American."

Some people who are denouncing former mayor Rudolph Giuliani seem to be saying that it is just not right to accuse a President of the United States of being unpatriotic. But when Barack Obama was a Senator, that is precisely what he said about President George W. Bush. Where was the outrage then?

If all else fails, critics of Mayor Giuliani can say that a man is entitled to be considered "innocent until proven guilty." But that principle applies in a court of law. Outside a court of law, there is no reason to presume anyone innocent until proven guilty. It is especially dangerous to presume a President of the United States -- any president -- innocent until proven guilty.

Whoever is president has the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans, and the fate of a nation, in his hands. It is those millions of people and that nation who deserve the benefit of the doubt. We need to err on the side of safety for the people and the country. Squeamish politeness to an individual cannot outweigh that.

We need to keep that in mind for the next president, and for all future presidents. We might have been better off if the question of Obama's patriotism had been raised before he was first elected. Never should we ignore so many red flag warnings again.

There is little that can be done about President Obama now, no matter what he does. Impeachment, even if it succeeded, would mean Joe Biden as president and riots across the country. It is hard to know which would be worse.

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4)--

Iran Talks Continue U.S. Nuclear Retreat

By Jonathan S. Tobin 

The latest round of nuclear negotiations between the U.S. and its Western partners and Iran ended today in Geneva without agreement. But it’s clear that the Obama administration is hoping that its latest concessions will entice Iran to finally sign a document in the coming weeks that could somehow be interpreted as a foreign-policy victory for a president badly in need of one. To support this notion of an impending deal, a “senior administration official” briefed the press on the outlines of the latest proposal delivered to the Iranians. But while it seems like something Tehran ought to pounce on if it really wants to “get right with the world,” in the president’s words, the details tell us more about the administration’s desperation than about progress toward an accord that would conclusively end the Iranian nuclear threat. After several previous Western retreats that had gradually ensured that Iran could keep its nuclear infrastructure, the latest concession in the form of a phased program will eventually grant the Islamist regime the freedom to do anything it wants.

The proposed terms leaked by the U.S. represent a shocking demarche from the president’s 2012 promise that any deal would mean Iran would have to give up its nuclear program. As the Associated Press reports:

The United States and Iran are working on a two-phase deal that clamps down on Tehran’s nuclear program for at least a decade before providing it leeway over the remainder of the agreement to slowly ramp up activities that could be used to make weapons. …

The U.S. initially sought restrictions lasting for up to 20 years; Iran had pushed for less than a decade. The prospective deal appears to be somewhere in the middle. One variation being discussed would place at least 10-year regime of strict controls on Iran’s uranium enrichment program. If Iran complies, the restrictions would be gradually lifted over the last five years of such an agreement.

Iran could be allowed to operate significantly more centrifuges than the U.S. administration first demanded, though at lower capacity than they currently run. Several officials spoke of 6,500 centrifuges as a potential point of compromise, with the U.S. trying to restrict them to Iran’s mainstay IR-1 model instead of more advanced machines.

While in theory this could mean that Iran would be prevented from building a bomb during the next decade, it more or less puts in place a Western acquiescence to future plans for a bomb.

But there are two clear problems with this idea.

One is that like past concessions giving Iran the right to enrich uranium, albeit at low levels and then the one authorizing the regime to hold onto thousands of centrifuges and the option to keep its nuclear stockpile in a non-active state, this latest retreat isn’t the last one Iran will expect the West to make on its way to an agreement. The dynamic of the negotiations that President Obama has authorized is clear. Whenever Iran says no to a Western demand, the U.S. simply says OK and gives in. At this stage, and with no sign that the Americans will ever walk away from talks that have already been extended three times, the Iranians clearly think they can keep negotiating indefinitely until the U.S. eventually agrees to a deal that would give Iran everything it wants, seriously endangering the security of the West but also that of Israel and moderate Arab nations.

The second problem is that, as last week’s report from the International Atomic Energy Agency stated, Iran is still stonewalling the UN body’s efforts to discover the facts about their progress toward weaponization of their nuclear research. The West simply has no idea how close the Iranians have gotten to a bomb. They also have no idea how much of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure is unknown to them. While Israeli and Western intelligence have openly speculated about the likelihood that much of the country’s nuclear work is being conducted at secret facilities, without a rigorous inspection regime that would give the IAEA access there is not a ghost of a chance that any regulation scheme could possibly work to restrain Iran, no matter how many carrots President Obama is offering his Islamist negotiating partners.

Under these circumstances, it’s understandable that the Israeli government is upset.While the administration is intent on using the nuclear talks as a wedge by which it can create a new détente with Iran that will ensure cooperation on a host of issues such as the fight against ISIS, in practice what it is doing is acquiescing to Tehran’s push for regional hegemony. Even in the unlikely event that Iran observes the proposed agreement, giving it this much capacity will make it a threshold nuclear power and a clear threat to the future of Israel (which it again threatened with destruction last week) as well as moderate Arab regimes.

Though the president’s apologists will, as they have with past concessions, defend this proposal as the best deal that can be made, Washington’s zeal for a deal is again the undoing of Western resolve. Kicking the can down the road for ten years may make sense to a president that has less than two more years in office. But the security of the West and its allies must be viewed with a longer perspective.

Yet what has to be most frustrating for observers who care about stopping the Iranian nuclear threat is the willingness of the administration to publicize concessions in such a way as to make them the starting point for future talks. With this ten-year pledge in their pocket, you can bet the next round of negotiations will begin with Iranian demands to lower the amount of time they will have to operate under restrictions. At this rate by 2016, Obama will have given away any shred of a deterrent to Iranian cheating or its future nuclear ambitions.

Though the administration thinks this leak will bolster its position, members of Congress who take this issue seriously should regard it as an even greater incentive for them to pass more sanctions on Iran that will attempt to restrain the desire of this president to accept any deal, even a disastrous one, rather than ever admit that his outreach to a tyrannical, anti-Semitic, terror-sponsoring Iranian regime has failed.

Jonathan S. Tobin is senior online editor of COMMENTARY magazine and chief political blogger at www.commentarymagazine.com. He can be reached via e-mail at: jtobin@commentarymagazine.com.

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5) 

ISIS abducts at least 90 from Christian villages in Syria

By REUTERS

AMMAN - Islamic State militants have abducted at least 90 people from Assyrian Christian villages in northeastern Syria, a monitoring group that tracks violence in Syria said on Tuesday. The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the militants carried out dawn raids on rural villages inhabited by the ancient Christian minority west of Hasaka, a city mainly held by the Kurds. Syrian Kurdish militia have renewed their assault on the militants, launching two offensives against them in northeast Syria on Sunday, helped from US-led air strikes and Iraqi peshmerga who have been shelling Islamic State-held territory from their side of the nearby border. This part of Syria is strategically important in the fight against Islamic State because it borders territory controlled by the group in Iraq, where last year the ultra-hardline group committed atrocities against the Yazidi community. Tel Tamr, a town near the Assyrian Christian villages where the abductions occurred, has witnessed heavy clashes between Islamic State fighters and the Kurdish YPG militia, the Observatory said. The incident comes about a week after the release of a beheading video of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians in the hands of  IS. A caption of the video released by Islamic State militants referred to the Coptics as "people of the cross, followers of the hostile Egyptian church." The victims, kidnapped in Libya, deepened Cairo's concerns over security threats from militants thriving in the neighboring country's chaos.