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Hillary believes America deserves a female president and she further believes, and has asserted, she fills the prescription. I have no problem with a woman becoming president. After all the men have been at it for years. We may be a sick nation after Obama but elect Hillary and she will kill off any hope of recovery.
Meanwhile, Hillary continues as an unmitigated hypocrite . Why? Because she has no problem receiving money from nations whose record on women's rights is appalling. Elect Hillary and we will find out how much the presidency is worth because she will put it up for sale since that is the way The Clinton's behave. They are for sale and if you cross them they will crush you.
While on the subject of cutting one off at the knees, I find it equally interesting that Obama , who told us his administration would be the most open, then proceeded to investigate a FOX Reporter, had the IRS club conservatives and now is ready to throw a Democrat Senator from New Jersey under the bus because he has challenged Obama's foreign policy initiatives immediately after Obama
silenced a General and former CIA head who possibly had presidential aspirations before he admitted to having an extra marital affair.
Would it not be nice if Obama was as tough on Iran. But then, the Ayatollah has no beef with Obama because Iran is getting virtually a pass go to becoming a nuclear power Meanwhile, Obama sees
no reason to make Congress a party to his negotiations. (See 1 below.)
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One more tough minded General forced out by Obama. Semper Fi! (See 2 below.)
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When Republicans ran in 2014 they were too chicken and/or disorganized to offer the voters programs how they would solve the immigration issue, what they would replace Obamacare with etc.
They have continued to look foolish now that they have become the party in control of Congress. (See 3 below.)
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Belated commentary by my friend John Podhoretz. (See 4 below.)
and
Gaping holes in Obama's Iranian deal? (See 4a below.)
Kerry keeps sticking his finger in the Iran Dike! Will Middle East Nations buy what Kerry
is selling? (See 4b, 4c and 4d below.)
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I am catching up from being away and leave again Friday so some of my postings refer to events that have taken place but , in my humble opinion, still are worth being posted.
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Dick
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1)Iran Hawks See a Possible Conspiracy in Menendez Corruption Leak
A Democratic senator is hit with corruption charges. A Republican governor stands ready to replace the senator if he resigns. On paper, it's easy to imagine the troubles of New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez setting up a partisan power struggle.
That's not how the Menendez story is playing out. On Friday afternoon, after CNN broke the news that the Department of Justice was preparing a case against Menendez, conservatives openly asked if this had anything to do with the debate over Iran. Menendez, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was wrangling Democrats for a sanctions bill that the White House had threatened to veto.
Just days before the leak, Menendez was onstage at the AIPAC conference, winning ovation after ovation. "I am not intimidated by anyone," said Menendez. Now, to many conservatives, it seemed as though someone was trying to intimidate him. Bret Stephens, the Pulitzer-winning Wall Street Journal columnist, reacted quickly and succinctly. (Re charges: DoJ better have good explanation of timing of charges against #1 Dem critic of Iran deal. Otherwise, BHO=RMN.)
Since, then plenty of pundits have repeated that sentiment, and leading conservative lawmakers like Ted Cruz have also weighed in.
How convenient was it that the key Democrat challenging the administration on Iran, a tough legislator in the final stages of getting votes for his bill, was hit with credibility-sinking charges. The question answered itself. The Obama administration, wrote Lee Smith in Tablet, "took a page from Michael Corleone’s handbook." In Iowa this past weekend, Texas Senator Ted Cruz openly speculated about a DOJ hit on Menendez."The timing is curious," he told reporters. The charges raised "suggestions to other Democrats if you dare part from [the] Obama White House that criminal prosecutions will be used potentially as a weapon against you as well."
After a Monday morning speech in New Hampshire, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham told Bloomberg Politics that the Menendez allegations did not sit right with him.
"All I can say is, they were leaked," Graham said. "He wasn't actually charged officially. They leaked the fact that he may be charged, is gonna be charged. I hate it when that happens for anybody. I like Bob. Like everybody else, he's innocent until proven guilty. He's been a champion on the Iranian nuclear issue. It just doesn't smell right."
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2)
Subject: Most Important 6 inches
His last quote is as good as it gets!
March 18, 2013 Gen. James Mattis, known to his troops as "Mad Dog Mattis," is retiring after 41 years of military service. The Marine Corps Times is calling Mattis the "most revered Marine in a generation. <http://militarytimes.com/ 1.. "I don't lose any sleep at night over the potential for failure. I cannot even spell the word." (San Diego Union Tribune <http://www.utsandiego.com/ 2.. "The first time you blow someone away is not an insignificant event. That said, there are some assholes in the world that just need to be shot." (Business Insider <http://www.businessinsider. 3.. "I come in peace. I didn't bring artillery. But I'm pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you screw with me, I'll kill you all." (said to the Iraqi leadership) (San Diego Union Tribune <http://www.utsandiego.com/ 4.. "Find the enemy that wants to end this experiment (in American democracy) and kill every one of them until they're so sick of the killing that they leave us and our freedoms intact." (San Diego Union Tribune <http://www.utsandiego.com/ 5.. "Marines don't know how to spell the word defeat." (Business Insider <http://www.businessinsider. 6.. "Be polite, be professional but have a plan to kill everybody you meet." (San Diego Union Tribune <http://www.utsandiego.com/ 7.. "The most important six inches on the battlefield is between your ears." (San Diego Union Tribune <http://www.utsandiego.com/ 8.. "You are part of the world's most feared and trusted force. Engage your brain before you engage your weapon." (Mattis' Letter To 1st Marine Division <http://upload.wikimedia.org/ Gen. Mattis in 2006 9.. "There are hunters and there are victims. By your discipline, cunning, obedience and alertness, you will decide if you are a hunter or a victim." (Business Insider <http://www.businessinsider. 10. "No war is over until the enemy says it's over. We may think it over, we may declare it over, but in fact, the enemy gets a vote." (Defense News <http://www.defensenews.com/ 11. "There is nothing better than getting shot at and missed. It's really great.." (San Diego Union Tribune <http://www.utsandiego.com/ 12. "You cannot allow any of your people to avoid the brutal facts. If they start living in a dream world, it's going to be bad." (San Diego Union Tribune <https://eaaspiv.dhs.gov/owa/ Gen. Mattis and Gen. Dempsey 13. "You go into Afghanistan , you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them. Actually it's quite fun to fight them, you know. It's a hell of a hoot. It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right up there with you. I like brawling." (CNN <http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/ 14. "I'm going to plead with you, do not cross us. Because if you do, the survivors will write about what we do here for 10,000 years." (San Diego Union Tribune <http://www.utsandiego.com/ 15. "Demonstrate to the world there is 'No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy' than a U.S. Marine." (Mattis' Letter To 1st Marine Division <http://upload.wikimedia.org/ 16. "Fight with a happy heart and strong spirit" (Mattis' Letter To 1st Marine Division <http://upload.wikimedia.org/ And one final quote for returning Veterans... Is anybody surprised President Obama forced this man to retire early? ------------------------------------------------------------------ 3) Why the GOP Can't 'Repeal and Replace' ObamacareThe only thing Republican leaders appear to have in common with one another is disdain for President Obama.
And while that antipathy may have carried a majority into both houses of Congress in the latest midterm, they are already demonstrating the foundational faults in the party that are going to prevent them from effectively acting on their supposed majority.
The Republican problem is that they are too ideologically fractured to work together, and “Not Obama” doesn’t actually constitute productive policy -- only a starting point for getting the country back on track after too many years of stagnation, political and economic.
The best example of this intra-party disorganization is actually visible in the current effort to propose, finally, a comprehensive alternative to Obamacare.
The signature legislation of the Obama presidency has been the single-greatest rallying cry for conservatives since it first gained traction in his first term. Party voices almost began to harmonize in their calls for a plan to ‘repeal and replace’ Obama’s destructive namesake policy.
At long last, the new Republican legislative majority, coupled with a promising Supreme Court challenge to one of the central tenets of Obamacare -- the subsidies granted on exchanges not created by states -- has given Republican leaders a unique opportunity not just to undo the health law, but provide their own replacement plan.
Several prominent party leaders have risen to the challenge, publicly announcing and disseminating their alternative plans. Far from reassuring, however, these conservative vanity projects have as much chance of obstructing a repeal of Obamacare as they do for actually replacing it.
The plans have much in common: they all predicate themselves on a wholesale repeal of Obamacare; in the words of Senator Ted Cruz, “Every last word of Obamacare must be repealed.” In fact, Senator Cruz’s plan (the Health Care Choice Act of 2015) does not repeal the entirety of Obamacare, but focuses on its most controversial features: the failure to allow individuals to buy insurance from out of state, the employer mandate, and of course, the individual insurance mandate, all elements of Title I of the Affordable Care Act.
Actually, this is one of the features common to all of the plans brought forth by Republicans so far: the sponsors demonize Obamacare, pontificate on its evils and the need for its immediate repeal, then detail the many things it apparently got right in their eyes by effectively reinstating them under the guise of a new plan:
The GOP is paralyzed by factions, sprinkled along the spectrum from Moderate to Hardline Conservative. This is hardly news, but becomes newly relevant given the fact that it could derail their efforts to take Obamacare off the table. Details matter to the current Congress, and despite the broad similarities among the rival plans, the particular differences between them could well prevent any single plan from attracting the broad support among the party -- to say nothing of their peers across the aisle -- necessary to pass.
There is a presidential election coming up -- undoubtedly, many of the legislators authoring health reform plans want their name to be the one associated with finally dethroning Obamacare. Indeed, the list of co-sponsors for the Senate plan as well as the House plan features many names frequently touted as presidential contenders for 2016. Even a failed attempt would put fuel in the tank of a presidential election campaign.
If the Republicans in Congress had a better track record of working together, advancing conservative policy without such profound attachment to their personal interpretation of the minutiae of what ‘conservative’ really is, the country might have a hope of seeing the best elements of all their plans integrated into a final alternative to Obamacare. That precedent for cooperation is sadly lacking -- and undermines any hope that a new plan will emerge.
The airtime and broad base support Republican leaders have enjoyed for railing against Obama’s every word and deed have taught them to avoid compromise, not only with Democrats, but with the increasingly entrenched branches of their own party. Speaker John Boehner’s failure to rally his supposed majority to vote on the Homeland Security budget bill previewed this handicap.
Partisanship has been the catchall for describing why Washington no longer functions; for Republicans, the divisions don’t yet have fully formed party lines, but come to the same result: a patchwork of disjointed platforms, objectives, and ultimately, legislative plans, unwilling to blend together to advance.
Republicans have shown admirable creativity and preparation in coming out with their Obamacare replacements -- especially compared to the current administration, which has bet everything on a favorable ruling from the Supreme Court. Republicans, at least, acknowledge the chance that Obamacare may be dealt a deathblow by an alternative ruling, necessitating a readily available alternative that can be passed, implemented, and used to cover the President’s failure.
What they don’t appear to have accounted for is each other.
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4)
BIBI'S GRAND SLAM: BOXING IN OBAMA ON IRAN'S NUKES
Author: John Podhoretz
On Tuesday, Bibi Netanyahu gave the speech of his life before a joint session of Congress — and he has Barack Obama to thank for it.
Yes, the very same Barack Obama who hates Bibi, the same Obama who was furious the speech was being given at all, walked the bases full for Netanyahu and served up the sucker pitch he hit for a grand slam.
For six weeks, the president and his team have been letting it be known just how angry they are that the leader of the House of Representatives invited the Israeli prime minister to speak about the threat from Iran.
The enraged leaks and overt hostility toward the head of state of an ally have been unprecedented.
The White House even tried to engineer a mass Democratic boycott of the speech, an effort that either (take your pick) met with success because 50 members of his party agreed to it, or was a failure because 75 percent of elected Democrats on Capitol Hill defied him and chose to attend.
What did all of this do? It made the Netanyahu speech the most important political event of 2015 by far.
It elevated Netanyahu’s powerful case against a nuclear deal with Iran to the highest level possible — so that the leader of a country of 8 million people roughly the size of New Jersey now possesses as much authority to discuss the issue as the leader of the free world.
Obama’s own national security mouthpiece, Ben Rhodes, has said the White House views a deal with Iran as the “biggest thing President Obama will do in his second term on foreign policy.”
Obama’s fit of pique against Netanyahu has led to a man-to-man showdown that will likely complicate that “biggest thing” immensely.
Netanyahu yesterday laid out, calmly and comprehensively, the reasons the deal is likely to be a bad one — and he had not only an audience of Americans vastly larger than he would’ve had if the president hadn’t had his hissy fit, but also the ear of the audience that matters most in this regard.
That audience is the United States Senate.
And his audience heard him.
Tuesday afternoon, after Netanyahu scored his success, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced he’ll bring up a piece of legislation requiring Senate consideration of any Iran deal for 60 days.
We can assume that the entire Republican caucus, 54 members in all, will be on board.
The bill will likely garner a healthy number of Democratic votes as well, led by the example of New Jersey’s Robert Menendez, the Senate’s most resolute voice on Iran.
But Obama will certainly veto any such legislation. It will take 67 votes to override a presidential veto.
Those who oppose a bad deal with Iran saw encouraging signs that this veto override might happen before the Netanyahu speech. McConnell clearly believes Bibi has made that all the more likely.
Almost from the outset, I thought the speech was a bad political idea — on the grounds that Netanyahu should’ve understood just how enraged the whole plan would make the president, whose hostility to Israel is nearly unprecedented.
Well, I was wrong.
I forgot I was talking about Barack Obama here, whose own political smarts extend as far as his own brilliance in getting himself elected and no further.
The president thought (and I thought) he could use the coming speech to set up a confrontation with Bibi that would make his job of selling the Iran deal easier.
It might have worked if the speech had been a dud. You know, like Obama’s own State of the Union, delivered on the very same spot six weeks ago.
But it wasn’t. It was a triumph — because, unlike Obama, Netanyahu had something of surpassing importance to say, and he said it with force, with strength, with conviction and with grace.
4a)
THE GAPING HOLES IN OBAMA'S IRAN DEAL
Author: Emily B. Landau
When considering the dangers of a bad nuclear deal with Iran, it’s time to depart from the drama surrounding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress and get back to the issues, as Mr. Netanyahu himself did in the speech.
The deal at stake has many flaws and is likely to leave Iran with the ability to move to nuclear weapons capability at a time of its choosing. With so little time to react to an Iranian violation, the international community will be powerless to stop Iran in time. This situation was never meant to be, but it could very likely come about if the holes in the deal are not closed.
The problems begin with the thousands of centrifuges that the permanent five UN Security Council members and Germany are poised to allow Iran to maintain and the R&D into more and more advanced generations of centrifuges that will spin much faster than those currently in use. In addition, the known facilities of concern – the reactor at Arak and the enrichment facility at Natanz – will not be shut down, as demanded by the P5+1 only a short time ago.
Even more worrying is the situation regarding Iran’s work on military aspects of its nuclear program and Iran’s defiance of the International Atomic Energy Agency in this regard. Iran has been stonewalling the IAEA investigation into the military dimensions of its program for years, and this intransigence has continued over the past 13 months of negotiations, as the agency itself recently reported. When U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced the extension last November, he praised Iran’s co-operation with the Joint Plan of Action agreed to in late 2013, but he failed to say a word about the more important IAEA investigation. In fact, the P5+1 resist squarely confronting Iran with the evidence of its years of cheating and deception, and are allowing Iran to continue to claim that it has done no wrong in the nuclear realm, which is an out-and-out lie.
If Iran’s lies and violations were exposed, the case for massive dismantlement of its nuclear program, due to lack of any ability to trust Iran not to cheat, would be that much stronger. If exposed, the absurdity of the sunset clause of any pending deal would also be quite evident – why envision any period of time after which all restrictions on Iran will be lifted when Iran harbours military ambitions that have not been exposed or checked? This is especially the case when we take into account Iran’s aggressive regional behaviour, support for terrorism and threats that Israel should be annihilated. And if weaponization activities were exposed, the demand for the most intrusive inspections – “anywhere, any time” – would be obvious, because Iran very likely has additional clandestine facilities, and certainly might be thinking of building more.
Iran’s vast ballistic missile program – a critical component of a deliverable nuclear weapon – is also not under consideration by the negotiators. Iran has declared such missiles to be “non-nuclear” even though a UN Security Council resolution from June, 2010, specifically demands that Iran not be allowed to work on missiles that can carry nuclear warheads. Yet the P5+1 are not demanding that this issue be addressed.
In the face of these gaping holes, the U.S. administration is attempting to deflect criticism of its negotiation by marginalizing the criticism now coming from many directions: Israel, Arab states, congressmen, statesmen like Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, and a particularly knowledgeable group: nuclear experts.
Rather than carefully considering the criticism raised by people no less knowledgeable than the administration, the critics are dismissed as “hawks,” “warmongers” and people who lack knowledge and understanding of the issues. The administration adamantly claims that the alternative to the precise negotiation it is leading is either Iran moving quickly to the bomb or war. Such framing eliminates any prospect of criticizing not the fact of negotiations, but rather how they have been conducted – all the mistakes that have been made. The critics have legitimate concerns; they are not warmongers.
The time to insist on mechanisms to maximize the prospect that Iran cannot move to nuclear weapons is now. But when Congress asks to weigh in on the deal, President Barack Obama threatens to veto the legislation. No role for Congress, no criticism.
Will the negotiators wake up to the fact that they have made some serious mistakes in this negotiation? Will they finally begin to listen to legitimate concerns and make corrections before it is too late?
Emily B. Landau is senior research fellow and head of the Arms Control Program at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University.
4b)
Earlier this week, Secretary of State John Kerry was in Saudi Arabia trying to reassure one of America’s most important Arab allies that the administration wasn’t selling them down the river. The Saudis, like many Arab regimes in the region, are actually in agreement with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the nature of the nuclear threat from Iran and President Obama’s reckless pursuit of détente with that regime. But Kerry’s efforts to calm the Saudis didn’t appear to succeed. Despite the secretary’s claim that the U.S. wasn’t seeking a “grand deal” with Iran and would, “not take our eye off of Iran’s other destabilizing actions,” the Saudis were well aware of the fact that Iranian-supported Shiite troops were playing a leading role in the effort to reclaim the Iraqi city of Tikrit from ISIS. As the New York Times reports today in a front-page feature, in the wake of the president’s complete withdrawal from Iraq, Iran has virtually replaced the U.S. as the dominant foreign power in that country. In other words, it’s too late for Kerry or American allies to worry about whether Iran’s efforts to gain regional hegemony will succeed. That’s because they already have.
As the Times notes:
The president’s apologists may blame this on George W. Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq in the first place as well as his kicking the can down the road on Iran’s nuclear program. There’s some truth to that but Bush left Obama a war that was already won by the 2007 U.S. surge. Bush may have laid the groundwork for the current mess. But its shape and the scale of the disaster is Obama’s responsibility.
Iranian influence among fellow Shiites in Iraq is nothing new. But the scale of the current effort and the open nature of the way Iran’s forces are now flexing their muscles — even in the Tikrit region where Sunnis dominate — demonstrates that the rise of ISIS was not the only negative consequence of President Obama’s decision to completely pull U.S. forces out of Iraq when negotiations about their staying got sticky. That enabled him to brag during the 2012 presidential campaign that he had “ended” the Iraq War (the same campaign where he pledged Iran would not be allowed to keep a nuclear program) but neither ISIS nor Iran got that memo. The war continues but the difference is that instead of an Iraq influenced by the U.S., it is now Iran that is the dominant force.
The same is true throughout the region. President Obama spent years dithering about the collapse of Syria even while demanding that Bashar Assad give up power and enunciating “red lines” about the use of chemical weapons. But while he stalled, moderate rebels withered, ISIS grew and Iran’s ally Assad stayed in Damascus, bucked up by Iranian help and troops supplied by Tehran’s Hezbollah auxiliaries.
So when the Saudis look at a potential deal that will allow Iran to keep its nuclear infrastructure and ultimately expire in ten years, they know that it is directly connected to America’s apparent decision to acquiesce to Iranian dominance in Iraq and elsewhere in the region.
Though Netanyahu’s speech centered mostly on the nuclear threat, like their Arab neighbors, Israelis are well aware of the peril that Iranian hegemony poses to their security. The brief bout of fighting on the northern border after Hezbollah and Iran attempted to set up a base to shoot missiles into the Jewish state from Syria showed the depth of the Iranian connection to the terror war against Israel.
Should the Iranians sign the deal, the administration will claim it as a triumph. But while the president pats himself on the back for appeasing Iran on the nuclear issue, Israelis and Arabs will also focus on the way Iran has used Obama’s desire to abandon the region as a wedge by which they have advanced their interests. Détente with Iran means more than an ally against ISIS; it means a Middle East in which Iran is the strong horse. That’s a development that gives the lie to Kerry’s reassurances.
4c)
Like Israel, U.S. Arab Allies Fear Obama’s Iran Nuclear DealKerry Visiting Saudi Arabia to assuage concerns
DUBAI—It isn’t just about Bibi.
The Israeli prime minister’s public confrontation with President Barack Obama over the U.S. administration’s pursuit of a nuclear bargain with Iran may have drawn all the spotlight this week.
Analysis
But America’s other key allies across the Middle East—such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates—are just as distraught, even if they lack the kind of lobbying platform that Benjamin Netanyahu was offered in Congress.
These nations’ ties with Washington have already frayed in recent years, dented by what many officials in the region describe as a nagging sense that America doesn’t care about this part of the world anymore.
Now, with the nuclear talks nearing a deadline, these allies—particularly in the Gulf—fret that America is about to ditch its long-standing friends to win love from their common foe, at the very moment that this foe is on the offensive across the region.
“A lot of the Gulf countries feel they are being thrown under the bus,” said Mishaal al-Gergawi, managing director of the Delma Institute in Abu Dhabi and a prominent Emirati political commentator. “The Gulf thought it was in a monogamous relationship with the West, and now it realizes it’s being cheated on because the U.S. was in an open relationship with it.”
Trying to assuage such concerns, Secretary of State John Kerry flew Wednesday to Saudi Arabia. There, he is slated to discuss with King Salman and foreign ministers of other Gulf nations their worries that the nuclear deal may enable Iran to dominate the region.
In remarks after Mr. Netanyahu’s speech on Tuesday, Mr. Obama acknowledged Iran’s “ambitions when it comes to territory or terrorism”—but argued that “if, in fact, they obtain a nuclear weapon, all those problems would be worse.”
Steven Simon, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute who served as senior director for Middle East and North Africa at the White House in 2011-2012, noted that the Gulf countries—while genuinely alarmed by the U.S. outreach—can’t really propose a viable alternative.
“The alternative to what the administration is doing with Iran is war,” he said. “And I don’t think the Saudis and the Emiratis and others are actually prepared for war.”
A joint effort to contain Iran and its proxies after the 1979 Islamic revolution was the key reason for the massive architecture of military, political and economic ties that the U.S. built with its regional allies in recent decades. Even before the revolution, Iran tried to dominate the Gulf, laying claim to Shiite-majority Bahrain and seizing disputed islands claimed by the U.A.E.
Taking advantage of the Obama administration’s attempt to pivot away from the region, Tehran in recent years asserted its influence in Baghdad and solidified its control in Damascus and Beirut. Last month, pro-Iranian Houthi Shiite militias seized power in Yemen’s capital San’a and ousted that country’s U.S.-backed president.
The Sunni Arab nations led by Saudi Arabia that are engaged in proxy conflicts with Tehran in Yemen, Syria, Bahrain and Lebanon view this confrontation as an existential zero-sum game—and interpret any American opening to Iran, and any relaxation of the economic sanctions that have hobbled Iran’s ability to project power, as succor to the enemy.
“Some of these countries are more worried about the consequences of the deal, about how it will change the balance of power in the region, rather than the actual contents of the deal,” explained Ali Vaez, Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group think tank. These fears are overblown, he said: “The reality is that the U.S. may have a tactical overlap in its interests in the region with Iran, but strategically it sees the region in a very different way.”
That may be true, but this tactical overlap has already created strategic consequences in the crucial battlefields of Syria and Iraq, cementing Iran’s sway in both nations.
The White House decision to focus the U.S. military effort exclusively on Islamic State, sparing the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, has allowed the regime and its Iranian-backed allies to regain ground there. This means that even the fighters of the U.S.-funded Free Syrian Army, which is supposed to help defeat Islamic State one day, are no longer sure about which side Washington really supports.
“America wants to back whoever is stronger, and the strongest now are Iran and Bashar. This is clear to all people,” said Bakri Kaakeh, a senior FSA officer in Aleppo province.
In Iraq’s war against Islamic State, the U.S. has in fact become a cobelligerent with Iran, which maintains brutal Shiite militias and is directly involved in running major campaigns, such as the current assault on the Sunni city ofTikrit.
Moeen al-Kadhimi, a senior commander in the largest Iraqi Shiite militia, Badr, which is armed by Iran and staffed with Iranian advisers, said he’s yearning for the day when Tehran and Washington will finally reconcile.
“It’s our wish as Iraqis for this to happen. We will be happy, and the entire Middle East will be stabilized,” he said.
Stability under an Iranian tutelage, of course, isn’t the most desirable outcome for other powers in the region, particularly in the Gulf. The big question is what can these allies do about it.
Not much, said Brian Katulis, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a think tank close to the Obama administration.
“
All of the fuss shows how much they need America. Who are they going to turn to? Russia or China?” he wondered. “ No one has the security footprint, capabilities, and network of partnerships across the region.”
But that doesn’t mean the disgruntled allies won’t start looking for ways to torpedo any U.S. opening to Iran—and for alternatives, including a nuclear option of their own, if that fails. Their dismay with the administration’s Iran policy—while not displayed as publicly as Mr. Netanyahu’s—is just as strong.
“Any opportunities that the Arab countries will have to undermine the deal, they will not miss it,” said Riad Kahwaji, CEO of the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis in Dubai. “They will all conclude that the U.S. is no longer a reliable strategic ally, and that the U.S. can sell them out any minute.
4d)
BY
T here’s so much wrong with the emerging Iran nuclear deal that it’s hard to know where to begin. But as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made clear in his speech this week to Congress, the biggest flaw is almost certainly the deal’s so-called sunset provision.
Amazingly, the Obama administration is prepared to sign an agreement that will expire in a mere 10 years time. At that point, any restrictions that the deal imposes on Iran’s nuclear program would vanish. Iran’s economy would be free from all nuclear-related sanctions and its government would be treated the same as any other non-nuclear weapon state that is a non-proliferation treaty-member in good standing. That means that Iran could be like Holland, which spins hundreds of thousands of advanced centrifuges to produce reactor fuel. It could be like Japan, which maintains enough stockpiled plutonium for thousands of nuclear warheads. It could be like Brazil, which plans to produce bomb-grade uranium enriched to 90 percent to power its nuclear submarines. All that will be perfectly permissible under the deal that Obama is negotiating. And it would have the full blessing of the United States and the rest of the international community, not to mention billions of dollars in trade and investment that’s likely to flow once sanctions are eased. In exchange, all Obama requires is a decade’s worth of nuclear restraint from the mullahs — a decent interval, if you will — that will allow him to claim victory and get out of Washington without the embarrassment of a mushroom cloud over the Iranian desert, while leaving the resulting mess to his successor or (if we’re really lucky) to his successor’s successor. The bottom line: The Obama administration is prepared to allow the Islamic Republic to get within the proverbial screwdriver’s turn away from the bomb, regardless of whether in 2025 Iran is ruled by the equivalent of Ahmadinejad 2.0; regardless of whether it remains the world’s leading state-sponsor of terrorism; and regardless of whether its leaders continue to call for the destruction of Israel. At that point, with a massive nuclear infrastructure in place, Obama’s so-called breakout time of at least a year would be history. The ability of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors to detect a small covert weapons effort would virtually evaporate. The time it would take Iran to sneak out to a bomb would drop to a matter of days. By the time the world realized what was happening — much less mobilized an effective response — it would almost certainly be too late. That’s why Netanyahu said that Obama’s deal “doesn’t block Iran’s path to the bomb, it paves Iran’s path to the bomb.” He was right. The Obama sunset clause is truly a catastrophe. It almost guarantees that America, Israel, and our Arab allies will have to confront the nightmare of an Iran with nuclear weapons in the not-too-distant future, at a point when the economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation that have done so much to shackle the mullahs will be but a distant memory. Talk about a ticking time bomb. The Obama administration knows this is true. That’s why it really doesn’t want the debate to focus on the sunset clause. The logical implications, as described above, are just too awful to contemplate, much less defend. It’s a poison pill, a flashing neon sign that screams “BAD DEAL.” When pressed, administration officials fall back on claims that at least their deal might buy the world another 10 years before we have to confront the prospect of an Iran on the nuclear threshold. And during that time, who knows? Perhaps the mullahs will be tamed, or better yet overthrown, and Iran will be transformed into a normal, non-revolutionary power, prepared to forego its almost four-decade long war with the Great Satan and its ambitions to dominate the Middle East. Yeah, right. Nice thought. But seriously: Is President Obama really ready to mortgage the country’s future, to bet America’s national security, on the hope — the hope! — that the Islamic Republic will stop being the Islamic Republic 10 years hence? Really, given the stakes at play both for us and our regional allies, what responsible national leader could possibly roll the dice and run that risk? Especially if the mantra guiding his Iran policy all along has allegedly been “no deal is better than a bad deal”? Predictably, if somewhat pathetically, the last refuge that the administration will seek to account for its disastrous sunset clause is almost sure to be an effort to shift the blame to George W. Bush. At a Senate hearing in January, and then again at a public forum two weeks ago, Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken previewed the argument that the sunset clause had really been a Bush concoction all along. According to Blinken, “the Bush administration put on the table the proposition that Iran would be treated as a non-nuclear weapons state after it complied for some period of time with any agreement. And that is exactly what we are doing.” In a word: bunk. Blinken is referring to an annex of UN Security Council Resolution 1747, passed in 2007. The annex set out the latest P5+1 offer to Iran for a long-term agreement on its nuclear program — the centerpiece of which, it should be stressed, was the suspension of all of Iran’s enrichment-related and reprocessing activities. Included in the offer was a vague commitment to “review” the moratorium on Iran’s restricted nuclear activities at some undetermined future date, but only after two conditions had been met: 1) Confirmation by the IAEA that all outstanding questions about Iran’s program had been satisfactorily resolved, including those pertaining to possible weaponization efforts; and 2) confirmation that there remained no undeclared nuclear activities or materials in Iran, and international confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of Iran’s civil nuclear program had been restored. Did you get that? No enrichment. No arbitrary deadline of 10 years. No commitment to do anything other than “review” the restrictions on Iran’s nuclear activities. And no review before the world — read, the United States — was convinced that Iran has come totally clean about its nuclear activities and has confidence that Iran has truly given up its quest for the bomb. An American veto, in other words, based on our assessment of whether there had been a genuine strategic shift in the Ayatollah’s nuclear ambitions. Needless to say, that’s a far cry from where we find ourselves today. I suppose you can call both of these approaches sunset clauses if you like. But as a negotiating strategy, they occupy different universes. One gives away virtually nothing, the other nearly everything. No one should buy the “Bush made me do it” excuse. It’s of a piece with Obama’s effort to blame his predecessor for his disastrous decision in 2011 to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq, which helped pave the way for the rise of the Islamic State. It was Bush, Obama complained, who negotiated the 2008 Status of Forces agreement that allowed for a U.S. departure in the event Washington and Baghdad failed to reach a follow-on deal. In this telling, Obama was merely sticking to the Bush script. When the Iraqis balked, his hands were tied. Left out was the fact that securing a follow-on deal would have been Bush’s highest priority, one he would have been prepared to invest hundreds of hours of his own personal time and prestige to ensure was achieved. Obama, by contrast, seems to have devoted all of two phone calls to the effort — the first to inform the Iraqi prime minister that the United States was ready to negotiate a follow-on deal; the second several months later to tell him that the United States was getting out. In between, he was largely AWOL. And then he spent the entire next year campaigning for re-election on the claim that he had fulfilled his 2008 pledge to get all U.S. troops out of Iraq. Make no mistake: The sunset clause now under negotiation is entirely an Obama production. He owns it. It puts us on a glide path to a world in which a militant Islamic theocracy — with the blood of at least a thousand Americans on its hands — that wants to destroy Israel and spread terror and violence across the Middle East is but a stone’s throw away from having the capacity to achieve a nuclear arsenal that, as a practical matter, no one will have time to stop. This is exactly the outcome that U.S. policy has fought so mightily to prevent for the better part of two decades. That strikes me as a pretty good definition of a bad deal. While we should all hope that a better deal, a good deal, is out there to be had, whether it is or not is irrelevant to the standard that the President himself has repeatedly insisted would guide his strategy. That is: no deal is better than a bad deal. Not that no deal is better than a bad deal — but only if a better deal exists. Rather, no deal is better than a bad deal, period. Full stop. End of sentence. The President is right. Now, difficult as it may be, he needs to follow his own policy.
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