Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Can't Help Myself! Wake Up America - You Are Being Duped Again! Judith Miller and The New York Times! Keeping The Dummy Inflated!

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 I just cannot help myself !
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Fifty years later three authors revisit the prescience of  Moynihan, his attack on liberals and failure to penetrate their minds, conscience and blind hypocrisy.

Author Steele makes a cogent observation when he writes: ".... black leaders continue to excel at trying to leverage grievances into more entitlements..." (See 1 below.)
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Additional thoughts regarding Obama and Iran!

Hanson perceives Obama is an American Chamberlain! (See 2 below.)

Horovitz on Obama and Iran. (See 2a below.)

Let's hear it from Tobin! (See 2b1 and 2b2 below.)

Even the Washington Post called Obama's hand.  (See 2c below.)

Finally, Bret Stephens gives his view. (See 2d below.)

 As for yours truly, Obama has struck a deal not with the devil because he is the devil. He gave away the store because he seemingly cares more about a legacy than protecting not only Israel, but also America, from a rogue regime which has proven to be totally untrustworthy and which has killed hundreds of Americans through the use of terror. In essence Obama has rewarded Iran for their constant duplicity, falsely claiming war was the only alternative to his arrogant ideas. Or he is delusional.  You choose!

Meanwhile, Obama persists in telling us we will be able to detect when, and if, Iran violates the terms of any future agreement.  Hell, Iran has been violating everything they commit to since Carter helped overthrow their King, and we have not known what was going on until it was too late.

Obama also said Iran will never have a bomb on his watch.  That is perhaps true because his watch ends in a few years but they will have a bomb because his and Kerry's incompetent negotiating style allows them to do so and they want one. The outlined agreement says nothing about Iran releasing American prisoners, recognizing Israel's right to exist, changing their acts of blatant terrorism, arming radical Islamists worldwide nor their development of missiles which are being built to carry nuclear made peaceful electricity?  Only a fool or slave to Obama believes this is a reliable and meritorious deal.

Now this liar of a president, who told us we could keep our doctors, and the list of his other lies that are endless, is about selling his fraudulent quack medicine and  attacking anyone, including Congress, who dares challenge him.

His clever defense of the indefensible places Netanyahu, as the modern Churchill, in a difficult position. To protect his nation, as is his moral obligation, he may have no alternative to attacking Iran's nuclear facilities, difficult as that may be both militarily and politically, which, perhaps, is the  check mate position in which Obama sought to place Israel.

March Madness has ended.. Will Americans finally wake up and see how they are continuing to be duped by this make believe president?   Frankly, I doubt it because the press and media will spin for Obama. They helped create and sell him and now they must keep their dummy inflated.
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Rolling Stone rolls over a fraternity at The University of Virginia, does nothing after admitting the article was baseless and will be allowed to just roll along.

Rolling Stone is a leftist organ and it bile typifies how low the liberal press has sunk, priding itself on 'gotcha' articles!.
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Judith Miller worked for The New York Times, and was duped by informants.  She protected her source and went to jail. Then she was dumped by The New York Times.  Now she has written a book which explains what happened and how misled the American people have been regarding Iraq.

Once again, the Left press and media had their own agenda and axe to grind. (See 3 below.)

A reliable and trustworthy press and media (the fourth estate) are essential if our Republic is to survive.

The leftist press and media have given up their own right to exist because they seem no longer capable of reporting the truth.
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Ralph Peters speaks his mind about why our 'best and brightest' fail us! (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1) Moynihan’s Mistake and the Left’s Shame

The late senator stood at the fault line between two very different versions of liberalism.


The Professor and the President: Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the Nixon White House, by Stephen Hess (Brookings Institution Press, 150 pp., $24)

American Burke: The Uncommon Liberalism of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, by Greg Weiner (University Press of Kansas, 208 pp., $27.95)

Shame: How America’s Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country, by Shelby Steele (Basic Books, 208 pp., $25.99)

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the four-term senator from New York who died in 2003, was that rare soul who was both a political and intellectual giant. Stephen Hess, who worked in the early Nixon White House as an aide to Moynihan, was the rare individual friendly with both Moynihan and Richard Nixon. The Professor and the President is a short but revealing memoir-cum-narrative of Moynihan’s service in the executive branch.

What brought Nixon and Moynihan together was a tectonic shift of the political plates. Nixon won the presidency in 1968 thanks to the backlash against the riots that had ripped through America’s cities. What made Moynihan a Democrat of extraordinary insight, willing to serve a Republican president, were his reactions to those riots—and to the excesses and wrong turns of American liberalism.

Today, 50 years after its issuance, some liberals “bravely” acknowledge that 1965’s so-called Moynihan Report, in which the future senator warned about the dire future consequences of the collapse of the black family, was a fire bell in the night. But at the time, and for decades to come, Moynihan was branded as a racist by civil rights leaders, black activists, and run-of-the-mill liberals. “One began to sense,” Moynihan wrote, that “a price was to be paid even for such a mild dissent from conventional liberalism.”

His capacity for irony notwithstanding, Moynihan came close to a nervous breakdown and “emerged changed” from the experience. He came to feel “that American liberalism had created its own version of a politique du pire (i.e., the worse the better) . . . in which evidence had been displaced by ideology.” His fear that the empirically oriented liberalism of his youth was under assault from racial and cultural nihilists intensified after the 1967 riots that burned through Cleveland, Newark, and Detroit, where 43 died. “The summer of 1967,” Moynihan wrote at the time, “came in the aftermath of one of the most extraordinary periods of liberal legislation, liberal electoral victories and the liberal dominance of the media . . . that we have ever experienced. The period was, moreover, accompanied by the greatest economic expansion in human history. And to top it all, some of the worst violence occurred in Detroit, a city with one of the most liberal and successful administrations in the nation; a city in which the social and economic position of the Negro was generally agreed to be far and away the best in the nation.”

In the wake of the riots, a candid Moynihan, notes Hess, addressed the liberal stalwarts of Americans for Democratic Action, an organization created as an anti-Communist counterpoint to the philo-Soviet liberals of the 1940s. “The violence abroad and the violence at home” was “especially embarrassing for American liberals,” Moynihan told his ADA listeners, “because it is largely they who have been in office and presided over the onset of the war in Vietnam and the violence in American cities . . . [which] must be judged our doing.” But the liberal media and establishment didn’t see it that way, shifting the blame on to the shoulders of Richard Nixon and the blue-collar voters who supported him. Fearing that America was headed toward a crack-up, Moynihan told his fellow ADA liberals that they needed to look, at least temporarily, to an alliance with conservatives to head off the breakdown.

Inside the Nixon White House, Moynihan, says Hess, proved “to be an amazingly agile bureaucratic player,” and he charmed the president with his fount of anecdotes and insights. “Pat saw that Nixon, who had experienced extreme poverty in his youth, was open to a sweeping measure that could do away with the vast ‘service’ apparatus of the poverty industry that had been created by the Great Society,” Hess writes. “Tory men and liberal measures” could shake up Washington, Moynihan told the president. He translated that approach into the Family Assistance Plan (FAP), which would have provided a guaranteed income to families in poverty. But FAP, despite Nixon’s support, was defeated not by the predictable right-wing critics like Arthur Burns, the thoughtful but dour chair of the Council of Economic Advisors who thought it too costly, but by intemperate liberals, who insisted on even more spending.

As an aide to Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey in the 1990s, Greg Weiner knew Moynihan, and he picks up on the crosscurrents that made the senator such a fascinating figure in American Burke: The Uncommon Liberalism of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Weiner describes how Moynihan distinguished between two types of liberalism. Pluralist liberalism, with which Moynihan identified, emphasized situation and circumstance in making policy. This was the position, Moynihan wrote, “held by those, who with Edmund Burke . . . believe that in . . . the strength of . . . voluntary associations—church, family, club, trade union, commercial association—lies much of the strength of democratic society.” But Moynihan saw another kind of liberalism developing, one caught up in an “overreliance upon the state.” This statist liberalism produced the bureaucratic “chill” that “pervades many of our government agencies” and has helped produce “the awesome decline of citizen participation in our elections.” That decline has continued to the present day, producing record-low turnouts in the recent New York and Los Angeles elections.

The two liberalisms also diverged in their view of America. Moynihan’s older liberalism identified deeply with America even as it acknowledged its failings. It respected facts and evidence. But the new liberalism, the radicalism of the late sixties that captivated educated elites, was shot through with an irrational anti-Americanism. “Radical politics,” explained Michael Novak at the time, “is so much the province of the affluent . . . that it fairly reeks of class bias,” a bias against “middle America.” Moynihan feared that “a society suffused with the alienation of its elites” would be “a society that courts—if not totalitarianism, at least statism.” He saw “totalitarian seeds in the new politics of who thinks what, and who feels how.” Moynihan understood that anti-Americanism was a useful lever for liberal elites who insisted that their inclinations be propitiated lest they undermine American society from within. But after being scorched by critics of the Moynihan Report and his Nixon-era comments about the need for “benign neglect” when it came to racial policy, Senator Moynihan confined his criticism of liberalism to occasional forays, such as his memorable 1993 essay “Defining Deviancy Down,” prompted by the frightening failures of the Dinkins mayoralty in New York.

By then, Moynihan had become an outlier whose personality and intellect insulated him from the changes that had corroded ADA liberalism. The “boodlers” Moynihan had warned Nixon about were organized into the powerful public-sector unions, whose statist aims came to define political liberalism. Obsessed with race and gender, modern liberalism has no use for Burke’s “little platoons,” among which the family stands as the central institution of social stability. Nor, with its emphasis on “narrative” as opposed to empiricism, has contemporary liberalism shown much interest in facts. The protesters screaming that “black lives matter” even as police killings of African-Americans reached new lows represent an ideological fervor whose grievances can never be sated.

In 1988, a Moynihan-sponsored welfare reform bill opened the way for state-level experiments and eventually made possible the successful bipartisan welfare reform bill of 1996. But sadly, Moynihan’s most enduring impact remains his advice to Nixon against cutting back the Great Society programs. Moynihan identified with the New Deal’s support for social insurance as opposed to the Great Society’s provision of social services. The services strategy, he argued, diverted money from low-income taxpayers to middle-class social workers—a version of feeding the horses to nourish the sparrows. Yet Moynihan helped save the Great Society from Nixon’s budgetary axe. He warned Nixon: “All the Great Society activist constituencies are lying out there in wait, poised to get you if you try to come after them, the professional welfarists, the urban planners, the day carers, the social workers, the public housers. . . . Just take [the] Model Cities [program], the urban ghettos will go up in flames it you cut it out.” Ironically, Moynihan spared the forces he rightly feared as a threat to American well-being.

The farrago of interests and organizations spawned by the Great Society became, by way of public-sector unions, the organizational backbone of Obama-era redistributive liberalism. Today’s liberalism is nearly unrecognizable by Moynihan’s egalitarian standards. Liberals in New York and California are increasingly comfortable with a stratified society governed by crony-capitalist political elites. Their idea of reform is to make the lives of those in poverty more comfortable, even as they import cheap labor and reduce wages for working-class blacks.

Moynihan was baffled by what had become of liberalism. “A simple openness to alternative definitions of a problem and a willingness to concede the possibility of events taking a variety of courses. This ought to be the preeminent mode of liberalism, and yet somehow it is not,” he wrote. That “simple openness” was blocked by an architecture of indignation built not on evidence, as Moynihan understood it, but rather on what Shelby Steele calls “poetic truths,” which insist, among other things, on the persistence of racial repression. The new shape-shifting structures of micro-oppression (and microaggression) guarantee explanations for why blacks are still held back by white subjugation, even as the symbols of that oppression—such as “hands up, don’t shoot”—have to be manufactured out of whole cloth.

Steele’s new book, Shame: How America’s Past Sins Have Polarized our Country, explains why Moynihan’s fears of statist liberalism have been realized and why Moynihan has had no political or intellectual heirs. While generations of immigrants have passed African-Americans on their way up the social ladder, black leaders continue to excel at trying to leverage grievances into more entitlements. African-Americans, explains Steele, courageously won their freedom only to sell themselves into a new sort of bondage—to perpetual victimization and federal subsidies. The doors to modernity, which demand that individuals make something of themselves so as to advance in the marketplace, opened for blacks in the wake of the civil rights movement—only, explains Steele, to have blacks retreat into a group identity based on cultivating grievances.

When blacks balked as they approached the promised land of equality before the law, they engendered a new multicultural ideology to explain away America’s achievements in finally confronting its racial sins. Black nationalists, along with the new upper-middle-class white radicals, insisted on the permanence of racism, and politicians black and white used the specter of racism to expand their political influence. Anti-Americanism became “a new and legitimate source of moral authority,” Steele contends, as blacks “found a recognizable home in grievance. Here we knew ourselves and felt empowered” by supposedly ongoing oppression in America. The new liberalism tragically asked “minorities to believe that the inferiority imposed on them is their best leverage in society—thus making inferiority the wellspring of their entitlement and power even as it undermines their incentive to overcome it.”

Postmodernism and multiculturalism similarly rendered intelligent attempts to deal with social problems impossible. The stuttering uncertainty of postmodernism nevertheless supplied rituals of repentance for white liberals ever anxious to shed their “privileges,” even as they expanded their power. But postmodernism offered no map to help blacks escape the pathologies of inner-city life. Multiculturalism has given liberalism a litany of racial and gender complaints that prove impervious to evidence.

Many accounts of Moynihan’s career overemphasize the failure of FAP and his later overwrought criticism of Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare bill. They overlook the enormous influence he wielded while close to the seat of power. Moynihan’s great mistake—allowing the self-serving panoply of government programs to survive—helped displace the Burkean liberalism that he otherwise tried to preserve. Statist liberalism’s half-century of efforts and trillions in expenditures, Steele rightly observes, has produced a society fit for continued second-class citizenship.

Fred Siegel, a City Journal contributing editor, is the author of The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Undermined the Middle Class, which is being reissued in an enhanced and expanded paperback edition.
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2)
The Shadow of Munich Haunts the Iran Negotiations Neville Chamberlain by VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

April 2, 2015 12:00 AM Once again our leaders are needlessly appeasing a hostile state that shows them nothing but contempt. The Western capitulation to Adolf Hitler in the 1938 Munich Agreement is cited as classic appeasement that destroyed Czechoslovakia, backfired on France and Britain, and led to World War II. All of that is true. 

But there was much more that caused the Munich debacle than simple Western naiveté. The full tragedy of that ill-fated agreement should warn us on the eve of the Obama’s administration’s gullible agreement with Iran on nuclear proliferation. Fable one is the idea that most people saw right through the Munich folly. 

True, Europeans knew that Hitler had never once told the truth and was already murdering German citizens who were Jews, Communists, or homosexuals. But Europeans did not care all that much. EDITORIAL: Surrender to Tehran Instead, the Western world was ecstatic over the agreement. After the carnage of World War I, Europeans would do anything to avoid even a small confrontation — even if such appeasement all but ensured a far greater bloodbath than the one that began in 1914. Another myth was that Hitler’s Wehrmacht was strong and the democracies were weak. In fact, the combined French and British militaries were far larger than Hitler’s. French Char tanks and British Spitfire fighters were as good as, or superior to, their German counterparts. 

Czechoslovakia had formidable defenses and an impressive arms industry. Poland and perhaps even the Soviet Union were ready to join a coalition to stop Hitler from dissolving the Czech state. It is also untrue that the Third Reich was united. Many of Hitler’s top generals did not want war. Yet each time Hitler successfully called the Allies’ bluff — in the Rhineland or with the annexation of Austria — the credibility of his doubters sank while his own reckless risk-taking became even more popular.  Munich was hardly a compassionate agreement. In callous fashion it immediately doomed millions of Czechs and put Poland on the target list of the Third Reich. Munich was directly tied to the vanity of Neville Chamberlain. 

In the first few weeks after Munich, Chamberlain basked in adulation, posing as the humane savior of Western civilization. In contrast, loud skeptic Winston Churchill was dismissed by the media and public as an old warmonger. Hitler failed to appreciate the magnanimity and concessions of the French and British. He later called his Munich diplomatic partners “worms.” Hitler said of the obsequious Chamberlain, “I’ll kick him downstairs and jump on his stomach in front of the photographers.” The current negotiations with the Iranians in Lausanne, Switzerland, have all the hallmarks of the Munich negotiations. 

 Most Westerners accept that the Iranian government funds terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas. It has all but taken over Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. Yet the idea of stronger sanctions, blockades, or even force to stop Iranian efforts to get a bomb are considered scarier than Iran getting a bomb that it just possibly might not threaten to use. 

The U.S. and its NATO partners are far stronger than Iran in every imaginable measure of military and economic strength. The Iranian economy is struggling, its government is corrupt, and its conventional military is obsolete. Iran’s only chance of gaining strength is to show both its own population and the world at large that stronger Western powers backed down in fear of its threats and recklessness. Iran is not united. It is a mishmash nation in which over a third of the population is not Persian. 

Millions of protestors hit the streets in 2009. An Iranian journalist covering the talks defected in Switzerland — and said that U.S. officials at the talks are there mainly to speak on behalf of Iran. By reaching an agreement with Iran, John Kerry and Barack Obama hope to salvage some sort of legacy — in the vain fashion of Chamberlain — out of a heretofore failed foreign policy. 

There are more Munich parallels. 

The Iranian agreement will force rich Sunni nations to get their own bombs to ensure a nuclear Middle East standoff. A deal with Iran shows callous disagreed for our close ally Israel, which is serially threatened by Iran’s mullahs. The United States is distant from Iran. But our allies in the Middle East and Europe are within its missile range. 

Supporters of the Obama administration deride skeptics such as Democratic senator Robert Menendez and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as if they were doubting old Churchills. 

Finally, the Iranians, like Hitler, have only contempt for the administration that has treated them so fawningly. During the negotiations in Switzerland, the Iranians blew up a mock U.S. aircraft carrier. Their supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, did his usual “death to America” shtick before adoring crowds. Our dishonor in Lausanne, as with Munich, may avoid a confrontation in the present, but our shame will guarantee a war in the near future.

2a) Defeatist Obama's deal with the devil
What was needed, and what was possible, was a better deal, but the US president lacked the resolve to insist upon it
By David Horovitz

Extolling the virtues of his deal with Iran on Thursday, President Barack Obama made a false and extremely nasty assertion: "It's no secret," he claimed, incorrectly, "that the Israeli prime minister and I don't agree about whether the United States should move forward with a peaceful resolution to the Iranian issue."

It is indeed no secret that Obama and Netanyahu don't agree on how to thwart Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions. It is emphatically not the case, however, that Israel's prime minister opposes "a peaceful resolution to the Iranian issue." It is emphatically not the case, despite Obama's insinuation, that Israel's leader regards military intervention as the only means to thwart Iran.

Netanyahu has not been saying no to diplomacy. His endlessly stated contention is not that war is the only alternative to the deal so delightedly hailed by Obama as "the most effective way to ensure Iran doesn't get a nuclear weapon." Rather, in Netanyahu's insistent opinion, what is needed is simply a different, far more potent deal.

As Netanyahu made plain in anguished, infuriated tones on Wednesday, in the final hours before the Lausanne agreement was struck, what was required was not no deal at all, but rather "a better deal," one "which would significantly roll back Iran's nuclear infrastructure" and "link the eventual lifting of the restrictions on Iran's nuclear program to a change in Iran's behavior." A deal to ensure that Iran "stop its aggression in the region, stop its terrorism throughout the world, and stop its threats to annihilate Israel." That, said Netanyahu, is "the deal that the world powers must insist upon."

Instead, what the world powers agreed in principle with the world's most dangerous regime was a deal under which none of Iran's nuclear facilities will be shuttered, and in which the ostensibly unprecedented international inspections do not meet the critical "anyplace, anytime" requirement — even if, that is, this currently unfinalized framework is actually filled in and completed over the months ahead. "None of those measures include closing any of our facilities; the proud people of Iran would never accept that," Iran's super-suave Foreign Minister Mohammad Javid Zarif contentedly reported. "Our facilities will continue. We will continue enriching; we will continue research and development; our heavy water reactor will be modernized, and we will continue the Fordow facility..."

Obama's consistently compromising mindset

Much has been made in the past few days about the purported departure, in this hopelessly flawed framework agreement, from the goals that Obama had publicly set for his diplomatic outreach.

Netanyahu himself has twice alluded to remarks made by Obama as recently as 15 months ago, at the Saban Forum in Washington, DC. "They don't need to have an underground, fortified facility like Fordow in order to have a peaceful nuclear program," Obama said then, in answer to a question posed by Israel's former IDF Military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin. "They certainly don't need a heavy-water reactor at Arak in order to have a peaceful nuclear program. They don't need some of the advanced centrifuges that they currently possess in order to have a limited, peaceful nuclear program."

In fact, however, the framework announced Thursday cleaves closely to the radically compromising mindset that the president detailed in that answer he gave to Yadlin. For what Obama went on to say that day in December 2013 was that, "...the question ultimately is going to be, are they prepared to roll back some of the advancements that they've made that ... hint at a desire to have breakout capacity and go right to the edge of breakout capacity. And if we can move that significantly back, then that is, I think, a net win."

With talk of reduced stockpiles and the halting of the plutonium route, Thursday's framework does indeed contain potentially positive elements toward that goal — the rolling back of some of Iran's moves toward a breakout to the bomb.

But Obama's defeatist approach — at the Saban Forum he derided Netanyahu's demand for the dismantling of Iran's military nuclear capabilities as plain unrealistic — means that the essential components for Iran's breakout to the bomb will merely be "mothballed," as the Israeli nuclear expert Dr. Emily Landau put it to me on Friday, rather than taken apart. "It'll still have everything there," warns Landau, to break out as and when it wants to.
And already Zarif is asserting that the US position paper setting out the ostensible agreement is "spin."

Emboldening a murderous regime

Iranians were said to be celebrating in the streets late Thursday, overjoyed by news of the deal, and most especially the imminent phased lifting of the sanctions that brought the regime to the negotiating table in the first place.

The ayatollahs have every reason for celebration too. This unsigned, already disputed, inadequate deal further cements their hold on power. It leaves a ruthless, duplicitous, and patient regime with the ways and means to break out to the bomb further down the road.

And it was negotiated in a context that can only have convinced Iran of the fecklessness of its adversaries.
Even as the world powers were convened in Lausanne, Iran was strengthening its proxy hold on Yemen, still further bolstering its sway in the region.

The talks went on, quite undisturbed, despite the declaration on Tuesday by Reza Naqdi, the commander of the Basij militia of the Revolutionary Guards, that, for Iran, "erasing Israel from the map" is "nonnegotiable."
The US-led negotiators convened, evidently unfazed, just days after Iran's Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, having wound up a mass gathering in Tehran to chant "Death to America," responded: "Of course yes, Death to America."

"The proud people of Iran," crowed Foreign Minister Zarif, would never have accepted the closure of any of their nuclear facilities. But the president of the United States was not too proud to strike a deal that empowers and rewards a murderous leadership that is widening its influence across the Middle East, extending its missile range, sponsoring terrorism worldwide, vowing to eliminate Israel, and demanding "Death to America."
What was needed was not no deal at all. What was needed — and, crucially, what was possible given the economic pressure that had been mustered against Iran — was a better deal.

A better deal is still needed. Unfortunately, tragically, the president of the United States has not been sufficiently resolute to insist upon it.

2b1)


Yesterday’s announcement of a framework for a nuclear deal with Iran is being sold by the administration as a historic foreign-policy triumph for President Obama. Most of his press cheering section seems to agree. The president has told us that he has begun a process that forecloses Iran’s path to a bomb. Just as importantly, he sees it as an achievement which, like his massive federal health-care initiative, will fulfill his boasts about changing the world that were so much a part of his initial campaign for the presidency. Though the Iran framework is filled with so many caveats and loopholes that may allow Iran to easily evade its strictures and will, in any event, grant it impunity to do as it likes in ten or 15 years, this seems a flimsy foundation for a legacy. Yet the president may be right about it being integral to his legacy. The only problem is that what could follow from this turning point may not burnish his reputation as a peacemaker as much as it will solidify his place in history as an appeaser that empowered a violent, hate-driven regime.
It is possible that some of the president’s hopes will be fulfilled. Perhaps Iran’s leaders have been telling the truth about not wanting to build a bomb, though everything they have done leads to the opposite conclusion. Perhaps they will keep their promises and not cheat on a deal that will give them ample opportunities to do so even though the history of this regime tells us that this would be the first time such a thing would happen. It is also possible that those who constantly tell us of the innate moderation of the Iranian people will be right and the opening up of the Iranian economy to the world will set in motion fundamental changes in their society that will transform its government and cause it to cease its campaign to undermine the stability of Arab governments in the region, stop supporting terrorism, and give up its dream of obliterating Israel.
If all those things happen, then President Obama has been right and his critics, including the majority of both houses of Congress and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, will have been wrong. But everything we know about the nature of the regime that he has pursued so relentlessly informs us that this is unlikely to be the case.
Indeed, the course of the negotiations into which the president has invested so much time and political capital shows that Tehran is prepared to ferociously defend not only its nuclear options but also its ideology. Even as the president was instructing his negotiators to give way on almost every key point during the negotiations—including the location of Iran’s stockpile of nuclear fuel, the retention of thousands of centrifuges, the reimposition of sanctions, and its unwillingness to tell the truth about the extent of its military research program—the Islamist regime was expanding its reach throughout the Middle East as its auxiliaries and allies strengthened their hold on Syria, Iraq, and now Yemen. Nor did it trouble to lower its voice about threatening Israel with destruction (a point which one of its top military leaders said was “not negotiable” just days before the happy announcement in Lausanne). Prime Minister Netanyahu’s plea that final deal signed in June includes Iran’s recognition of Israel’s right to exist is a forlorn hope that has zero chance of fulfillment. That’s not only because Iran would never do so but because the United States has not asked for such a thing any more than it has demanded that an end to Iranian support for terrorism or its building of ballistic missiles be included in the deal.
Having agreed to measures that will jumpstart an Iranian economy that might have been brought to its knees had President Obama stuck to the strategy that brought the regime to the negotiating table, the notion that it will moderate its ambitions is simply wishful thinking. Nor is there any reason to think that a government that has always treated its nuclear program as a key symbol and tool of their ability to defy the West will step back from their ambition to create a weapon.
At the same time, Arab governments whose existence is being threatened by Iranian-back subversion, and who rightly understand that they are as much in the crosshairs of Tehran as Israel, will now begin their own races to a bomb. Though President Obama clings to the notion that what he has done is to help Iran “get right with the world,” its neighbors understand that what is happening is the strengthening of a dangerous revolutionary power whose goals have nothing to do with peace.
President Obama may get his deal in June and he may even be able to pick off enough Democratic senators whose party loyalty exceeds their devotion to principles to prevent the passage of the Corker-Menendez bill that would force any such agreement to be subject, as it should under the Constitution, to a vote by Congress. He may well exit the White House claiming that his diplomacy has prevented Iran from getting a bomb, making him a great success in his own eyes and in those of his many fans in the press and the country.
But if we strip away the gloss of false optimism and subject the deal to cold, hard logic, the best-case scenario for this effort is that it will put off an Iranian bomb by a decade, though it will become a threshold nuclear power almost immediately. In the meantime, a dangerous Islamist regime will be strengthened, American allies weakened, and the stage will be set for a series of proxy wars across the Middle East as well as a surge in Iranian-backed terrorism. A more pessimistic assessment would see Iran cheat its way to a bomb much sooner with an emboldened Tehran using its enhanced diplomatic, economic, and political power to transform the Shia-Sunni split from a regional source of tension to a new age of religious wars in the region with untold consequences and casualties. Either way, U.S. influence will suffer a blow with equally uncertain costs.
President Obama should enjoy the adulation he is receiving today. He is a young man who will hopefully enjoy a long post-presidency that will enable him to witness what his attempt to forge a legacy will mean for the world. But that is a dangerous position for any appeaser to be in. If, contrary to his hubristic assumptions, Iran is not transformed into a peaceful partner of the U.S., he will have an equally long time to account for his folly and to face the awful truth about the destruction caused by his feckless pursuit of détente with Iran.

2b2)


When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu  turned up on the Sunday morning talk shows yesterday as the principle voice speaking out against the Iran nuclear deal, there’s little doubt that many people in the White House breathed a sigh of relief. Having sent President Obama out  to talk to friendly outlets like the New York Times to defend an agreement that has yet to be put onto paper and which the Iranian regime is characterizing in a wholly different manner from that of the administration, they understand that the more the public understands about the details, the less they are going to like it. Advocacy for a pact about which the best that can be said is that it is better than a false choice of war is not easy. Nor is attempting to claim that the president alone ought to be able to decide about this rather than allowing Congress to exercise its constitutional responsibility to an up or down vote on foreign treaties. Yet the president is probably entirely comfortable if this argument is reduced to another Barack versus Bibi debate such as the one about the latter’s address to Congress last month. But though Netanyahu is being set up for another beating in the press, he has little choice but to continue to speak out.
The arguments about whether Netanyahu erred in accepting House Speaker John Boehner’s invitation to speak to Congress earlier this year are moot. In doing so, he allowed the White House to divert the discussion from one about their indefensible appeasement of Iran to whether the prime minister and his GOP hosts had violated protocol or were “insulting” the president. That didn’t help those attempting to muster a veto-proof majority for more sanctions on Iran as well as the Corker-Menendez bill requiring the pact to be ratified by Congress before going into effect. But in the long run the arguments about the speech were meaningless. Netanyahu gave a great speech but nothing he said could have possibly altered the course of the negotiations in Switzerland. Nor did it galvanize Congress into immediate action.
Now that Iran has finally deigned to accept an agreement that allows it to become a threshold nuclear power and gives it a legal path to a bomb if it passes the time until the deal ends or to cheat its way to one if it doesn’t want to wait, Netanyahu has been put in an unenviable position. If he speaks up now, it allows the president to claim that the Israelis are allying themselves with his Republican opponents and gives him more ammunition with which he can try to persuade wavering Democrats to abandon the bipartisan consensus behind Corker-Menendez. If he remains silent, he abandons the field to Obama and his apologists at a time when Israel’s security—and that of its erstwhile antagonists among the moderate Arab nations in the region—is being imperiled.
It is unfortunate that the attitude among many Democrats, including many who claim to be friends of Israel, is such that they no longer hesitate to attack Netanyahu or dismiss his strong arguments about the nuclear deal with impunity. One such was California Senator Dianne Feinstein  who more or less told Netanyahu to shut up and stop annoying his betters in an interview on CNN yesterday. Part of the fault for this is Netanyahu’s pre-election statements about the two-state solution and Arab voters that offended many Americans as well as the backwash from the speech controversy. But the bottom line here is that all of these anti-Netanyahu talking points have been ginned up primarily by an Obama administration that wants to silence the most prominent and articulate critic of its feckless quest for détente with Iran.
But whether or not Democrats and other liberals are putting their fingers in their ears and chanting “la, la, la” every time he speaks up about the obvious weaknesses to the Iran deal, Netanyahu can’t back down now.
Some criticized his speech to Congress as a mere appeal to history rather than a pragmatic effort to influence U.S. policy. There was some truth to that point but it is not one that is to Netanyahu’s discredit. Given the presence in the White House of a president who has been obsessed with ending 35 years of enmity between the U.S. and Iran, there was never anything that Netanyahu or any Israeli leader could ever do to stop Obama from getting his deal if he made as many concessions to the Islamist regime as he did. All Netanyahu can do at this point is make clear the danger that the president is creating for Israel, moderate Arabs, and the West.
Moreover, despite the dismissals of his plea for Western patience and courage to broker a better deal with Iran, Netanyahu does have a coherent alternative to Obama’s path. The U.S. could have, and still could if it had a president who wasn’t besotted with Iran détente, use all the economic and political weapons at its disposal to bring Tehran’s economy to its knees. It could insist that any deal be dependent on an end to Iranian support for international terrorism as well as force it to give up far more of its nuclear infrastructure and its fuel stockpile. It won’t because Obama didn’t have the guts to stick to his position when push came to shove.
Israel has no good options to deal with the threat from Iran. It cannot—and won’t—bomb Iran while it is negotiating with the United States. Nor can it shame the West into better behavior. But Netanyahu can speak. In spite of the opprobrium that has been hurled against him, he remains a strong voice respected by most of the American public.  The list of improvements in this very bad agreement put forward by the Israelis are informative and will be useful to Congress and members of the American general public. Netanyahu must, if possible, avoid making himself the center of the argument. But he cannot be silent. Though the chances of success in this effort may not be good, he has no choice but to continue to speak lest history judge him and anyone else who punts on the issue as being complicit in one of the most disgraceful examples of appeasement in modern history.

2c) Obama’s Iran deal falls far short of his own goals
By Editorial Board 


THE “KEY parameters” for an agreement on Iran’s nuclear program released Thursday fall well short of the goals originally set by the Obama administration. None of Iran’s nuclear facilities — including the Fordow center buried under a mountain — will be closed. Not one of the country’s 19,000 centrifuges will be dismantled. Tehran’s existing stockpile of enriched uranium will be “reduced” but not necessarily shipped out of the country. In effect, Iran’s nuclear infrastructure will remain intact, though some of it will be mothballed for 10 years. When the accord lapses, the Islamic republic will instantly become a threshold nuclear state.

That’s a long way from the standard set by President Obama in 2012 when he declared that “the deal we’ll accept” with Iran “is that they end their nuclear program” and “abide by the U.N. resolutions that have been in place.” Those resolutions call for Iran to suspend the enrichment of uranium. Instead, under the agreement announced Thursday, enrichment will continue with 5,000 centrifuges for a decade, and all restraints on it will end in 15 years.

Mr. Obama argued forcefully — and sometimes combatively — Thursday that the United States and its partners had obtained “a good deal” and that it was preferable to the alternatives, which he described as a nearly inevitable slide toward war. He also said he welcomed a “robust debate.” We hope that, as that debate goes forward, the president and his aides will respond substantively to legitimate questions, rather than claim, as Mr. Obama did, that the “inevitable critics” who “sound off” prefer “the risk of another war in the Middle East.”
The proposed accord will provide Iran a huge economic boost that will allow it to wage more aggressively the wars it is already fighting or sponsoring across the region. Whether that concession is worthwhile will depend in part on details that have yet to be agreed upon, or at least publicly explained. For example, the guidance released by the White House is vague in saying that U.S. and European Union sanctions “will be suspended after” international inspectors have “verified that Iran has taken all of its key nuclear related steps.” Exactly what steps would Iran have to complete, and what would the verification consist of?

The agreement is based on a theoretical benchmark: that Iran would need at least a year to produce fissile material sufficient for a weapon, compared with two months or less now. It remains to be seen whether the limits on enrichment and Iran’s stockpile will be judged by independent experts as sufficient to meet that standard.
Both Mr. Obama and Secretary of State John F. Kerry emphasized that many details need to be worked out in talks with Iran between now and the end of June. During that time, the administration will have much other work to do: It must convince Mideast allies that Iran is not being empowered to become the region’s hegemon, and it must accommodate Congress’s legitimate prerogative to review the accord. We hope Mr. Obama will make as much effort to engage in good faith with skeptical allies and domestic critics as he has with the Iranian regime. 


2d) Obama and the ‘Inevitable Critics’

We are dealing with a case of Mutually Assured Obfuscation.

By 
‘So when you hear the inevitable critics of the deal sound off, ask them a simple question: Do you really think that this verifiable deal, if fully implemented, backed by the world’s major powers, is a worse option than the risk of another war in the Middle East?”
That was Barack Obama on Thursday, defending his Iran diplomacy while treating its opponents to the kind of glib contempt that is the mark of the progressive mind. Since I’m one of those inevitable critics, let me answer his question.
Yes, it’s worse. Much worse.
Yes, because what the president calls “this verifiable deal” fails the first test of verification—mutual agreement and clarity as to what, exactly, is in it.
Take sanctions. Iran insists all sanctions—economic as well as nuclear—will be “immediately revoked” and that “the P5+1 member countries are committed to restraining from imposing new nuclear-related sanctions.” But the Obama administration claims Iran will only get relief “if it verifiably abides by its commitments.” The administration adds that “the architecture of U.S. nuclear-related sanctions on Iran will be retained for much of the duration of the deal.”
So who is lying? Or are we dealing with a case of Mutually Assured Obfuscation?
Yes, too, because the deal fails the second test of verification: It can’t be verified.
Here again there are significant discrepancies between the U.S. and the Iranian versions of the deal. The administration claims “Iran has agreed to implement the Additional Protocol,” a reference to an addendum to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that permits intrusive inspections. But Tehran merely promises to implement the protocol “on a voluntary and temporary basis,” pending eventual ratification by its parliament,inshallah.
We’ve seen this movie before. Iran agreed to implement the Additional Protocol in 2003, only to renounce it in early 2006, after stonewalling weapons inspectors.
But even the Protocol is inadequate, since it doesn’t permit no-notice, “anytime, anywhere” inspections. “A verifiable agreement would require unfettered access to all key facilities, personnel, documentation, and other information being sought,” notes Olli Heinonen, a former top nuclear inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency. The Protocol, he adds, “does not fully oblige this.”
Yes, as well, because Mr. Obama’s caveat, “if fully implemented,” is catnip to the rulers of Iran. What happens if Iran complies with every aspect of the accord, save one—for instance, if it starts fielding more advanced centrifuges?
“The Iranian regime cheats incrementally, not egregiously, even though the sum total of its incremental cheating is egregious,” says Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Does anyone think Mr. Obama will walk away from his deal at the first instance of Iranian noncompliance? This is a president who failed to inform Congress of Russia’s suspected violations of a 1987 nuclear arms-control treaty so he could get his own treaty ratified by the Senate in 2010.
Yes, furthermore, because a deal that is “backed by the world’s major powers,” as Mr. Obama says, is also beholden to those powers.
That would include the Europeans, who will re-enter the Iranian market with the animal spirits of famished poodles. It will include the Chinese, eager to extend their new economic “silk road” through Persia. It will include Russia, which will invest even more heavily in Iran—think nuclear reactors and advanced surface-to-air missile systems—while holding Iran policy hostage to its own demands in Ukraine and elsewhere. Of all the flaws in this deal, none is so fatal as the subordination of the U.S. to the U.N. on the most consequential diplomatic agreement so far in the 21st century.

***

It is typically crass of Mr. Obama that he should try to justify his failed diplomacy with the false alternative of a hypothetical war. If John Kerry were half as canny a negotiator as Javad Zarif, we’d have a better deal in hand.
But let’s accept the president’s premise. Should the current deal hold, Iran will be able to develop all the nuclear infrastructure it wants by the time my youngest child is in college. And it will do so not over Washington’s objections, but with our blessing.
Maybe by then the Iranian regime will have changed for the better. More likely not. Their economy will have revived thanks to the end of sanctions. Their geopolitical position will be stronger thanks to the internal convulsions of some of their neighbors. And they will have a nuclear infrastructure capable of producing many bombs on short notice—too short for the U.S. to do anything about it. The same will likely be true of Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
So let me rephrase the president’s question: Is targeted military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities—with all the unforeseen consequences that might entail—a better option than a grimly foreseeable future of a nuclear Iran, threatening its neighbors, and a proliferated Middle East, threatening the world?
I know my answer. What’s yours?
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3) The Iraq War and Stubborn Myths
by Judith Miller
Wall Street Journal

 I took America to war in Iraq. It was all me.
OK, I had some help from a duplicitous vice president, Dick Cheney. Then there was George W. Bush, a gullible president who could barely locate Iraq on a map and who wanted to avenge his father and enrich his friends in the oil business. And don't forget the neoconservatives in the White House and the Pentagon who fed cherry-picked intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, to reporters like me.
None of these assertions happens to be true, though all were published and continue to have believers. This is not how wars come about, and it is surely not how the war in Iraq occurred. Nor is it what I did as a reporter for the New York Times. These false narratives deserve, at last, to be retired.
There was no shortage of mistakes about Iraq, and I made my share of them. The newsworthy claims of some of my prewar WMD stories were wrong. But so is the enduring, pernicious accusation that the Bush administration fabricated WMD intelligence to take the country to war. Before the 2003 invasion, President Bush and other senior officials cited the intelligence community's incorrect conclusions about Saddam's WMD capabilities and, on occasion, went beyond them. But relying on the mistakes of others and errors of judgment are not the same as lying.
I have never met George W. Bush. I never discussed the war with Dick Cheney until the winter of 2012, years after he had left office and I had left the Times. I wish I could have interviewed senior officials before the war about the role that WMDs played in the decision to invade Iraq. The White House's passion for secrecy and aversion to the media made that unlikely. Less senior officials were of help as sources, but they didn't make the decisions.
No senior official spoon-fed me a line about WMD. That would have been so much easier than uncovering classified information that officials can be jailed for disclosing. My sources were the same counterterrorism, arms-control and Middle East analysts on whom I had relied for my stories about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda's growing threat to America—a series published eight months before 9/11 for which the Times staff, including me, won a Pulitzer.
In 1996, those same sources helped me to write a book about the dangers of militant Islam long before suicide bombers made the topic fashionable. Their expertise informed articles and another book I co-wrote in 2003 with Times colleagues about the danger of biological terrorism, published right before the deadly anthrax letter attacks.
Another enduring misconception is that intelligence analysts were "pressured" into altering their estimates to suit the policy makers' push to war. Although a few former officials complained about such pressure, several thorough, bipartisan inquiries found no evidence of it.
The 2005 commission led by former Democratic Sen. Charles Robb and conservative Republican Judge Laurence Silberman called the estimates "dead wrong," blaming what it called a "major" failure on the intelligence community's "inability to collect good information…serious errors in analyzing what information it could gather, and a failure to make clear just how much of its analysis was based on assumptions." A year earlier, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence denounced such failures as the product of "group think," rooted in a fear of underestimating grave threats to national security in the wake of 9/11.
A two-year study by Charles Duelfer, the former deputy chief of the U.N. inspectors who led America's hunt for WMD in Iraq, concluded that Saddam Hussein was playing a double game, trying (on the one hand) to get sanctions lifted and inspectors out of Iraq and (on the other) to persuade Iran and other foes that he had retained WMD. Not even the Iraqi dictator himself knew for sure what his stockpiles contained, Mr. Duelfer argued. Often forgotten is Mr. Duelfer's well-documented warning that Saddam intended to restore his WMD programs once sanctions were lifted.
Will Tobey, a former deputy administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (which oversees America's nuclear arsenal), still fumes about the failure to see problems in the CIA's intelligence supporting Secretary of State Colin Powell's now largely discredited prewar speech at the U.N. about Iraq's WMD. Based partly on the CIA's assurances of strong evidence for each claim, Mr. Tobey told me, Mr. Powell was persuaded that the case against Saddam was "rock solid."
Mr. Powell declined my requests for an interview, but in his 2012 book on leadership, he acknowledges having been annoyed years later when former CIA officials bemoaned his speech's "unsupported claims." "Where were they," he wrote, "when the NIE [National Intelligence Estimate] was being prepared months earlier?"
The CIA repeatedly assured President Bush that Saddam Hussein still had WMD. Foreign intelligence agencies, even those whose nations opposed war, shared this view. And so did Congress. Over the previous 15 years, noted Stuart Cohen, the former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, none of the congressional committees routinely briefed on Iraqi WMD assessments expressed concern about bias or error.
Though few legislators apparently read the classified version of the 2002 WMD estimate—which contained more caveats than the sanitized "key findings" disclosed in October of that year—almost none disputed the analysts' conclusion, with "high confidence," that Saddam retained both chemical and germ weapons, or their view, with "moderate confidence," that Iraq did not yet have nuclear weapons. Speeches denouncing Saddam's cheating were given not just by Republican hawks but by prewar GOP skeptic Sen. Chuck Hagel and by senior Democrats Al Gore, Hillary Clinton and Jay Rockefeller, among others.
Another widespread fallacy is that such neoconservatives as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz strong-armed an inexperienced president into taking the country to war. President Bush, as he himself famously asserted, was the "decider." One could argue, however, that Hans Blix, the former chief of the international weapons inspectors, bears some responsibility. Though he personally opposed an invasion, Mr. Blix told the U.N. in January 2003 that despite America's ultimatum, Saddam was still not complying fully with his U.N. pledges. In February, he said "many proscribed weapons and items," including 1,000 tons of chemical agent, were still "not accounted for."
Years would pass before U.S. soldiers found remnants of some 5,000 inoperable chemical munitions made before the first Gulf War that Saddam claimed to have destroyed. Not until 2014 would the U.S. learn that some of Iraq's degraded sarin nerve agent was purer than Americans had expected and was sickening Iraqi and American soldiers who had stumbled upon it.
By then, however, most Americans had concluded that no such weapons existed. These were not new chemical arms, to be sure, but Saddam Hussein's refusal to account for their destruction was among the reasons the White House cited as justification for war.
Ms. Miller's new book, "The Story: A Reporter's Journey," will be published on April 7 by Simon & Schuster. She was a staff writer and editor at the New York Times from 1977 to 2005.
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4)

Putin vs. the preppies and the PhDs: Outsiders, not insiders, change the world 
By  Ralph Peters
Why do our “best and brightest” fail when faced with a man like Putin? Or with charismatic fanatics? Or Iranian negotiators? 

Why do they misread our enemies so consistently, from Hitler and Stalin to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliph?


The answer is straightforward:

  • Social insularity: Our leaders know fellow insiders around the world; our enemies know everyone else.
  • The mandarin’s distaste for physicality: We are led through blood-smeared times by those who’ve never suffered a bloody nose.
  • And last but not least, bad educations in our very best schools: Our leadership has been educated in chaste political theory, while our enemies know, firsthand, the stuff of life.

Above all, there is arrogance based upon privilege. For revolving-door leaders in the U.S. and Europe, if you didn’t go to the right prep school and elite university, you couldn’t possibly be capable of comprehending, let alone changing, the world. 

It’s the old social “Not our kind, dahhhling…” attitude transferred to government.

Dramatic, revolutionary change in geopolitics never comes from insiders. It’s the outsiders who change the world. In the 21st century, our government suffers from the sclerosis of insider thinking that constantly reinforces itself and rejects conflicting evidence. 

The result is that we are being whipped by savages.

That educational insularity is corrosive and potentially catastrophic: Our “best” universities prepare students to sustain the current system, instilling vague hopes of managing petty reforms. But dramatic, revolutionary change in geopolitics never comes from insiders. It’s the outsiders who change the world.

 In the 21st century, our government suffers from the sclerosis of insider thinking that constantly reinforces itself and rejects conflicting evidence. The result is that we are being whipped by savages.
Of course, the insiders can’t accept so abhorrent a prospect as their own fallibility. So when new blood does enter — through those same “elite” institutions — it’s channeled into the same old calcium-clogged arteries. 

And we get generals with Ivy League Ph.D.s writing military doctrine that adheres cringingly to politically correct truisms and leaves out the very factors, such as the power of religion or ethnic hatred, that prove decisive. 

Or a usually astute commentator on Eastern European affairs who dismisses Vladimir Putin as a mere chinovnik, a petty bureaucrat, since Putin was only a lieutenant colonel in the KGB when the Soviet Union collapsed and didn’t go to a Swiss prep school like John Kerry.

That analyst overlooked the fact that Hitler had been a mere lance corporal. Stalin was a failed seminarian. Lenin was a destitute syphilitic. Ho Chi Minh washed dishes in the basement of a Paris Hotel. And when the French Revolution erupted, Napoleon was a junior artillery officer.

And sophisticated Germans assumed they could use Hitler and then dismiss him, while other Europeans mocked him. Stalin’s fellow Bolsheviks underestimated him, until it was too late and their fates were sealed. The French didn’t notice Ho. And Napoleon shocked even his own lethargic family. The “man on horseback” is often the man from nowhere, and the members of the club ignore the torches in the streets until the club burns down around them.

Put another way: We are led by men and women educated to believe in the irresistible authority of their own words. When they encounter others who use words solely to deflect and defraud, or, worse, when their opposite numbers ignore words completely and revel in ferocious violence, our best and brightest go into an intellectual stall and keep repeating the same empty phrases (in increasingly tortured tones):
“Violence never solves anything.” “There’s no military solution.” “War is never the answer.” “Only a negotiated solution can resolve this crisis.” “It isn’t about religion.”

Or the latest and lamest: “We need to have strategic patience,” and “Terrorists need jobs.”

Every one of those statements is, demonstrably, nonsense most — or all — of the time. But the end result of very expensive educations is a Manchurian Candidate effect that kicks in whenever the core convictions of the old regime are questioned. 

So we find ourselves with leaders who would rather defend platitudes than defend their country.

And negotiations become the opium of the chattering classes.

Once-great universities have turned into political indoctrination centers worthy of the high Stalinist Era or the age of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Their aims may be more benign, but their unwillingness to consider alternative worldviews is every bit as rigid. 

Students in the social sciences at Harvard or Yale today are cadets being groomed to serve a soft-Socialist form of government conceived not in the streets, but in the very same classrooms. It’s a self-licking ice-cream cone. And graduates leave campus brilliantly prepared for everything except reality.

This is not an argument against education. Rather, it is an argument for education and against indoctrination, against the fantasy that the barbarian with the knife bashing in the door poses no danger to the career government official who has published a book on “the false construct of race and its deleterious impact upon climate change.”

Putin, that “petty bureaucrat,” has won every significant confrontation with the West, conquering foreign territory and humiliating presidents. 

Iran’s negotiators have outmaneuvered their Western interlocutors so spectacularly that they really don’t need Obama’s deal, having gotten most of what they needed: time and partial sanctions relief. 

And the Islamic State has confounded not only our elite’s prejudices about how the world should work, but demolished their platitudinous nonsense that “All men want peace.” In fact, some men delight in inflicting grotesque forms of violence on others.

We face a new age of barbarism. And we’re led by those whose notion of violence is a rugby game at Princeton, who won’t let their children play unattended but deny the murderous impulses haunting humanity. 

Perhaps it’s time to recognize that the lack of a prep-school background and a Brooks Brothers charge account doesn’t mean that a thug with slovenly manners can’t change the world.

Fox News Strategic Analyst Ralph Peters is a retired U.S. Army officer and former enlisted man. He is the author of prize-winning fiction and non-fiction books on the Civil War and the military. His latest is the Civil War novel, “Valley of the Shadow,” which will be published by Forge Books on May 5.
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