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Obama shifts Iran policy! (See 2 below.)
Mort Zuckerman tags Obama! (See 2a below.)
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If liberals can place the fate of our nation above their every other consideration like gay rights, abortion, restraining freedom of speech, right to protect one's person, energy expansion, contempt for our military, income disparity, minimum wage, banning Chick Fil-A and all the other extraneous issues that pale when compared with the reason why government exists there is no way they can vote for Hillarious.
The Clintons' have raped women and the nation and now they have the gall to believe they deserve the right to re-enter the Oval Office which ole Bill besmirched because they think Hillarious is entitled and because she is a woman.
God help America if voters are dumb enough to go from Obama to Grandma Hillary. It would signify to me they have learned nothing and proves Professor Gruber was right - Americans are truly beyond stupid. (See 3 and 3a below.)
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My friend, John Fund, says goodbye and good riddance to Eric Holder and expresses my own thoughts. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)-- DEFENSIBLE BORDERS REMAIN VITAL FOR ISRAEL
Israel's long-standing diplomatic goal of obtaining defensible borders in any future peace settlement has become even more compelling in recent years. Historically, since the 1967 Six-Day War, Israeli governments have insisted that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) would not withdraw to the pre-war lines with the West Bank, from which Israel was attacked. In any case, these were formally only armistice lines from 1949, designating where the armies stopped in Israel's War of Independence, so that any new international political boundary, it was felt, still needed to be negotiated.
Moreover, according to the carefully drafted language of UN Security Council Resolution 242, which was adopted five months after the Six-Day War, Israel was not expected to fully pull out from all the territories it captured. Basing themselves on Israel's legal rights, the architects of Israeli national security doctrine, from Yigal Allon and Moshe Dayan to Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon, insisted that Israel needed defensible borders in the West Bank to protect itself against the plethora of threats it faced in the Middle East.
Pulling back to the 1967 lines would strip Israel of the territorial defenses that have provided for its security for nearly fifty years. It would be only nine miles wide at one point and without its formidable eastern barrier in the Jordan Valley, which to this day is viewed by Israel's security establishment as the front line for its defense in the east.
This traditional Israeli position has acquired new salience against the background of three important recent developments:
Israel's 2005 disengagement from the Gaza Strip that resulted in an enormous military buildup on the part of Hamas and other Islamist groups that benefited from the ability to fully exploit the Sinai-Gaza boundary area through which they smuggled far larger quantities of rockets and other weaponry.
What was initially called the Arab Spring–later labeled the Islamist Winter–erased much of the certainty that once existed about the stability of surrounding Arab regimes. The Arab-Israeli peace process had been predicated upon Israel assuming risks by its withdrawal from territories it captured in the 1967 Six-Day War, while being able to rely on neighboring regimes to assume responsibility for security in any area that Israel vacated.
The U.S. and its European allies have increasingly made known their view that another effort to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be attempted, in which the territorial dimension be addressed up front. This has placed pressure on Israel to accept the notion of a withdrawal based on the 1967 lines.
The Impact of Gaza Disengagement
Israel's decision to unilaterally withdraw from the Gaza Strip in September 2005 resulted in far-reaching military developments that have come to serve as a warning of what could happen in the West Bank if appropriate security arrangements and defensible borders are not in place.
Israeli planners might have expected that the rate of Palestinian rocket fire from the Gaza Strip would diminish after Israel's withdrawal. After all, by pulling out its civilian settlement presence as well as its army positions, Israel was removing one of the principal grievances raised by Palestinian spokesmen.
There had been a steady escalation of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israeli targets since 2001, when four short-range Kassam rockets were fired on Israel. This number increased to 179 attacks in 2005–the year of the disengagement. But in 2006, in the aftermath of Israel's withdrawal, the number of rocket attacks did not go down, but actually went up dramatically: there were 946 rockets launched at Israel, amounting to a more than 500 percent increase in the rate of rocket fire.
Another dimension of the post-Gaza withdrawal environment was the qualitative improvement of Palestinian rockets, especially with respect to range. Prior to 2005, Palestinian organizations were using the domestically-produced Kassam rocket that had a range of only seven kilometers. But in the aftermath of the Israeli withdrawal, the Palestinians began attacking a much wider belt around Gaza, striking the city of Ashkelon for the first time on March 28, 2006. During November 14-21, 2012, Palestinians fired 1,506 rockets at Israel, nearly reaching Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Newly imported rockets were entering the arsenals of Hamas and other organizations, including the 120 mm Grad rocket, supplied by Iran, with a range of 20-40 kilometers. Eventually, the Iranians exported the Fajr-5 rocket (range 75 kilometers) to Hamas. Russian armor-piercing missiles like the “Konkurs” also entered the Hamas arsenal. In 2011, Hamas fired a Russian-manufactured “Kornet,” an advanced laser-guided, anti-tank missile, at a yellow Israeli school bus in southern Israel, killing a 16-year-old boy.
Finally, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles like the SA-7 “Strella” appeared, which had to be taken into account by Israeli pilots flying within Israeli airspace adjacent to Gaza. A new wave of shoulder-fired missiles came into Gaza through the smuggling tunnels in 2011 from Libya, after the overthrow of Muammar Kaddafi. In the meantime, Hamas operatives also exited the Gaza Strip though the tunnel system, reaching Egypt and then flying to Syria and on to Iran for advanced military training.
The key to understanding these developments in the weaponry deployed by Hamas and other organizations is to look at what happened on the outer perimeter of the Gaza Strip along its border with Egyptian Sinai. The original 1994 Gaza-Jericho Agreement between Israel and the PLO was the first implementation agreement under the Oslo Accords, creating a very narrow strip along the border area that continued to be under Israeli military control. It was formally designated on the maps as the “Military Installation Area,” but was code-named by the IDF as the “Philadelphi Route.”
When Palestinian organizations began to dig smuggling tunnels underneath the Philadelphi Route, the IDF waged a difficult counter-insurgency campaign to identify the location of the tunnels and eliminate them. After the Gaza disengagement in 2005, Israel was no longer able to send in forces to try to close down the tunnels, so their numbers mushroomed. Hundreds of smuggling tunnels were opened and the amount of weaponry reaching Gaza increased accordingly. Without close Israeli control, Hamas developed a domestic production capability for longer-range rockets as well.
As a result, Israel was forced to conduct repeated military campaigns Operation Cast Lead (December 27, 2008-January 18, 2009), Operation Pillar of Defense (November 14-21, 2012), and Operation Protective Edge (July 8-August 26, 2014) to suppress Hamas rocket fire.
In contrast, when Israel conducted Operation Defensive Shield (March 29-May 3, 2002) in the West Bank to halt a wave of suicide bombing attacks on its cities, it was able to seal off the territory from any external reinforcement, leading to a far more decisive result than in the case of Gaza. Shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles may have entered the Gaza Strip, but no such weaponry reached the West Bank, where the strategic consequences of their arrival would be enormous, given the proximity of Ben-Gurion International Airport to the pre-1967 line.
Jordan has acted to prevent smuggling into Israel or the West Bank from its territory, but it, too, faces a growing challenge, which it has openly admitted. In December 2013, the commander of the Jordanian Border Guard, Brig.-Gen. Hussein Zayoud, disclosed that smuggling over the Syrian-Jordanian border had more than tripled during 2013. At some point, when the situation within Syria stabilizes, this smuggling industry could be re-directed westward and involve itself in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Thus, Israeli concerns with the Egyptian scenario replicating itself along the Jordan-West Bank border are no exaggeration.
The lesson for Israel in planning West Bank security was clear. The equivalent of the Philadelphi Route in the West Bank is the Jordan Valley. Beyond the utility of the Jordan Valley as a strategic barrier in the event that Israel is drawn into conventional warfare, the area has acquired new importance in Israel's public debate, since no one wants to replicate the errors of the Gaza disengagement on a much greater scale in the West Bank. Continuing to seal the West Bank from external reinforcement remains critical and Israel can only trust its own forces–rather than international troops–to carry out that task.
An additional lesson from Gaza disengagement had to do with how costly it would be for Israel to try to correct any errors from a poorly executed withdrawal. In 1993, presenting the Oslo Accords to his Labor Party faction in the Knesset, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin remarked that if it all goes wrong, “there is always the IDF.” An underlying assumption from the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 was that, having pulled out, Israel would have far more international legitimacy if it was required to use force in the future. Undoubtedly, a similar calculus existed with the Gaza disengagement five years later.
But when this thesis was tested, it turned out to be terribly wrong. Even though Israeli civilian population centers had been repeatedly struck by escalating Hamas rocket attacks, the moment Israel forces re-invaded large parts of the Gaza Strip during Operation Cast Lead, it faced severe international condemnation, including a well-publicized investigation of its military actions by the UN Human Right Council, which came to be known as the Goldstone Report.
As a result, while Israel possesses the military power to re-invade territory from which it has withdrawn, the political price makes reliance on this option largely prohibitive. What makes more sense is to make sure Israel has defensible borders, through which it can prevent any territory it evacuates from turning into a base for attacking the people of Israel.
The Arab Spring and the Fragmentation of the Arab State System
One underlying assumption of the Arab-Israeli peace process since 1967 has been that if Israel withdraws from territory captured in the Six-Day War, there will be a responsible Arab government on the other side to assure the security of the vacated area. Even in the separate case of southern Lebanon, which saw IDF ground action in 1978 for the first time, UN Resolution 425, which Israel came to support, specifically called for the restoration of the authority of the Lebanese government as part of any future Israeli withdrawal.
However, the Arab Spring beginning in 2011 presented new factors in the Arab world that will have to become part of Israel's future calculus if it contemplates withdrawal from any part of the West Bank. First, the central governments of many Arab states have been badly weakened, if not entirely replaced, and are in no position to exert control over large parts of their sovereign territory. In Libya, the central government in Tripoli lost control over the western part of the Libyan state, known as Cyrenaica. In Egypt, the Sinai Peninsula increasingly appeared to be beyond the control of the government in Cairo. By 2013, large parts of Syria were no longer governed by Damascus. Notably, Jordan remained an island of stability amidst regional turmoil. Perhaps its internal situation has been strengthened by what is transpiring around it; after all, who in Jordan would want to import the bloodbath of Syria or Egypt into the kingdom?
There were those who greeted the disintegration of Arab states as a security windfall for Israel. True, with the collapse of the Arab states, it would become extremely difficult for them to maintain the kinds of large force structures that were so prevalent for much of the Cold War. Israel originally conceived of defensible borders as a strategy that would allow its relatively small standing army to withstand and contain quantitatively superior Arab armies until the IDF completed its reserve mobilization and reached full strength. That scenario appears less relevant in a Middle East enmeshed in internal revolts, leading some to suggest that Israel was facing a more benign strategic environment.
That conclusion is mistaken.
Long-term planning cannot be based on a snapshot of reality in a given year, but has to take into account different possible ways the military balance in the Middle East can evolve over time.
Israel will be operating in the years ahead with a large degree of uncertainty. As a result, long-term planning has to take into account different ways the military balance in the Middle East can evolve over time. Unquestionably, some Arab states will inevitably rearm after they become more stable. Iraq has already begun the long road to rebuilding its ground forces with the acquisition of U.S. M1A1 Abrams tanks, as well as older Soviet military hardware like the T-72 main battle tank with which the Iraqis are more familiar. Armor remains a significant component of military power for many Middle Eastern states.
In the near term, the conventional military threat is being superseded by a new global jihadist challenge. Across the region, the vacuum is being filled by al-Qaeda-associated and independent movements that do not recognize the international borders of the Middle East state system. In July 2013, the head of IDF military intelligence, Maj.-Gen. Aviv Kochavi, warned that in the “immediate future” the dangers to Israel were increasing. He focused on the al-Qaeda presence in Syria:
Syria is the most disturbing example, drawing thousands of global jihad activists and radical Islamists from the region and beyond. They are establishing themselves in Syria, not only to oust Assad, but to promote their vision of a Sharia state. In plain sight, on our doorstep, a global jihad stronghold of great magnitude is being established. This reality could potentially affect not only Syria and the border with Israel but Lebanon, Jordan, Sinai and the entire region as well.
The head of IDF operations, Maj.-Gen. Yoav Har-Even, noted in early 2014 that the jihadi presence in Syria was becoming more consolidated and had a broader mission:
The moment they finish dealing with Assad, we're next in line. They are not coming only to fight in Syria.. They are already in the southern Golan Heights, in the area of Dar'a, and this deeply disturbs us, the Americans and the Jordanians. It was notable that at this time, al-Qaeda was also seeking to gain a foothold in the West Bank. Clearly, the stability of all of Israel's neighbors could be put at risk if this phenomenon were to grow.
The rise of these organizations along Israel's borders is much more militarily significant than in the past. Prior to the 1990s, the terrorist threat was usually seen in Israel as tactical, while the threat of conventional armies was perceived as strategic. These distinctions no longer make sense. Terrorist organizations are proving far more militarily potent than in the past with the introduction of more advanced military technologies.
Iran Moves In
Finally, Iran has become a new and uncertain factor along Israel's eastern front, largely due to its role in Iraq, which behaves increasingly like an Iranian satellite state. Despite Washington's repeated requests that Iraq not persist in this behavior, Baghdad permitted Iranian aircraft to use its air space in order to ship reinforcements to President Bashar al-Assad's embattled regime in Damascus. The Iraqi regime also supplied Iraqi Shiite militia forces to fight alongside those of Lebanese Hezbollah in Syria against the rebel Sunni forces fighting Assad.
The weakness of the Arab state system has allowed Iran to intervene in a host of internal conflicts and exploit them, from Yemen to Bahrain, Iraq, and Syria. For over a decade, Iranian weapons deliveries bound for Lebanon or the Gaza Strip have been repeatedly thwarted by the Israeli Navy, in ships like the Karine A (January 3, 2002), the Francop (November 4, 2009), or the Klos C (March 5, 2014). Iranian smugglers, backed by the Qods Force of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, have been active in shipping weapons to aid the pro-Shiite insurgents, known as the Houthis, in Yemen as well.
In December 2013, Bahrain intercepted yet another Iranian weapons ship bringing explosives and weapons to Shiite insurgents. Unfortunately, much of the international community has become accustomed to the deployment of Iranian forces in various combat zones, including Syria. Assuming that Iran invests in upgrading its armed forces, Israel might very well witness the regular deployment of Iranian units in parts of Iraq or Syria in the future, thereby reviving, in part, Israel's eastern front.
This would allow Iran to project its military power towards Jordan, Israel's immediate neighbor to the east. Iran has made multiple efforts to build a bridgehead to the Hashemite Kingdom. Since 2012, Iran has sought to reach an agreement with Jordan allowing it to vastly expand Shiite tourism to shrines that are regarded as sacred to Iranian religious pilgrims, particularly near al-Karak in southern Jordan. Today, there is also a substantial Iraqi Shiite refugee population in Jordan. Though not known for religious extremism, this population nevertheless may be targeted by Iranian propaganda.
Finally, radical Palestinian organizations like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which have been allied with Tehran, might be used to build up centers of influence for Iran in Jordan. Israel's policy of regarding any foreign invasion of Jordan as a “red line” that would trigger its own intervention has provided a certain degree of security for Jordan in the past and has effectively deterred expansionist powers. Were Israel to concede the Jordan Valley and withdraw its forces, then its ability to play this role in regional stability would be much more constrained precisely at a time at which Iranian activism is expected to increase.
Negotiating Defensible Borders
Since 1967, the traditional view in Israel on its final boundaries has been that where Israel has vital security interests in the West Bank, it should seek sovereignty in order to safeguard them. Yigal Allon, known as one of Israel's greatest military minds, commanded the Palmach strike force of the Haganah during Israel's War of Independence when he served as a mentor to one of his senior officers, Yitzhak Rabin. During the 1967 Six-Day War, Allon was Israel's deputy prime minister and in its aftermath he proposed a plan for “territorial compromise” in the West Bank based on Israel retaining 700 square miles (out of 2,100 square miles).
This involved the largely arid eastern zone in the Jordan Valley that would not add any substantial Palestinian population to Israel. By revising the pre-war boundaries this way, Allon concluded that Israel would obtain “defensible borders.” He unveiled the Allon Plan in Foreign Affairs in 1976, in his capacity as Prime Minister Rabin's foreign minister. Allon explained that any part of the West Bank from which Israel withdrew would have to be demilitarized. The only way to guarantee demilitarization was for Israel to extend its sovereignty to the Jordan Valley.
An alternative way of implementing defensible borders is to insist that an Israeli military presence be maintained in those specific areas in which Israel has vital interests, even if they are not under formal Israeli sovereignty.
Presumably, the security arrangements model would be easier for the Palestinian side to accept in negotiations as opposed to outright Israeli annexation of the area. However, Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian leadership were vocally resistant to this model as well, stating a preference for international forces over any IDF presence. Ultimately, Israel will have to seek arrangements for the Jordan Valley that best protect its vital security interests.
Israel's Bottom Line
Regardless of the question of sovereignty, in the Jordan Valley, Israel must obtain exclusive security control over a specified area, which would allow it to operate effectively against the likely threats. Israel has always based its security in the Jordan Valley on a right of reinforcement in the event that a new threat emerges to the east. This requires that Israel hold on to deployment areas that it may need in the event that those scenarios occur. In an address to the Knesset in October 1995, just before he was assassinated, Rabin stressed that the security border of Israel should be in the Jordan Valley, “in the widest sense of that term.”
One of the main questions for Israel under the scenario of a military presence but not sovereignty, is: How long will it need this military presence in the Jordan Valley? Three years, ten years, or forty years? The answer is not a function of time but of performance: whether the Palestinian security forces can and will fulfill their commitments as outlined in any agreement. West Bank security is also a function of what happens in the surrounding states: Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. Will these states continue to be afflicted with jihadi movements seeking to join their counterparts on the West Bank? Will revived military forces in these areas remain focused elsewhere, or will they coalesce to challenge Israel?
Jordan itself is a factor in Israeli considerations. Any negotiation over the sensitive Jordan Valley requires close consultation with the Jordanian leadership. Moreover, the Sinai precedent must be uppermost in the minds of Jordanian planners. When it became clear that the outer perimeter of the Gaza Strip was completely open through the Philadelphi Route, hosts of jihadi movements relocated to Egyptian Sinai, creating a direct security threat to Egypt itself. Some of the most lethal al-Qaeda affiliates in Sinai relied on Gaza connections.
Ironically, Israeli vulnerability thus undermined the internal security of its largest Arab neighbor. That is a process that Israel cannot allow again in the Jordanian case. For that reason, Israel's continuing control of the Jordan Valley is not only important for its security, but for regional security more broadly.
Ambassador Dore Gold is President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He was the eleventh Permanent Representative of Israel to the United Nations. Previously he served as Foreign Policy Advisor to the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu.
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2)
When President Obama took to the podium in the White House rose garden on April 2, his mood was victorious. With evident pride, he announced that negotiators in Lausanne had reached a “historic understanding with Iran, which . . . will prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”
In truth, the negotiators had reached no understanding, historic or otherwise. Obama was celebrating something that did not exist—at least not yet. Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif had failed to agree on a text describing the terms of the so-called “Lausanne framework.” In its place, each issued a separate “fact sheet.” On some key issues the documents contradicted each other; on others they were entirely mute. Statements from officials did little to clarify the discrepancies or rectify the omissions. One official statement even seemed to widen the areas of disagreement.
In his own speech dedicated to the Lausanne framework, Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, flatly denied that an understanding had been reached. He also disputed specific provisions of the emerging deal as described by the Americans. For example, he dismissed Obama’s assertion that the framework would permit “intrusive” inspections. On the contrary, military sites were off-limits to inspectors, because, he explained, “one must absolutely not allow infiltration of the security and defense realm of the state on the pretext of inspections.”
If the gap between the two sides was this big, what possessed Obama to announce a historic breakthrough? The answer is that the president was eager to produce tangible proof of progress in order to prevent the Republicans in Congress from branding the negotiations a failure. He could fend off the Republican challenge, he calculated, by telling a tale of progress—by depicting the remaining disagreements as details to be ironed out rather than as insurmountable roadblocks.
Exaggerating the successes of Lausanne may have been a savvy maneuver against the president’s domestic critics, but it weakened his hand against the Iranians by telegraphing his deep personal investment in the negotiations. Failure to get a deal would now be a major embarrassment. Knowledge of this fact gave Khamenei an opening, which he exploited with his defiant speech. Not so fast, the speech signaled to Obama. In order to get the agreement that you’re already celebrating, you must pay—in the form of more concessions to me.
If past behavior is anything to go by, Obama will give Khamenei what he wants. Indeed, American concessions have propelled the negotiations forward at every stage. A good example of the established pattern is the fate of Fordow, the bunker under the mountain near Qom. At the beginning of the negotiations, Obama publicly stated that the existence of the facility was inconsistent with a peaceful nuclear program. But after Khamenei announced his refusal to dismantle Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, Obama agreed that Fordow would not close. In the latest round of negotiations, his position softened further. The bunker would not only remain open; it would also contain operational centrifuges.
Thanks to retreats like this one, it is Khamenei’s red lines, not Obama’s, that have determined the shape of the emerging deal—a fact that prompts the president’s critics to accuse him of fecklessness and/or naïveté. But these descriptions miss the mark. The president is not wedded to any set of specific demands. For him, the specific terms of the nuclear agreement are far less important than its mere existence. One of Obama’s greatest diplomatic successes is to have persuaded much of the world, including many of his critics, that the primary goal of his Iran diplomacy is to negotiate a nuclear arms-control agreement. In fact, the primary goal is détente with Iran.
In the president’s thinking, détente will restrain Iranian behavior more effectively than any formal agreement. In addition, it will also open the way to greater cooperation with Iran on regional security. Détente will permit the United States to pull back from the Middle East and focus more on its domestic priorities. Finally, it will vindicate Obama’s ethos of “engagement,” which he sees as a superior alternative to the military-driven concepts of American leadership championed by his Republican opponents. In short, détente will secure Obama’s legacy.
By contrast, Khamenei is pursuing highly specific goals. Three stand out above all others. He is seeking, first, to preserve Iran’s entire nuclear infrastructure; second, to repeal the sanctions on the Iranian economy; and third, to abolish the international legal regime that brands Iran a rogue state. In all three areas, Obama has already satisfied his core demands.
True, significant disagreements still remain. One of the thorniest is the timing of sanctions relief, another dispute that Khamenei emphasized in his defiant speech. Whereas Obama says that sanctions should be lifted in a staged manner, Khamenei is calling for abolishing them immediately. Sanctions, he demanded, “must all be completely removed on the day of the agreement.”
How will Obama bridge the gap? He has two tools at his disposal. First, he will offer Khamenei what amounts to a signing bonus. Every piece of sanctions legislation passed by Congress gives the president the discretion to waive it if he perceives a national imperative for doing so. Using this waiver authority, Obama will unlock Iranian escrow accounts in China, India, Turkey, and elsewhere—accounts that hold somewhere between $100 and $120 billion. Some significant fraction of that amount, $50 billion according to one credible report, will be handed to the Iranians the moment they sign on the dotted line.
Next, the president will seek, and certainly receive, the UN Security Council’s approval of the agreement. Its stamp of approval will free the Europeans, the Russians, and the Chinese, among others, to expand their commercial ties with Iran. And trade is not all that will grow. The deal will also generate increased Iranian-Russian military cooperation. Vladimir Putin’s recent announcement of his intention to deliver S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to Iran offered a foretaste of that cooperation.
The president’s offer of a signing bonus will be difficult for Khamenei to resist, because it will not limit his options in any way. On the contrary, it will increase them. Even if he has no true intention of honoring the terms of the agreement, it still makes sense for him to ratify it, if only to pocket the bonus and collect the other benefits that will thereupon accrue immediately. Later on, when Iran begins violating the agreement, the United States will likely try to re-impose sanctions. But it will now find the job of convincing the Security Council harder than ever before, for the simple reason that a powerful European commercial lobby will have come into being with a vested interest in doing business with Iran. Nor will there be any guaranteeing the support of the Russians and the Chinese for a resumption of sanctions. No matter what, Iran will negotiate from a position of much greater strength than currently.
Alarmed by this threat, the U.S. Congress is working on a bill that will give it the right to vote its approval or disapproval of the deal with Iran. However, a vote of disapproval can stop Obama only if it passes the House and Senate with a veto-proof majority—a very high bar to clear. So long as the president can convince just one- third of either the Senate or the House to support his diplomacy, he will be free to pursue his plan. Although there’s no guarantee the president will win the fight with Congress, the odds are strongly in his favor.
Détente may sound like a minor shift in American policy, but in truth it is nothing less than tectonic.
Obama has put an end to containment of Iran as a guiding principle of American Middle East policy. To be sure, he continues to pay lip service to the idea of countering Iran’s influence, but his actions do not match his rhetoric. In Syria and Iraq, especially, Obama has long been respectful of Iranian interests while treating Tehran as a silent partner against Islamic State (IS).
Détente requires Obama to demote all of those allies who perceive a rising Iran as their primary security threat. The process, which has been under way for many months already, is most advanced in the case of Israel. Of course, Obama has never admitted that he is demoting Israel. He and his senior officials prefer, instead, to blame the deterioration in relations on the personal failings of the Israeli prime minister. They have spared no effort to inform us of Benjamin Netanyahu’s myriad faults. His attitude toward Arab citizens of Israel, we are told, is bigoted; his failure to reinvigorate the peace process is indefensible; his readiness to serve as a pawn of the GOP is abject; and his supposed readiness to conduct espionage against the United States is treacherous.
The attacks on Netanyahu have been extraordinarily personal. Since the Israeli prime minister is the most persuasive opponent of the Iran deal, Obama is working to discredit him much as a defense attorney works to tarnish the character of the prosecution’s star witness. He is also teaching a lesson to other allies who might be tempted to speak out. And potential critics of the Iran deal are not in short supply. In private, the French, the Saudis, and most other Arabs all bemoan Obama’s policy. None of them, however, has stood up and directly attacked it in the manner of Netanyahu.
To reinforce the lesson, the president has given the Gulf Arabs a small taste of the chastisement he is holding in reserve for them. For example, in a recent interview with Thomas Friedman, Obama discussed the Gulf allies’ fears of Iran. These fears, he implied, were misplaced. In fact, Iran was not the biggest threat to their security; of greater concern is internal unrest. Young people, he explained, have no legitimate means to express their grievances, and so the top priority must be domestic political reform. In his interview, the president expressed keen interest in discussing with the Gulf states “how we can we strengthen the body politic in these countries, so that Sunni youth feel that they’ve got something other than [Islamic State] to choose from.”
Obama stopped short of accusing America’s allies of fueling the sectarianism and violence sweeping the Middle East, but the veiled threat was obvious. A week later, moreover, he made it more explicit when, in a discussion of Libya, he said the Gulf states sometimes “fan the flames of military conflict.” Whether to Israel or to the Gulf countries, Obama’s general message is the same: Iran is not the problem; you are. Get your own house in order.
While criticizing allies for their parochialism, Obama and his senior officials have a habit of praising Iran for its supposedly ecumenical spirit. “I think what the Iranians have done,” the president said in an interview last August, “is to finally realize that a maximalist position by the Shias inside of Iraq is, over the long term, going to fail. And that’s, by the way, a broader lesson for every country: you want 100 percent, and the notion that the winner really does take all, all the spoils. Sooner or later that government’s going to break down.” To hear the White House tell it, Iran could even serve as a role model for the Gulf Arabs.
Behind such statements is a new vision of the American role in the Middle East. In Obama’s eyes, the United States no longer leads a coalition dedicated to bringing order to the region. Instead, it is the convener of a grand negotiation between Shiite Iran and the Sunni powers. For over a year now, when describing the goal of his diplomacy the president has repeatedly returned to the same word: “equilibrium.” If the United States does its job correctly, he told Friedman, “what’s possible is you start seeing an equilibrium in the region, and Sunni and Shia, Saudi and Iran start saying, ‘Maybe we should lower tensions and focus on the extremists like [IS] that would burn down this entire region if they could.’”
The president believes that his détente policy—especially his willingness to compromise on the nuclear program—will convince the leaders in Tehran that the United States no longer sees their regime as an adversary. They will then work more cooperatively with Washington, especially in places like Iraq and Syria, where we supposedly share a common interest in stability and in defeating the Islamic State. At first this shift may alarm America’s traditional allies, but thanks to American mediation they will eventually drop their paranoid fears of Iran, and equilibrium will ensue.
The Saudi answer to Obama’s pursuit of equilibrium came recently when Riyadh organized a coalition of Sunni allies and intervened in Yemen. The intervention is certainly an effort, as advertised, to counter the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. But it was also meant to send a message to Obama: if you won’t organize the region to contain Iran, we will. To drive home the point, the Saudis gave Washington only an hour’s notice before commencing the operation.
Riyadh’s project of organizing the Sunnis, however, is fraught with difficulty. The three most influential powers—Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey—all agree, generally speaking, that an Iranian-dominated Middle East is undesirable. But beyond that, they have no unified vision. The three cannot even agree on a common Syria policy, let alone a strategy for the entire region. The stark fact is that there is no such thing as a Sunni bloc.
There is, however, an Iranian bloc: the self-styled “resistance alliance” that includes Syria, Hizballah, and a network of Shiite militias now operating in Iraq, Syria, and, increasingly, Yemen. The glue holding this system together is the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force. By means of subversion and extortion, and by playing on sectarian divisions, the Quds Force is expanding Iranian influence throughout the region. No Sunni state has a military branch analogous to the Quds Force.
In short, Obama’s pursuit of equilibrium is strengthening the player, Iran, with the greatest tools for projecting power and influence and with the least respect for the sovereignty of its neighbors.
Other than Iran, the only power in the region truly capable of projecting military power effectively is Israel. But its small size limits its ability to carry out a strategy regional in scope. Moreover, the realities of the Arab-Israeli conflict hinder cooperation with the Sunni powers. While the interests of Saudi Arabia and Israel now dovetail to a remarkable degree, a historical chasm continues to separate Riyadh and Jerusalem. The two sides can coordinate quietly, but the impediments to overt cooperation will likely prove insurmountable.
The disarray and atomization among the anti-Iranian states in the Middle East means that they (like the American Congress) will likely prove incapable of mounting a decisive opposition to Obama’s détente. But their inability to stop it does not mean they will ever accept it. They will remain dedicated to contesting Obama’s policy, and they will continue to fight back against Iran and its proxies in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq—not to mention new venues that will appear over time.
Détente, therefore, will deliver disequilibrium, the exact opposite of the effect intended. By negotiating an arms-control agreement, the president has shifted the tectonic plates of the Middle East order. And for tectonic plates, it takes a move of just inches to level whole cities.
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2)
The President Daydreams on Iran
Anyone who looks at the nuclear deal and sees success is living in a world of rainbows and unicorns.
I’m always chasing rainbows, watching clouds drifting by / My schemes are just like all my dreams, ending in the sky.
The vaudeville song by Harry Carroll and Joseph McCarthy, popularized by Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand, is all too appropriate to this moment, as we consider the implications of a nuclear Iran and the prospect of mushroom clouds over the Middle East.
President Obama has been chasing a rainbow in his negotiations with Iran. He has forsaken decades of pledges to the civilized world from presidents of both parties. He has misled the American people in repeatedly affirming that the U.S. would never allow revolutionary Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, which would guarantee a new arms race. In fact, one has already started. Credible reports suggest Pakistan is ready to ship an atomic package to Saudi Arabia, the Sunni nation that stands opposed to Shiite Iran’s subversion throughout the region.
But Tehran is working across religious lines as well. Though Hamas is Sunni, Iran has sent millions of dollars to the terror group that controls Gaza to rebuild the tunnel network that the Israeli Defense Force destroyed last summer.
How far Mr. Obama is prepared to chase the negotiation dream is illustrated by the recent candor of his energy secretary, Ernest Moniz, a nuclear physicist who has been party to the negotiations. In 2013 the president answered questions about Iran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons with these words: “Our assessment continues to be a year or more away, and in fact, actually our estimate is probably more conservative than the estimates of Israeli intelligence services.”
Yet on Monday Mr. Moniz told reporters at Bloomberg a different story: “They are right now spinning. I mean enriching with 9,400 centrifuges out of their roughly 19,000,” he said. “It’s very little time to go forward. That’s two to three months.” How long has the administration held this view? “Oh, quite some time,” Mr. Moniz replied. The Bloomberg report suggests “several years.”
This stunningly casual remark was based on information apparently declassified on April 1. What is Mr. Obama up to? Why was he reassuring in 2013 when he knew it was misleading? Is the declassification intended to create a false sense of urgency?
Compare where we are today with the conditions Mr. Obama laid down two years ago. Referring to Iran’s smiling new president, Hasan Rouhani, Mr. Obama said: “If in fact he is able to present a credible plan that says Iran is pursuing peaceful nuclear energy but we’re not pursuing nuclear weapons, and we are willing to be part of an internationally verified structure so that all other countries in the world know they are not pursuing nuclear weapons, then, in fact, they can improve relations, improve their economy. And we should test that.”
Sure—let’s test it:
• Enrichment: Before the talks began, the Obama administration and U.N. Security Council insisted that Iran stop all uranium enrichment. So did the 2013 framework agreement. Now the deal enshrines Iran’s right to enrich.
• Stockpile: In February, Iran had 10,000 kilograms of enriched uranium, which the deal says will be reduced to 300 kilograms. The remainder is to be exported to Russia and returned to Iran as fuel rods for use in a power plant. But Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told state media at the end of March that “there is no question of sending the stocks abroad.”
• Centrifuges: Iran has about 19,000 centrifuges, and the U.S. initially called for cutting that to between 500 and 1,500. The agreement now allows 6,104. Not only that, Iran’s foreign minister has said that advanced IR-8 centrifuges, which enrich uranium 20 times faster than the current IR-1 models, will be put into operation as soon as the nuclear deal takes effect—contrary to what the U.S. has asserted.
• Infrastructure: The closure of nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz and Arak has been an American goal for a decade. Under the deal, the 40-megawatt heavy-water nuclear plant at Arak, which produces plutonium, will remain, albeit with reduced plutonium production. The deal allows the Fordow facility, which is buried in a mountain fortress designed to withstand aerial attack, to be converted into a “peaceful research” center. Iran will be allowed to keep 1,000 centrifuges there. Natanz will remain open as well.
• Missiles: Iran stonewalled on concerns about the military dimensions of its nuclear program. U.S. negotiators dropped demands that Tehran restrict development of intercontinental ballistic missiles that could be used to deliver warheads.
• Duration: Initially the U.S. wanted the deal to last 20 years. Now the key terms sunset in 10 to 15 years. Rather than enabling American disengagement from the Middle East, the framework is likely to necessitate deepening involvement under complex new terms, as former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz wrote in this newspaper earlier this month.
• Enforcement: President Obama promises: “If Iran cheats, the world will know it. If we see something suspicious, we will inspect it.” This is incredibly unrealistic. Over the past year alone, Iran has violated its international agreements at least three times. In November the International Atomic Energy Agency caught Iran operating a new advanced IR-5 centrifuge. Disagreement about inspections under the deal persists. Secretary Moniz has said that inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency must be allowed access to any place at any time. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his military say no way.
• Sanctions: The deal gives Iran exactly what it wanted: permanent relief from economic sanctions in exchange for temporary restraints. Mr. Obama talks about being able to “snap back” sanctions. But consider the attitudes of two of the big players in the six-power talks. China’s press refers to “peaceful” Iran as if it were Switzerland. Russia says the deal has freed it to sell S-300 air-defense missiles to Tehran. Assuming that the West discovers a nuclear violation, it will be nearly impossible to reimpose today’s sanctions.
• Good behavior: Meanwhile, Ayatollah Khamenei continues to denounce the U.S. as the Great Satan, making clear that Iran doesn’t expect to normalize relations. His speeches indicate that Iran still sees itself in a holy war with the West.
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So here we are at the end of the rainbow, seemingly willing to concede nuclear capacity to Iran, a country we consider a principal threat. No wonder Saudi Arabia and Egypt are insisting on developing equivalent nuclear capabilities. America’s traditional allies have concluded that the U.S. has traded temporary cooperation from Iran for acquiescence to its ultimate hegemony.
The sanctions that brought Iran to the negotiating table took years to put in place. They have impaired Iran’s ability to conduct trade in the global market. The banking freeze in particular has had a crippling effect, since international businesses will not risk being blacklisted by the U.S. and European Union to make a few dollars in Iran. Many of those who have studied the problem believe that if the sanctions were to remain, they would squeeze Tehran and force greater concessions.
President Obama seems to be willfully ignoring Iran’s belligerent behavior and its growing influence over Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad and Yemen’s capital, San’a. Free of sanctions, Iran may become even more assertive.
There are no rainbows ahead, only menacing clouds.
Mr. Zuckerman is chairman and editor in chief of U.S. News & World Report.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------3) Gay Marriage: A Trojan Horse Movement
The Left doesn’t care about gay rights, any more than they care about civil rights, welfare rights, minority rights, animal rights or any other “rights.” According to the Left, “the issue is never the issue; the issue is always the revolution.” The various “rights” the Left has aggressively promoted over the years are merely vehicles to advance the Left’s power.
Consider: the welfare “rights” movement, founded by the notorious socialists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, was not established to guarantee welfare to the poor. As they said, their purpose was to pack the welfare rolls with so many beneficiaries that the government would collapse of its own weight. In the ensuing riots, they hoped policy makers would be driven to accept their socialist solution. In short, they sought anarchy, using a militant poor as their foot soldiers. They couldn’t care less what happened to the poor in prosecuting this agenda, and they said so. Doubt me? Just look at the status of the poor today. There are more people on welfare than at any time in history. And the crime and degeneracy that accompany it are epidemic.
Look at our country today. With manufactured crisis Strategist-in-Chief Obama, we are almost there, and Cloward and Piven’s intellectual descendants were out in force in Ferguson. The communist agitators seeking “social justice” for Michael Brown burned down much of the neighborhood. Do black lives matter to them? Apparently not. And they have even said so. The issue is not the issue.
Occupy Wall Street’s black anarchist organizer Nelini Stamp’s new group, Dream Defenders, popularized the slogan “Hands Up Don’t Shoot!” But prior to Ferguson there was Trayvon Martin. Working with Eric Holder’s DOJ, Stamp’s group was responsible for getting Sanford, Florida police chief Bill Lee fired. This despite the fact the FBI agreed with Lee’s assessment that there was no case against Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman. Did Stamp care about “Justice for Trayvon?” Not according to Stamp. “We are actually trying to change the capitalist system we have today, because it’s not working for any of us,” she said.
The Left uses “rights” agendas to wrap itself in the mantle of righteousness and seize the moral high ground, tactically putting us on the defense in the process. But they couldn’t care less about the actual issue except in its ability to facilitate their path to power.
The agenda is never the agenda for the Left. And this is especially true for gay marriage. Homosexual marriage is a Trojan horse tactic. The true agenda is to establish the primacy of homosexual rights over the First Amendment’s guarantee of the free exercise of religion. Our nation was founded on this principle, and the gay marriage movement seeks to destroy it.
Consider that Annise Parker, the lesbian mayor of Houston, Texas, demanded to review pastors’ church sermons before public outrage forced her to back off. We have already seen how small businesses have been singled out and attacked for refusing to provide certain services to gays.
What is less known is that these gay couples are frequently part of the movement. They deliberately seek out businesses known for their Christian owners. They deliberately demand a service they know in advance will be refused. When the inevitable happens they use it as pretext to destroy the business and savage its owners. Doesn’t it amaze you how quickly legal groups immediately materialize to assist in the attack? The fact that they got unexpected push back through a spontaneous crowd sourcing campaign to support one pizza shop will not dissuade them from future efforts. If gay marriage is adopted, their current bullying behavior will look like child’s play compared to what’s coming.
This is a highly organized, nationwide campaign of vilification against Christians. But even Christians are not the ultimate target. If the First Amendment can be challenged this way; if a certain group’s “rights” can trump the U.S. Constitution, and if the Supreme Court can actually issue an edict making it so, then the entire Constitution has become meaningless. This is the Left’s true agenda and it always has been. This is the Cultural Marxists’ endgame. The issue is not the issue. The issue for them has always been destroying our country to impose socialism -- with them in charge, of course. In order to do that they have to strip America of its culture, its traditions, and most importantly, the most important law of the land, the U.S. Constitution.
We are almost there. Well-meaning liberals and even some conservatives who support the gay marriage agenda are unknowingly committing an act of betrayal against their own country. If the gay marriage agenda wins, those other rights guaranteed by the Constitution will immediately be at risk. Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of America will be complete. Everyone in our country, including gays, will find all our rights summarily stripped. And if the gay lobby wants to see what that looks like for them, they should turn to Cuba, Russia or North Korea for their inspiration. It will not go well for them. The Left does not care about your rights. They care about one thing and one thing only: their power.
I recently gave a presentation on cultural Marxism at the National Press Club. You can watch it on YouTube, here. It’s about 35 minutes long. It was part of the latest Cliff Kincaid press conference. I have attended and reported on many of them on these pages over the years. Keynote speaker was former presidential and senatorial candidate, Ambassador Alan Keyes, a brilliant orator and Harvard-trained intellectual powerhouse who clearly explained what is at stake. His logic and legal reasoning was flawless and irrefutable. Following his act was quite a challenge. Also in attendance were Matt Barber of Barbwire, and Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth. But together we painted a picture of what the true gay rights agenda looks like.
3a)
The Insiders: How do the Clinton scandals end?
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton smiles after delivering the keynote address at the Women in the World summit in New York on Thursday. (Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)
In a compelling read, The Post’s Chris Cillizza just declared that Hillary Clinton “had the worst week in Washington.” Fortunately for Clinton, we all know that things in Washington can turn on a dime. Bad news recedes from the headlines, momentum shifts and today’s scandals and gaffes fade into distant memories. But given the long list of unanswered questions about the multitude of Clinton scandals, how will they come to an end? How can Clinton put a period at the end of the sentence and move on? It’s actually hard to see how that will be possible, simply because there is not one source of trouble. There are questions about her e-mails, Clinton Foundation donations, tax records, foreign influence — and that’s just this month. And given what we know about the Clintons, there is more to come and more shoes that will be dropping. Plus, all the new problems prompt fresh looks at all the old problems. Anyway, every week I have to tell someone that in Washington being innocent is only an advantage. Likewise, being guilty is only a disadvantage. Neither is determinative. But it’s safe to say Clinton is operating at a distinct disadvantage.
So what are Team Clinton’s options on how to manage the campaign politics? Some problems are solved and others are managed. The scandals currently in the public view won’t be solved, so the Clinton brain trust will have to find a way to manage them. Doesn’t the constant drip, drip, drip of damaging revelations deflate her supporters? Maybe the Clinton managers’ hope is that voters will just become numb to all of the questionable dealings that swirl around her universe. But I don’t see how Clinton’s supporters can be both numb and enthusiastic at the same time. Enthusiasm drives turnout. Numbness has got to suppress it.
The way I see it, Clinton has three realistic strategies to manage the reality of her circumstances.
First, she can employ a “whack-a-mole” strategy. The Clinton forces could have a team that tackles every new ugly mole as it pops up, whacking it down with talking points, surrogates and whatever other tactics they have at their disposal so it doesn’t distract the rest of the campaign.
Next, she can deploy a strategy of permanent stonewalling. But this is untenable. As the campaign moves forward, she will have to have regular encounters with the media. Clinton will need to get to a place where she can take on all questions, not be intimidated, not tell whoppers that will dig the scandal hole deeper and actually impress people with her command of her story and the facts.
Clinton’s third option is a scorched earth policy. A recent Quinnipiac pollshows that Clinton is viewed as untrustworthy by 54 percent of the population, which makes her strategy simple. She will just need to make sure her opponent — whoever it is — is viewed as untrustworthy by 60 percent of the electorate. So the Clinton campaign has to start now by attacking the Republican brand. They will need to load the kitchen sink and get ready to launch it at their Republican opponent as soon as that person emerges. This means the 2016 campaign will get down in the gutter faster than in most previous campaigns.
None of this bodes well for the next president. The 2016 campaign needs to establish a credible case for governing, if not a mandate. Having a campaign that goes negative in the spring of 2015 will make that almost impossible. Call me a cynic, but I don’t think Clinton has much of a choice in the matter.
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were both elected when voters were upbeat and enthusiastic. Bill Clinton was the man from Hope who didn’t want you to stop thinking about tomorrow. Barack Obama was full of hope and change. What is it Hillary Clinton will realistically expect voters to affirmatively hope for in 2016.
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4)We Weren’t Invited to Holder’s Going-Away Party, but We Approve of It
by JOHN FUND & HANS A. VON SPAKOVSKY
With yesterday’s Senate confirmation of Loretta Lynch, Attorney General Eric Holder will finally be leaving the Justice Department building soon. After six years, he leaves behind a demoralized department that has been politicized to an unprecedented degree.
Attorneys general are obligated to enforce the law in an objective, unbiased, and non-political manner. They must demonstrate the highest regard for the best interests of the public and for their sworn duty to uphold the Constitution and the laws of the United States. Prior attorneys general of both political parties — Benjamin Civiletti, Griffin Bell, Ed Meese, Michael Mukasey — have fulfilled that duty to the highest ethical and professional standards.
But not Eric Holder. He has put the interests of his political boss ahead of the administration of justice. When President Obama bent, broke, changed, or rewrote the law, the person at his side advising him how to do it was Eric Holder. All the while, he maintained a façade of respect for the rule of law, something for which he and the president have at times demonstrated utter contempt.
Holder’s failure to enforce federal laws such as our immigration statutes is a particularly acute betrayal of the most basic standard that applies to the attorney general. The nation’s chief law-enforcement officer, the attorney general has acted instead as the political lawyer of an overly partisan president. Holder has one of the lowest approval ratings of any public official. The recent cases in which judges found that Justice Department prosecutors engaged in prosecutorial abuse during Holder’s tenure show how much this high-level corruption has seeped also into the department’s lower levels.
In a failed prosecution of a peaceful abortion protester, for example, a federal judge remarked on the nearly total lack of evidence of any violation of the law. The protester had been targeted in an effort to chill the political speech of pro-life advocates. In another case, involving police officers in New Orleans, a federal judge, finding that the Justice Department had committed “grotesque prosecutorial abuse,” complained about the “skullduggery” and “perfidy” of DOJ prosecutors.
The politically motivated hiring of civil servants that has gone on in parts of the Justice Department, such as the Civil Rights Division, guarantees that radical ideologues will continue to permeate the department for years to come. As former federal prosecutor and National Review columnist Andrew McCarthy has observed, under Eric Holder the Justice Department has become a “full employment program for progressive activists, race-obsessed bean counters (redundant, I know), and lawyers who volunteered their services during the Bush years to help al-Qaeda operatives file lawsuits against the United States.”
The legal theories advanced by the administration have been so far outside the mainstream that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled against Holder’s Justice Department unanimously almost two dozen times. Those cases have ranged from the Hosanna-Tabor decision, where the Justice Department claimed that the religious-freedom clause of the First Amendment did not protect the hiring decisions of a church, to the Sackett case, where the department tried to prevent a family from defending itself in court and from contesting a ludicrous administrative order from EPA bureaucrats that would have subjected them to a fine up to $75,000 a day.
Many of those cases have a common theme: a frightening view of unlimited federal power, one untempered by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Eric Holder has aggressively used the enormous power of the Justice Department to abuse the liberty and economic rights of Americans, to manipulate racial politics to drive a wedge of hostility deep into our society, and to exploit the administration of justice as a political tool to benefit his president and his political party. There is no way to know how long it will take to repair the damage he has done. One thing we do know: It will take a new attorney general with the political willpower and steadfastness of a kind that is rarely seen in Washington.
Unfortunately, it is unlikely Loretta Lynch will clean up Holder’s misbegotten legacy. She made it clear in her confirmation hearings that she did not disagree with a single act of Eric Holder or President Obama. So her tenure will probably just be Holder 2.0.
Nonetheless, to paraphrase Mark Twain, we weren’t invited to Eric Holder’s going-away festivities at the Justice Department, but we approve of them, since they mean that one of the worst attorneys general in recent memory is finally leaving office. — John Fund is national affairs columnist for National Review. Hans A. von Spakovsky is a senior legal gellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former Justice Department lawyer. They are co-authors of Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department (HarperCollins / Broadside, 2014).
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417400/we-werent-invited-holders-going-away-party-we-approve-it-john-fund-hans-von-spakovsky
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