Even if Liberal Jews move away from Obama, I fear they will find their way to support Hillary, should she run. Why? Because Pence's episode provides them a sense of justification that supports their concern about the Far Right's flirtation with Social Issues!
As for myself, I do not fear this as much as I fear the Far Left policies that ruin our economy and social policies that destroy the family because a sick economy and a broken family structure leave minorities very vulnerable, whereas, a healthy and growing economy floats all ships and allows less focus on using minorities as scapegoats. (See 1b below.)
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Any potential Republican candidate for higher office is a damn fool to volunteer to be interviewed on all major national TV Broadcasters and certainly that is the case as evidenced by Candy Crowley's hatchet job in the last presidential debate and more recently Stephanopoulos' interviews.
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As for the postponement of the Iranian negotiations and comment by The White House, the military option remains on the table, that is true. It will remain on the table and Iran knows it. Can you see Obama attacking Iran? If you can, you need a new pair of glasses.
Obama gave away the store from the git go and like a cow Iran has been milking him all along. You would think Obama is sore by now!
Desperation is what now drives Obama! (See 2 below.)
The WSJ published this op ed by Alan Caruba, on SATURDAY, JANUARY 2, 2010. Events have proven Caruba was prophetic! (See 2a below.)
Meanwhile, Iran's influence spreads like a mud slide. (See 2b below.)
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Some Democrats are beginning to waiver and move to the right. (See 3 below.)
=
Israel is attacked when defending itself but not a word said against Saudis who decided they can no longer depend on America.
One day Obama will be gone but the effects of his impotency will last forever. (See 4 below.)
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Off to Miami tomorrow. Happy Easter and Passover again.
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Dick
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1)
Hillary Obstructs Congress
She erased emails after the Benghazi probe wanted to see them.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton PHOTO: KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS
If the House panel investigating Benghazi really wants to get a look at Hillary Clinton’s emails, perhaps it should subpoena the Chinese military. Beijing—which may have hacked the private server she used to send official email as Secretary of State—is likely to be more cooperative than are Mrs. Clinton and her stonewall specialists now reprising their roles from the 1990s.
On Friday Mrs. Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, disclosed that he couldn’t cooperate with the Benghazi committee’s request that she turn over her private server to an independent third party for examination. Why not? Well, the former first diplomat had already wiped the computer clean.
Of course she had. What else would she do?
The timing of the deletions isn’t entirely clear. Benghazi Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy says they appear to have been deleted after Oct. 28, 2014, when State asked Mrs. Clinton to return her public records to the department. That could qualify as obstruction of Congress, as lawyer Ronald Rotunda recently argued on these pages.
The deletions certainly violate Mrs. Clinton’s promise to Congress on Oct. 2, 2012, when the Benghazi probe was getting under way. “We look forward to working with the Congress and your Committee as you proceed with your own review,” she told the Oversight Committee. “We are committed to a process that is as transparent as possible, respecting the needs and integrity of the investigations underway. We will move as quickly as we can without forsaking accuracy.”
Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Kendall say the vanishing emails don’t matter because State and the committee already have all the relevant documents and emails they’ve asked for. But State and the committee don’t have the actual emails, only the printed copies she provided to State.
And State had previously assured the committee it had everything it had asked for before Mrs. Clinton coughed up 850 pages of email copies from her private server this month—emails State couldn’t turn over before because she hadn’t provided them despite clear State Department policy that she and other officials do so.
Mrs. Clinton’s real message to Congress: You’ll see those emails over my dead body.
Mrs. Clinton is a student of history. In the 1970s she served as a lawyer on the House Judiciary Committee that investigated Watergate. There she saw how Richard Nixon’s release of his tape-recorded conversations led to his resignation from the Oval Office. It appears she absorbed the lesson that Nixon should have burned, er, wiped clean, the tapes.
Two decades later, Mrs. Clinton was First Lady and her billing records from her days at the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas were under federal subpoena. For two years no one could find them.
Then in January 1996, the same Mr. Kendall who now assures us Mrs. Clinton has turned over all relevant emails revealed how Hillary’s lost Rose Law files had miraculously been discovered on a table in the first family’s private quarters in the White House. No one could say how they got there. The woman who discovered them said they had not been on the table a week or two earlier, when she had last been in the room.
In a dispatch reporting on the discovery, the New York Times put it this way: “The release of the records is the latest of several instances in which the Clinton White House has declared a document search to be exhaustive, only to later stumble on important material.” She’s doing it again.
The question now is what Congress can do, if anything, to retrieve those “wiped” emails. In theory, the House could subpoena Mrs. Clinton’s emails and take her to court. But Mr. Gowdy concedes that going this route would take “years and years.” Meantime, Mrs. Clinton would make Lois Lerner of IRS infamy look like a model of cooperation.
Eric Holder’s Justice Department isn’t about to investigate, so the sanction will have to be political. Team Hillary and her media palace guard think the email story will fade, and they’ll help by calling it “old news” within a fortnight.
Democrats could provide one check on her stonewalling if anyone runs against her in the presidential primaries. Then her Nixonian character would become an issue. But so far the only Democrats who might run are second-stringers who are bidding to be Vice President and so wouldn’t want to speak truth to Mrs. Clinton’s power. Thus her Democratic coronation proceeds apace. It’s going to be fascinating to see if the voters are as eager as Democrats to be governed again by Clinton-Nixon mores.
1a) Hillary's Baggage
Hillary Clinton’s latest misadventures are not just so typically Clintonian, but more to the point, they reveal a fatal flaw in the woman’s makeup -- she has absolutely no judgment! Now you can write off the three current scandals (her private email account use while serving as secretary of state; the foreign donations to the Clinton foundation while also serving in that capacity; and, most recently, her brother Tony and her campaign advisor Terry McAuliffe receiving preferential visa treatment for their friends or clients by the Department of Homeland Security) as just another manifestation of Clinton arrogance. But that would barely scratch the surface as to what it reveals about Hillary.
These disturbing qualities became apparent upon her leaving Yale with her failure to pass the District of
Columbia Bar examination, a feat rarely accomplished by a Yale Law School graduate. First, the D.C. Bar exam has never been regarded as one of the country’s more difficult bar exams, and second, 80% of graduates of first-tier law schools (and Yale is at the top of the heap) pass the bar exam -- any bar exam -- on their first effort. Hillary, with characteristic ("what-difference-does-it-make?") insouciance, brushed this failure off with the romantic notion that, since her heart was in Arkansas (with Bill and where she passed the bar exam), this was a message to her that she should follow her heart. She then went to work on the staff of the House Judiciary Committee, which was considering the impeachment of Richard Nixon at the time. She worked for the committee’s chief counsel, Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat and a former professor at the University of Santa Clara Law School, who found her work legally inadequate and ethically flawed. As a consequence, she was one of only three attorney-employees of the committee over the course of Zeifman’s tenure that he considered unworthy of a positive reference. Indeed, Hillary and the Clintons left such a sour taste in Zeifman’s mouth that, not only did he point out his displeasure with Hillary in his 1995 book about the Committee’s activities,Without Honor, he wrote a lengthy monograph some 10 years later excoriating Hillary Clinton’s scurrilous behavior (Hillary’s Pursuit of Power), in which he details many of Hillary’s indiscretions and displays of incompetence. Things did not improve from there; indeed, they only went downhill.
Finally, even on leaving the White House, Hillary couldn’t do so with dignity -- she took the government’s furniture with her. The Clintons were really a class act!
1a) Hillary's Baggage
Hillary Clinton’s latest misadventures are not just so typically Clintonian, but more to the point, they reveal a fatal flaw in the woman’s makeup -- she has absolutely no judgment! Now you can write off the three current scandals (her private email account use while serving as secretary of state; the foreign donations to the Clinton foundation while also serving in that capacity; and, most recently, her brother Tony and her campaign advisor Terry McAuliffe receiving preferential visa treatment for their friends or clients by the Department of Homeland Security) as just another manifestation of Clinton arrogance. But that would barely scratch the surface as to what it reveals about Hillary.
The woman knows that she is going to run for president in 2016; knows that she is carrying a ton of baggage from her first lady years in the White House that she would like to put behind her; knows that the Republicans (as inept as they are) are going to dig out all these skeletons in her closet; yet engages in this form of clearly inappropriate conduct that she has to know is going to come out in the course of her quest for her own stint in the White House. This is much more than Clintonian arrogance and/or duplicity; this puts in relief Hillary’s greatest failing – lack of judgment.
This pattern of incompetence and dishonesty has dogged her path at every step in her undistinguished career. The only action that Hillary has taken that might be regarded as a “positive accomplishment” was marrying Bill Clinton and riding his coattails to positions of prominence, where she not only failed to “accomplish” anything that might be regarded as positive, she consistently revealed her inability to lead, her willingness to lie with impunity, and to screw up with regularity.
These disturbing qualities became apparent upon her leaving Yale with her failure to pass the District of
Columbia Bar examination, a feat rarely accomplished by a Yale Law School graduate. First, the D.C. Bar exam has never been regarded as one of the country’s more difficult bar exams, and second, 80% of graduates of first-tier law schools (and Yale is at the top of the heap) pass the bar exam -- any bar exam -- on their first effort. Hillary, with characteristic ("what-difference-does-it-make?") insouciance, brushed this failure off with the romantic notion that, since her heart was in Arkansas (with Bill and where she passed the bar exam), this was a message to her that she should follow her heart. She then went to work on the staff of the House Judiciary Committee, which was considering the impeachment of Richard Nixon at the time. She worked for the committee’s chief counsel, Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat and a former professor at the University of Santa Clara Law School, who found her work legally inadequate and ethically flawed. As a consequence, she was one of only three attorney-employees of the committee over the course of Zeifman’s tenure that he considered unworthy of a positive reference. Indeed, Hillary and the Clintons left such a sour taste in Zeifman’s mouth that, not only did he point out his displeasure with Hillary in his 1995 book about the Committee’s activities,Without Honor, he wrote a lengthy monograph some 10 years later excoriating Hillary Clinton’s scurrilous behavior (Hillary’s Pursuit of Power), in which he details many of Hillary’s indiscretions and displays of incompetence. Things did not improve from there; indeed, they only went downhill.
1) Arkansas -- She did little of note in her stay in Arkansas, either in her capacity of wife of its attorney general and then governor, nor in her work at the Rose Law firm. When the National Law Journal labeled her as one of the 100 most “influential” attorneys in the country (because of her relationship with the state’s attorney general and governor) she tried to pass this off as one of the country’s 100 best attorneys (for which she was taken to task by the National Law Journal). Arkansas is where she entered into the infamous Whitewater transaction which dogged her path to the White House. Also, you may recall the fraudulent futures transaction she entered into in which, thanks to her relationship with a Tyson Chicken attorney with the right market connections, she managed to turn $1,000 into $100,000. She explained this bit of stock market alchemy as the result of her having read the Wall Street Journal. (which market pundits said had about a million to one chance of being the case).
Two of her Rose Law firm cohorts, Vince Foster and Webster Hubbell, accompanied her to Washington -- Foster committed suicide and Hubbell went to prison (where he received a substantial “consulting” fee for not giving Hillary up -- how many imprisoned consultants do you know of who are so handsomely compensated?).
2) White House First Ladyship -- Her stay in the White House was marked by numerous scandals, and, with the exception of her husband’s reckless sexcapades, every one of them was due to some action engaged in by Hillary. There is no need to rehash this unpleasant period, but since the woman is running for president, it might be wise to remember Travelgate, Filegate, the Rose Law Firm billing records (that magically showed up in one of her rooms some two years after they had been subpoenaed), etc., etc. The list goes on an on, and, again, every nonsexual scandal could be laid at her doorstep. And even the sex scandals were a farce insofar as Hillary is concerned; she not only stood by her man (contrary to her having informed us that she was no Tammy Wynette), she savaged the women with whom he inappropriately behaved as shameless bimbos. How’s that for the behavior of a feminist “icon”?However, in all fairness, she did accomplish one thing -- her imperious, arrogant, and incompetent handling of the one function her husband entrusted to her, HillaryCare, was instrumental in delivering to her husband the first Republican House in 40 years. The election of 1994 was a Republican rout, and Hillary played an instrumental role in producing it; no one energizes Republicans like Hillary Clinton. One of the key players who worked on HillaryCare, J. Bradford DeLong, an economics professor at U.C. Berkeley and a Democrat, said this about Hillary (with respect to her handling of HillaryCare):
My two cents’ worth -- and I think it is the two cents’ worth of everybody who worked for the Clinton Administration health care reform effort of 1993-1994 is that Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life. Heading up health-care reform was the only administrative job she has ever tried to do. And she was a complete flop at it. She had neither the grasp of policy substance, the managerial skills, nor the political smarts to do the job she was then given.And she wasn’t smart enough to realize that she was in over her head and had to get out of the Health Care Czar role quickly.
How’s that for a ringing endorsement? This from a Democrat, and not just any Democrat, a U.C. Berkeley college professor, and you can’t get much more Democratic than Berkeley -- it is the heart of Democratic darkness in a completely Democratic region. In short, HillaryCare was her only management assignment, and she screwed that up so badly that it was one of the key causes of her husband’s getting the first Republican House in 40 years
Finally, even on leaving the White House, Hillary couldn’t do so with dignity -- she took the government’s furniture with her. The Clintons were really a class act!
3) Senator From New York -- On being retired from the White House, she carpetbagged her way into a position as Senator from New York (things broke nicely for her here since, not only was Moynihan retiring, but Guiliani, who would have been a formidable opponent; was unable to run against her due to health problems. In her years in the Senate, she failed to do anything of note other than fairly meaningless actions such as bridge dedications, you will search in vain for a praiseworthy accomplishment.
4) Secretary of State -- This period can be quickly dismissed by noting that it began with her “Russian Reset” blunder (you would think some one in our State Department was smart enough to know the correct word and clue her in) and finished with the Benghazi fiasco (for which she took responsibility but was never held accountable -- what good is responsibility without accountability? In between these notable bookends, she traveled a million miles and watched the globe burn while she circled it. It is important to note that no one died in Watergate; four Americans died at Benghazi, thanks to Hillary’s failure of leadership (which, at the outset, she tried to paper over by blaming the entire fiasco on a video, for which she shamefully promised parents of the deceased the video producer would be punished). Nixon, on whose impeachment proceedings she worked, was pilloried for his Watergate behavior and ultimately driven out of office. Hillary fobbed the whole thing off in her Senate testimony with her brazen and shameless retort to Senator Ron Johnson’s query on the matter -- what difference at this point does it make? Unfortunately, Johnson was so taken aback by her shameless outburst that he neglected to point out that it made all the difference in the world to the people who were sitting behind her, i.e. the families of the men who died at Benghazi because Hillary failed to respond to the now deceased ambassador’s request for additional security for the Benghazi facility.
5) As A Campaigner: Dull, Plodding, Gaffe Prone, And Unlikeable -- Alright, we have looked at her scandal-plagued past, what does she look like now? The same, as far as character is concerned, but now we have to deal with the uninspiringly dull campaign speeches in which her lies are packaged. Also, not only is she dishonest, she is gaffe prone, tone deaf, and does not comfortably connect with an audience. For example her complaint that she and her husband were dead broke when they left the White House -- as a consequence, no doubt, of running up mortgage debt on the two million dollar homes they were purchasing for their post-presidential residences (one in D.C., the other in Chappaqua, New York, to establish residence there as a basis for her senatorial run). And even in the course of acquiring some of that debt, a minor scandal occurred in connection with Terry McAuliffe’s assistance in financing the project. Also, she and her husband have been taking in huge gobs of money for their book efforts and speeches.
Then she made the outrageously stupid statement that “businesses” don’t create jobs, suggesting that government does (no doubt a Freudian slip, reflecting the general job-creation approach of the Dems, i.e. if there is a problem, government is the solution -- in contrast to Reagan’s observation that government is the problem, not the solution). Finally, she comes across as angry and unlikable -- probably because she is angry and unlikable. When informed of this quality during her 2008 campaign, she seemed taken aback, shedding a few tears, thus reassuring her admiring public that she was indeed a feeling person.
Now this unaccomplished fraud gets $300,000 a speech to inform her audience of absolutely nothing of consequence. In the end, perhaps this says more about her audience than it does about her; that is, why would any one pay that kind of money to a person who not only accomplished nothing, but is a charmless political hack? By way of concluding this piece, I would recommend that the reader follow Professor Delong’s advice, i.e. “Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life.”
1b) Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R) says his state will "correct" the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, saying the law "does not give anyone a license to deny services to gay and lesbian couples." (Reuters)
The national debate over an Indiana religious-liberties law seen as anti-gay has drawn the entire field of Republican presidential contenders into the divisive culture wars, which badly damaged Mitt Romney in 2012 and which GOP leaders eagerly sought to avoid in the 2016 race.
Most top Republican presidential hopefuls this week have moved in lock step, and without pause, to support Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R) and his Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which has prompted protests and national calls for boycotts by major corporations.
In Arkansas on Tuesday, Republican legislators approved a similar measure that Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) is expected to sign. The action prompted the chief executive of Arkansas-based Wal-Mart to ask Hutchinson to veto the bill, saying that it “does not reflect the values we uphold.”
The agreement among the likely GOP candidates illustrates the enduring power of social conservatives in early-voting states such as Iowa and South Carolina, which will help determine who emerges as the party’s nominee next year.
But the position puts the Republican field out of step with a growing national consensus on gay rights, handing Hillary Rodham Clinton and other Democrats a way to portray Republicans as intolerant and insensitive. Some Republicans also fear that Indiana is only the first in a series of brush fires that could engulf the party as it struggles to adapt to the nation’s rapidly changing demographics and social mores.
At a news conference Tuesday, Pence — a potential long-shot presidential candidate himself — strongly defended the Indiana statute, which grants individuals and businesses legal grounds to defend themselves against claims of discrimination. But he also said the state would “fix” the law to make clear that it does not give license to businesses to deny services to anyone.
Pence insisted that it was never the law’s intent to allow discrimination — “I abhor discrimination,” he said repeatedly — although he acknowledged that negative perceptions have taken a rapid toll on Indiana’s reputation and economic development.
After Pence signed the law Thursday, corporate executives nationwide — as well as the White House and likely Democratic presidential candidates Clinton and Martin O’Malley — issued sharp condemnations.
But former Florida governor Jeb Bush and other GOP presidential hopefuls did not waver in their support of Pence and what they consider a necessary state measure to safeguard religious liberty. The positions are in keeping with the views of social conservatives, who enjoy an outsize influence in the Republican presidential nominating contest.
“This is another case where the Iowa caucus beckons,” veteran GOP strategist John Weaver said. “Politically, it’s a difficult issue for a general election. After watching the Romney campaign in 2012, a lot of people said, ‘Do no harm to your general-election chances while trying to win the nomination.’ Having said that, you have to win the nomination first.”
As Steve Deace, a conservative talk-radio host in Iowa, put it: “This is the first litmus test of the race. Everyone in the party is watching to see how the candidates respond. For evangelicals, this is the fundamental front of culture issues.
Across the GOP firmament Tuesday, there was some worry that Democrats could revive the moment in next year’s general-election campaign to assail the eventual Republican nominee as an opponent of gay rights.
“Could this emerge as an ad? Yes,” GOP pollster David Winston said. “Could it be a decisive issue in people’s minds? It’s not clear at this point.”
Vin Weber, a former congressman and Bush ally, said he is concerned about the general-election implications and whether the Indiana debate damages the Republican brand with moderate and independent voters. “Everyone likes Mike Pence, and they’re concerned about the primary politics of the marriage issue, but I’m a little worried they’re not thinking of the broader perceptions of the party,” he said.
But other Republican strategists argued that the Indiana imbroglio could have the opposite effect. They suggested that the harsh reaction to the law has become a rallying cry for the tens of millions of evangelical voters. On his show Tuesday, talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh called the media blowback an example of how “religious people in this country are being ganged up on.”
Longtime GOP consultant David Carney said: “It’s going to potentially wake up a sleeping giant. . . . It’s crazy for people in our party to surrender or wet their pants every time there’s something controversial on the front page of The Washington Post, Out magazine or the New York Times.”
Regardless of whether they support or oppose the Indiana law, the Republican contenders must signal compassion to avoid damaging the party’s brand, said pollster Whit Ayres, an adviser to likely presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).
“More than anything else, it’s a tone and an attitude of inclusion and acceptance that Ronald Reagan articulated beautifully and that too few Republicans have articulated effectively of late,” Ayres told reporters at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor.
Bush defended the Indiana law in an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt on Monday, but he has not made social issues part of his core campaign message. At some moments, he has tried to strike a conciliatory tone on gay issues. He drew heat from social conservatives in January after saying people should accept court rulings that legalize same-sex marriage and should “show respect” for gays in committed relationships.
States are driving debate
The reaction of likely Republican candidates to the Indiana law captures a powerful dynamic at play in the early stages of the 2016 race. The actions of GOP-controlled state legislatures as well as Congress are setting the course of debate, leading the presidential contenders to grapple with controversies that arise in far-flung state capitals.
The frenzy of activity by conservative lawmakers is an outgrowth of Republicans’ sweeping success in state and federal elections in recent years, especially in the tea-party-fueled 2010 contests. Buoyed by their victories that year, many hard-right legislators have aggressively pursued conservative agendas on regulatory policy, social issues and labor law.
After Pence’s rocky appearance Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” Christian conservative leaders around the country organized a frantic outreach effort to pressure likely candidates to defend the legislation, according to several people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private communications.
The Republican Party has been fraught with tensions over the scope and details of such legislation. GOP leaders have been wary of upsetting more moderate swing voters but also nervous about angering the conservative activists who lifted them to power.
Outside groups, such as the right-leaning American Legislative Exchange Council, have gained traction as they have bolstered their relationships with ascendant Republicans in the states and have provided them with blueprints for a wide variety of bills.
On the right, religious liberty has emerged as a central issue, rooted in the ongoing fight over contraception coverage mandates in President Obama’s signature health-care law. The Supreme Court ruled last year that family-owned businesses do not have to offer their employees contraceptive coverage that conflicts with owners’ religious beliefs.
“Before the contraceptive mandate, very few people in the country knew what an RFRA was or had need to know,” said Mark Rienzi, senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, referring to Religious Freedom Restoration Acts. “Since then, there has been mass education, and people have sat up and paid attention.”
Much of the rallying behind the Indiana law can be credited to the ideological impulses of the modern GOP, but part of the response is also due to Pence’s strong political capital. The former talk-radio host became a high-ranking congressman with ties to influential religious conservatives.
He remains a force on the national stage, shuttling to Washington to nurture his relationships and taking to the speaking circuit to criticize Common Core, a set of education benchmarks adopted by most states that has sparked a revolt among conservative groups.
“Governor Pence has a lot of friends in the party,” said Pence pollster Kellyanne Conway. “He’s been very heartened by the e-mails, texts and personal calls he’s received from Republicans around the country.”
2) How many more allies have to be sacrificed for Obama's ego?
When George W. Bush left office, Libya was a halfway ally, which had dropped its nuclear weapons program at the insistence of the Bush administration.
That was a victory for sanity over extreme danger – i.e., the risk that nukes would fall into the hands of suicide-glorifying gangs like al-Qaeda and ISIS.
Today, Obama has overthrown Gaddafi for no particular reason, causing tens of thousands of deaths and a raging civil war in Libya.
When George W. Bush left office, Egypt was still a stable country at peace with its neighbors. So were Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen. Even Iraq and Afghanistan were taking precarious steps toward stability.
After six years of Obamanismo, Egypt is at civil war with the Muslim Brotherhood and with ISIS/al-Qaeda terrorists in the Sinai Desert. Egypt has blown up a reported sixty smuggling tunnels to Hamas in Gaza, because Hamas is the terrorist group spun off by the Brotherhood. Obama has consistently supported the MooBros in the battle against Egyptian stability.
Now Syria is being torn apart between Iran-supported Shi’ites and Saudi-supported Sunnis, notably the Al Nusrah murder gang, now part of ISIS.
ISIS itself exploded into power after Obama told Americans during the election that al-Qaeda is “decimated.” Al-Qaeda is alive, all right, and now its big brother ISIS is laying claim to parts of Iraq and Syria to set up a caliphate – a Muslim sharia empire.
When George W. left office, it was still possible to stop Iran from building nukes, using the same methods that worked so well with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq: a trade embargo combined with a no-fly zone enforced by the U.S. Air Force, which made it impossible for Saddam to attack other nations by air, sea, or land.
Ultimately we invaded and knocked a weakened Saddam from power in three weeks. (Our mistake was to stay there afterward.)
When George W. left office, the Iranian imperial campaign was still contained to Iran. Today, Iran’s Al-Quds Brigade is in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and, via Iran’s proxy terror group Hezb’allah, in Lebanon. The boss of the Al-Quds brigade just threatened to invade Jordan, which would give him blitzkrieg access across the desert to Mecca and Medina, the mullahs’ real theological targets.
When George W. left office, the most threatened and yet the most modern nation in the Middle East, Israel, was feeling reasonably safe. So were Saudi Arabia and the other Sunni powers like Egypt.
Today they are all frightened to death by Obama’s obsessive surrender to Iranian nukes.
All over the Middle East, people see the United States as an enemy rather than a friend. The only exception is the two anarchic forces Obama has supported over and over again: the Iranian war priests, the mullahs, and their fanatical troops; and on the Sunni side, the Muslim Brotherhood, which has a dozen known loyalists in high positions in this administration.
Four-star admiral James (“Ace”) Lyons (USN, ret.) has pointed out Muslim Brotherhood infiltration in so many words.
“[There is] Muslim Brotherhood penetration in every one of our national security agencies, including all our intelligence agencies[.]” ... Admiral Lyons said that our “lead intelligence agency” is “headed by a Muslim convert,” a reference to Obama CIA head John Brennan.
By now the story has leaked that Obama has blindly and arrogantly overruled any military advice, as we can see from his utter failure to deal with the al-Qaeda attack on our CIA weapons compound in Benghazi, Libya. Obama’s and Hillary’s biggest objectives were to cover their rear ends, and our hyper-corrupt media colluded in the Benghazi cover-ups, which are still going on today. The reason is that Benghazi involved Obama’s and Hillary’s direct and knowing collusion with al-Qaeda gangs, who were trusted to help us smuggle massive quantities of modern Libyan arms to the AQ rebels in Syria.
Another brilliant Obama move that went bad.
During the election, with corrupt media collusion, Obama lied that al-Qaeda was defeated. But the front page of newspapers on September 11, 2012 showed the black flag flying over a part of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, and in Libya as well.
Everything Obama and Hillary have said since that moment has been a lie. Today AQ and ISIS are alive and murdering innocent people on YouTube, and Obama is seen as a traitor by Egypt, the Saudis, and the rest. Only the mullahs love Obama, which is why they treat him with contempt.
The Sunni Arabs have now announced a military alliance against Iran. (Not against Israel, which is helping the Sunnis with intelligence and satellite recon.)
The Middle East is fracturing along its ancient theological fault lines, the Shi’ites of Iran against the majority Sunnis of the rest of the world.
With Obama’s delusional “peace agreement,” which will sidestep the U.S. Senate’s constitutionally required “advice and consent” for treaties with foreign powers, Obama is clearing the way for nuclear escalation in the most unstable part of the world.
The only conceivable purpose for this unprecedented sham parade by the United States of America is to serve the glorious egos of Obama and Hillary. Both have consistently abused their federal offices, with the direct collusion of the rotten media. Both have used all their powers and privileges to violate their oaths of office and the clear language of the United States Constitution. Both are plausible candidates to be tried for high crimes and misdemeanors, if any federal prosecutor or Senate committee ever got up the guts to expose them.
So when you watch Obama’s phony ego ceremony on TV, just remember Jeremiah (6:14), who saw it all before:
They say, “peace, peace.”
But there is no peace.
But there is no peace.
2a) Obama's Make-Believe Life
by Alan Caruba:
"I have this theory about Barack Obama. I think he's led a kind of make-believe life in which money was provided and doors were opened because at some point early on somebody or some group (George Soros, maybe? or Frank Marshall Davis??) took a look at this tall, good looking, half-white, half-black, young man with an exotic African/Muslim name and concluded he could be guided toward a life in politics where his facile speaking skills could even put him in the White House.
In a very real way, he has been a young man in a very big hurry. Who else do you know has written two memoirs before the age of 45? "Dreams of My Father" was published in 1995 when he was only 34 years old. The "Audacity of Hope" followed in 2006. If, indeed, he did write them himself. There are some who think that his mentor and friend, Bill Ayers, a man who calls himself a "communist with a small 'c' was the real author.
His political skills consisted of rarely voting on anything that might be deemed controversial. He went from a legislator in the Illinois House to the Senator from that state because he had the good fortune of having Mayor Daley's formidable political machine at his disposal.
He was in the U.S. Senate so briefly that his bid for the presidency was either an act of astonishing self-confidence or part of some greater game plan that had been determined before he first stepped foot in the Capital. How, many must wonder, was he selected to be a 2004 keynote speaker at the Democrat convention that nominated John Kerry when virtually no one had ever even heard of him before?
He out maneuvered Hillary Clinton in primaries. He took Iowa by storm. A charming young man, an anomaly in the state with a very small black population, he oozed "cool" in a place where agriculture was the antithesis of cool. He dazzled the locals. And he had an army of volunteers drawn to a charisma
that hid any real substance.
that hid any real substance.
And then he had the great good fortune of having the Republicans select one of the most inept candidates for the presidency since Bob Dole. And then John McCain did something crazy. He picked Sarah Palin, an unknown female governor from the very distant state of Alaska . It was a ticket that was reminiscent of 1984's Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro and they went down to defeat.
The mainstream political media fell in love with him. It was a schoolgirl crush with febrile commentators like Chris Mathews swooning then and now over the man. The venom directed against McCain and, in particular, Palin, was extraordinary.
Now, 6 full years into his presidency, all of those gilded years leading up to the White House have left him unprepared to be President. Left to his own instincts, he has a talent for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. It swiftly became a joke that he could not deliver even the briefest of statements without the ever-present Tel-Prompters.
Far worse, however, is his capacity to want to "wish away" some terrible realities, not the least of which is the Islamist intention to destroy America and enslave the West. Any student of history knows how swiftly Islam initially spread. It knocked on the doors of Europe, having gained a foothold in Spain.
The great crowds that greeted him at home or on his campaign "world tour" were no substitute for having even the slightest grasp of history and the reality of a world filled with really bad people with really bad intentions. Oddly and perhaps even inevitably, his political experience, a cakewalk, has positioned him to destroy the Democrat Party's hold on power in Congress because in the end it was never about the Party. It was always about his communist ideology, learned at an early age from family, mentors, college professors, and extreme leftist friends and colleagues.
Obama is a man who could deliver a snap judgment about a Boston police officer who arrested an "obstreperous" Harvard professor-friend, but would warn Americans against "jumping to conclusions" about a mass murderer at Fort Hood who shouted "Allahu Akbar." The absurdity of that was lost on no one. He has since compounded this by calling the Christmas bomber "an isolated extremist" only to have to admit a day or two later that he was part of an al Qaeda plot.
He is a man who could strive to close down our detention facility at Guantanamo even though those released were known to have returned to the battlefield against America. He could even instruct his Attorney General to afford the
perpetrator of 9/11 a civil trial when no one else would ever even consider such an obscenity. And he is a man who could wait three days before having anything to say about the perpetrator of yet another terrorist attack on Americans and then have to elaborate on his remarks the following day because his first statement was so lame.
The pattern repeats itself. He either blames any problem on the Bush administration or he naively seeks to wish away the truth.
Knock, knock. Anyone home? Anyone there? Barack Obama exists only as the sock puppet of his handlers, of the people who have maneuvered and manufactured this pathetic individual's life.
When anyone else would quickly and easily produce a birth certificate, this man spent over a million dollars to deny access to his. Most other documents, the paper trail we all leave in our wake, have been sequestered from review. He has lived a make-believe life whose true facts remain hidden.
Even his wife has mentioned they visited the country of his birth, Kenya. You did note she did not accompany him on the trip to Saudi Arabia on which he actually bowed to the king. Being a Muslim required him to do so and that same
faith prevented him from taking her with him . "
faith prevented him from taking her with him . "
We laugh at the ventriloquist's dummy, but what do you do when the dummy is President of the United States.
By Alina Dain Sharon/JNS.org
While the outcome of the latest phase in nuclear negotiations between Iran and P5+1 powers remains uncertain, Iran is forging ahead with its quest for dominance in the Middle East region.
A March 31 deadline for a framework agreement in the nuclear talks has not yet brought an announcement of a deal, and any pact would be just a precursor to a final deal before a June 30 deadline. How will the negotiations’ outcome affect Iran’s regional ambitions, and what is the current extent of the Islamic Republic’s power play? JNS.org spoke with experts for a snapshot of Iran’s influence in Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Gaza.
Yemen
Judging from images appearing in Iranian media of airplanes loaded with humanitarian aid headed for Yemen, and of Shi’a-Muslim Houthi rebels being shipped to Iran for medical treatment, it seems that Iran is making little effort to hide its affinity for the Houthis, said Dr. Emanuele Ottolenghi, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
While it is not necessarily possible to verify precisely what materials are being shipped from Iran to Yemen, Ottolenghi described “a track record of Iran sending ships of aid” containing weapons.
“We’ve seen it in shipments to Gaza [and] shipments to Lebanon,” Ottolenghi told JNS.org.
The establishment of direct flights between Iran and Yemen by the Iranian carrier Mahan Air is another indication of Iran’s interest in the Yemenite conflict. That airline has coordinated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force (IRGC-QF) by “secretly ferrying operatives, weapons, and funds on its flights,” U.S. Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David S. Cohen said in 2011.
Gregory Gause, head of the International Affairs Department at the Bush School of Government and Public Service of Texas A&M University and a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Doha Center, said the Houthis are the more interested party in the Iranian-Houthi relationship.
“The Houthis are aligned with Iran, but they’re not the creation of Iran. They have more so thrown themselves at the Iranians than the other way around,” Gause told JNS.org.
Dr. Hooshang Amirahmadi—a professor of planning and public policy at New Jersey-based Rutgers University and a candidate in Iran’s 2013 presidential race—argued that while the Houthis are Shi’a Muslims, as is the Iranian regime, the Houthis should not be equated with Hezbollah, a Shi’ia terror group that has much closer ties to Iran.
“Iran’s strategy toward Yemen is not a military strategy because Yemen is too far away from Iran,” Amirahmadi told JNS.org.
Yet Reuters has reported that Iran provided significant military and financial support to the Houthis before and after their takeover of Sana’a (Yemen’s capital) last September, quoting an anonymous senior Yemenite security official as saying, “Before the entrance into Sana’a, Iran started sending weapons here and gave a lot of support with money via visits abroad.”
Lebanon and Syria
Amirahmadi said that unlike Iranian-Houthi ties, the relationship between Iran and Lebanon-based Hezbollah is “brotherly.”
In Lebanon, it has become clear that Hezbollah “is willing to do whatever the Iranians ask them to,” said Gause.
“The fiction that Hezbollah was only a Lebanese nationalist organization whose whole mission was in Lebanon, and confronting Israel from Lebanon, has been disproven by the fact they’re willing to fight so directly in the Syrian civil war,” Gause said.
In Syria, he added, Iran “supports [President Bashar] Assad in every possible way by supplying the Assad regime with cheap oil… They supply the Assad regime with direct military support through the [IRGC-QF] force.”
Meir Javedanfar, an Iranian-Israeli Middle East analyst who teaches contemporary Iranian politics at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya college in Israel, believes the Assad regime in Syria would not have survived without Iran’s influence.
“If it wasn’t for the fact that Hezbollah and Iran are supporting Assad militarily, his dictatorial regime would have been finished,” Javedanfar toldJNS.org.
Iraq
Gause said that from the beginning of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Iran had established close relations with a number of Iraqi political actors and militias. Today, Iran is “the most important foreign player in Iraqi politics,” he said.
“In the 2010 election the Iranians intervened directly to help keep then Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in power. It was the Iranians who [then] basically told Maliki in 2014 that he had to go,” said Gause.
According to Ottolenghi, “both the political and military levels of the Iraqi Shi’a militia are very close to Iran, and the Shi’a political parties take much of their leads from Iran.”
Iran exerts additional influence over Iraq through “business, trade, investments, people-to-people programs, religious pilgrimages, access to the holy sites of Shi’a Islam,” and more, Ottolenghi explained. That influence, he said, has contributed to the current sectarian violence in Iraq.
“For all intents and purposes… there’s a civil war going on within Iraq as well,” Ottolenghi said.
In the meantime, the rise of the Islamic State terror group in Iraq and Syria has become a major problem for Iran. In addition to threatening Iran’s Shi’a proxies in the Iraqi government, Islamic State threatens the regional government in Iraq’s Kurdish region, which has been a significant trade partner for Iran, noted Ottolenghi. Islamic State could also eventually threaten the long-term viability of the Assad regime in Syria.
Iran has made it clear that it is not going to allow its “allies in Bagdad to be pushed out of power by an [Islamic State] blitzkrieg,” Gause said.
Gaza
The Hamas-Iran relationship more closely resembles Iranian-Houthi ties than the Iran-Hezbollah relationship.
Gause said Hamas and Iran have been “allies of convenience” since 2007, when Hamas took over Gaza, “because the Iranians were willing to support them and Hamas was happy to get support from anywhere.” Ever since last summer’s war with Israel, Hamas—a Sunni-Muslim Palestinian terror group—“remains dependent on Iranian financial support by and large,” Ottolenghi said.
Hamas has benefited from training and equipment from Iran, especially during last summer’s Gaza war. There have been reports of Hamas fighters being sent to Iran for training, and the sophistication of the tunnels that Hamas terrorists built under the Gaza-Israel border indicates that they might have received training from the engineering corps of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.
But Gause said Iran’s involvement in the Syrian civil war “has made it harder for Sunni groups like Hamas to be openly aligned with the Iranians… because [the war in Syria] really polarized sectarian sentiment in the region.”
Impact of the nuclear talks
Amirahmadi said he believes Iran will be more aggressive in the region if the nuclear negotiations fail to produce an agreement, and would behave more moderately with a deal in place.
Saudi Arabia, Israel, and even Turkey—though the latter country has been relatively quiet on the issue—all do not believe a deal will stop Iran from attaining nuclear weapons.
“The issue is not the number of centrifuges or the amount of enrichment. It’s the trust. [Such countries] say [Iran’s] regime is a cheater… [that] they will go behind the backs of the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.S., and everyone else to build a bomb,” Amirahmadi said.
Gause said Saudi Arabia—a Sunni-Muslim rival of Shi’a Iran—has failed in its “efforts to roll back Iranian influence in the region.” The Saudis and some other Gulf states fear that Iran “will try to disrupt their domestic politics by trying to activate links with Shi’a communities,” he said. Bahrain, for instance, has a Sunni monarchy but a Shi’a-majority population. Countries like Saudi Arabia, said Gause, have “come to the conclusion that the U.S. isn’t going to take the lead in trying to block Iran’s regional games, and if that’s not going to happen, then they are going to have to do it.”
Javedanfar believes that in the absence of a nuclear deal—framework or final—Iran will seek to wreak havoc in the Middle East in order to strengthen its future negotiating position.
“[Iran] will make chaos in the region, and they will make it so bad that they will try to convince the Americans that no security will exist in this region without Iran,” Javedanfar said. “They will create chaos in order to force the Americans to sit down and deal with them.”
Even with a deal, he said, there is still “going to be instability in this region, because Iran is going to have more money—because some of the sanctions will be removed—and [Iran] will give it to all kinds of extremist groups in Iraq or the Assad regime, Hezbollah, and probably to the Houthis.”
If Iran and Western nations do ultimately reach a deal, signs are already emerging that other Middle East countries would react by expanding their own nuclear programs. Last week, Jordan signed a $10 billion deal with Russia to build its first nuclear power plant.
“The pushback against Iran’s success will be to match Iran’s recognized nuclear capability with programs that these countries will now start,” said Ottolenghi, who added that even with no nuclear deal in place, “as long as there is no pushback… Iran will continue to interfere” in other Mideast countries’ affairs.
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3)- Great White Hope: Why Some Dems Are Moving Right
The biggest Senate battlegrounds are in the Midwest, where Democrats have been losing ground with some longtime supporters.
Republicans are debating whether their path to the presidency in 2016 runs through the blue-collar Rust Belt states, or the demographically changing new South and Sunbelt states. For Democrats looking to retake the Senate, however, the formula is more clear-cut: Win back white working-class voters, or be consigned to a longer-term minority.
Most of the Senate battlegrounds run through the Midwest—Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio—along with New Hampshire, which carries demographic similarities with those older, whiter Great Lakes states. To defeat the vulnerable Republican incumbents, Democrats have a challenging task ahead: Making inroads with blue-collar voters, who have been stubbornly resistant to the party's agenda since Barack Obama's time as president.
It's no coincidence that Democrats are turning to candidates with biographies tailored to appeal to this constituency. Illinois Rep. Tammy Duckworth announced her candidacy Monday against Sen. Mark Kirk by touting her working-class upbringing and service in the military. Former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, who represented a blue-collar district in the House, is the expected Democratic nominee against Sen. Rob Portman. Former Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold, a populist who championed campaign-finance reform during his last Senate tenure, is eyeing a comeback against the businessman who defeated him in 2010. And former three-star Navy Admiral Joe Sestak, a former two-term congressman from the working-class Philadelphia suburbs, is an early front-runner to face a rematch against Sen. Pat Toomey.
Exit polls show that Rust Belt Democrats performed dismally among non-college-educated white voters in these states in 2010. Feingold won just 40 percent of their vote in 2010, five points behind Obama's vote share in the state two years later. In Ohio, Strickland tallied just 40 percent of the working-class white vote in his reelection bid—a 20-point decline from his first gubernatorial campaign. Kirk's narrow victory in solidly Democratic Illinois was attributable to a 33-point margin of victory among blue-collar white voters. Sen. Kelly Ayotte won a whopping 62 percent of their vote in 2010, 9 points higher than in Scott Brown's losing campaign in 2014, and 14 points higher than Mitt Romney. (Sestak was the one exception to the rule, losing his race primarily because of lower turnout among minority groups, not weaker-than-usual support from whites.)
Democratic officials are hoping that, running in a presidential year when turnout from the party's base voters is higher, the environment will be sufficient to flip these Democratic-leaning seats back in their column. Indeed, in three of the five races, the Democrats are running challengers who were swept away in the 2010 wave (Feingold, Sestak, and Strickland). Obama won all five states in both of his presidential campaigns.
But that optimism assumes that Democratic support among white working-class voters already has hit rock bottom. At the end of the year, Obama's national approval with them dipped to 27 percent—nine points lower than after the 2012 presidential election. Republicans are already looking at contesting many of these traditionally Democratic Great Lakes states in the presidential election, especially if a candidate like Scott Walker emerged as the nominee.
Meanwhile, there's no guarantee that Hillary Clinton will offer much of an improvement over Obama in wooing working-class voters back to the Democratic fold. Last year, the Clintons spent plenty of political capital appealing to their old supporters in last year's key Senate races in Kentucky and Arkansas. Not only did Democrats Alison Lundergan Grimes and Mark Pryor get crushed by their GOP opponents, they performed as poorly among blue-collar voters as President Obama. Perhaps white voters in the Midwest will act differently than their Southern counterparts, but the 2010 results will give them pause.
Part of the challenge for Democratic candidates in the last election was their resistance to split more aggressively from an unpopular president, even when it was in their self-interest. (PagingLundergan Grimes.) In 2016, with the presidential campaign occurring at the same time as these pivotal Senate races, that tendency to be a team player will be even greater—especially since the Senate battlegrounds are in more favorable territory.
But sounding more like an independent operator is an invaluable political asset—one that will be crucial for Democrats to have any hope of winning back disaffected voters alienated with the party. In her kickoff announcement Tuesday, Duckworth took a surprising step in that direction by critiquing Hillary Clinton for her secrecy regarding past State Department e-mails. Duckworth said she would "hold [Clinton] accountable" and called on her to testify before the Benghazi committee. Assuming he runs again, Feingold would be well-served to underscore his maverick reputation. He lost in 2010 because too many voters saw him as part of an overreaching Washington culture; he's hoping voters will remember his time taking on entrenched financial interests. Out of office, Sestak has been telegraphing his independence, feeling freer to criticize the president and his party's leadership.
For his part, Strickland trumpeted an endorsement from former President Clinton this week in hopes of recapturing some past glory. But relying on the Clintons' may not be enough in 2016. Disaffected voters are looking for change, and for candidates who aren't beholden to the same old message.
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4) AS U.S. AND IRAN SEEK NUCLEAR DEAL, SAUDI ARABIA MAKES ITS OWN MOVES
Author: David Kirkpatrick
As America talks to Iran, Saudi Arabia is lashing out against it. The kingdom, Iran’s chief regional rival, is leading airstrikes against an Iranian-backed faction in Yemen; backing a blitz in Idlib, Syria, by jihadists fighting the Iranian-backed Assad regime; and warning Washington not to allow the Iranian-backed militia to capture too much of Iraq during the fight to roll back the Islamic State, according to Arab diplomats familiar with the talks.
Through Egypt, a major beneficiary of Saudi aid, the kingdom is backing plans for a combined Arab military force to combat Iranian influence around the region. With another major aid recipient, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia is also expected to step up its efforts to develop a nuclear bomb, potentially setting off an arms race in the region.
All this comes just a few weeks after the death of King Abdullah and the passing of the throne to a new ruler, King Salman, who then installed his 34-year-old son Mohamed in the powerful dual roles of defense minister and chief of the royal court.
“Taking matters into our own hands is the name of the game today,” said Jamal Khashoggi, a veteran Saudi journalist and former adviser to the government. “A deal will open up the Saudi appetite and the Turkish appetite for more nuclear programs. But for the time being Saudi Arabia is moving ahead with its operations to pull the carpet out from underneath the Iranians in our region.”
“Taking matters into our own hands is the name of the game today,” said Jamal Khashoggi, a veteran Saudi journalist and former adviser to the government. “A deal will open up the Saudi appetite and the Turkish appetite for more nuclear programs. But for the time being Saudi Arabia is moving ahead with its operations to pull the carpet out from underneath the Iranians in our region.”
With the approach of a self-imposed Tuesday night deadline for the framework of a nuclear deal between Iran and the Western powers, the talks themselves are already changing the dynamics of regional politics. The proposed deal would trade relief from economic sanctions on Iran for insurance against the risk that Iran might rapidly develop a nuclear bomb. But many Arab analysts and diplomats say that security against the nuclear risk may come at the cost of worsening ongoing conflicts around the Middle East as Saudi Arabia and its Sunni Muslim allies push back against what they see as efforts by Shiite-led Iran to impose its influence — often on sectarian battle lines.
Unless Iran pulls back, “you will see more direct Arab responses and you will see a higher level of geopolitical tension in the whole region,” argued Nabil Fahmy, a veteran Egyptian diplomat and former foreign minister.
In Yemen, where a bombing campaign by a Saudi-led coalition killed dozens of civilians in an errant strike on a camp for displaced families, the Saudis accuse Iran of supporting the Houthi movement, which follows a form of Shiite Islam and recently came close to taking control of the country’s four largest cities. (Western diplomats say Iran has provided money to the group but does not control it.) In Bahrain, across a short causeway from Saudi Arabia, the kingdom and its allies accuse Iran of backing opposition from the Shiite majority against the Sunni monarchy. And Iran has also cultivated clients in government in the great Arab capitals of Damascus, Baghdad and Beirut, the last through its proxy, Hezbollah.
Even if the proposed deal constrains Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the Saudis and their allies note, the pact would do nothing to stop Iran from projecting its influence through such local proxies and conventional arms. Sanctions relief from the deal could even revive the Iranian economy with a flood of new oil revenues. “The Americans seem nonchalant about this, like, ‘This is your sectarian problem, you deal with it,’ ” Mr. Khashoggi said. “So the Saudis went ahead with this Yemen operation.” Watching Secretary of State John Kerry pursue a deal in Lausanne, Switzerland, many in Saudi Arabia and other Arab states say their ultimate fear is that the talks could lead to a broader détente or even alliance between Washington and Tehran.
Washington is already tacitly coordinating with Iran in its fight against ISIS in Iraq. As a result, the American-led military campaign is effectively strengthening the Iranian-backed government in Syria by weakening its most dangerous foe, Arab diplomats and analysts say. So they wonder what else Mr. Kerry is talking about with his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif, “on those long walks together” in Lausanne, said Salman Shaikh, director of the Brookings Doha Center, in Qatar. “Is there something going on underneath the table?”
Easing the hostility between the United States and Iran would tear up what has been a bedrock principle of regional politics since the Iranian revolution and the storming of the American embassy in 1979. “But let’s not forget that we are still dealing with the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Mr. Shaikh said, reflecting the skeptical views of many in the Saudi Arabian camp.
“There is a disbelief in the Arab world that these negotiations are only about the nuclear file, and a frequent complaint here is that we are kept in the dark, we are not consulted,” said Gamal Abdel Gawad Soltan, a political scientist at the American University in Cairo. “The U.S. is much less trusted as an ally, as an insurance policy towards the security threats facing the governments in the region, and so those governments decide to act on their own.” President Obama has argued that a verifiable deal is the best way to secure the Arab states because it is the most effective way to ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear bomb. Even military action to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities, the Obama administration argues, would set it back only temporarily. But she acknowledged that at the moment Saudi Arabia and its allies did not see it that way. “The Saudi and Iranian rivalry is being played out now in a hot war in Iraq, in Syria and now in Yemen,” she said. “The confrontation is causing people on both sides to dig into their sectarian positions.”
Aversion to the Iran deal in the Saudi camp is also representative of the latest convergence of views with the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been deeply critical of the nuclear pact. But “they can be on the same side without necessarily talking,” said Mr. Soltan of the American University in Cairo.
Whether an Iran deal is consummated or not, he and several other analysts said, the negotiations have contributed to a divergence with the Obama administration and a growing desire for greater autonomy among the Sunni Arab states.
Whether an Iran deal is consummated or not, he and several other analysts said, the negotiations have contributed to a divergence with the Obama administration and a growing desire for greater autonomy among the Sunni Arab states.
Saudi Arabia and its Persian Gulf allies bucked the Obama administration to sponsor the military takeover and repression of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 2013, for example. And last year the United Arab Emirates carried out airstrikes from Egyptian bases against Islamist allied militias in Tripoli, Libya, without notifying Washington. Some American diplomats were so incredulous that the U.A.E. acted on its own that they doubted early reports until a second set of strikes confirmed them.
“There are issues that you cannot expect a superpower to engage in directly because of their own politics and interests, and if you don’t have the capabilities or the initiatives to deal with them yourself then you are not providing enough of a deterrent to other regional players,” said Mr. Fahmy, the former Egyptian foreign minister. He added, speaking of Arab relations with Washington, “There is a difference between a security relationship and a security addiction.”
“There are issues that you cannot expect a superpower to engage in directly because of their own politics and interests, and if you don’t have the capabilities or the initiatives to deal with them yourself then you are not providing enough of a deterrent to other regional players,” said Mr. Fahmy, the former Egyptian foreign minister. He added, speaking of Arab relations with Washington, “There is a difference between a security relationship and a security addiction.”
Mr. Khashoggi, the Saudi editor, argued that Saudi Arabia’s own campaign to push back against Iran without waiting for the Americans was showing signs of success. Saudi Arabian and Turkish sponsors, he said, had backed the coalition of jihadist groups that recently captured the Syrian city of Idlib in the first major victory in months against the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
One participant in the coalition was the Nusra Front, the Syrian arm of Al Qaeda, a terrorist group in the eyes of the West. But members of the jihadi coalition “are the ones who captured Idlib, it is an important development, and I think we are going to see more of that,” Mr. Khashoggi said. “Coordination between Turkish and Saudi intelligence has never been as good as now.”
The after-the-fact American support for the military campaign in Yemen, he said, was also a reassuring sign that Washington was willing to back Saudi leadership as it pushes back against Iran across the region. “The Americans are going along with that,” he said.
The after-the-fact American support for the military campaign in Yemen, he said, was also a reassuring sign that Washington was willing to back Saudi leadership as it pushes back against Iran across the region. “The Americans are going along with that,” he said.
The operation “proved that a regional power can lead, they do not have to wait for America,” he said, “and if the issue is moral or justified, America will get on board.”
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