Skidaway Island Republican Club
Presents:
True Perspectives
The War in Cyber-space
Tuesday, July 14, 2015
Plantation Club
Cocktails : 4:30 PM
Presentation : 5:00 PM
Sustaining members – Free
Regular members - $5
Non-Members - $10
All Welcome
Jim' Van de Velde's resume:
James Van de Velde, Ph.D., a Lecturer Johns Hopkins University and Adjunct Faculty at the Georgetown University, is also a Lieutenant Commander in the US Naval Intelligence Reserves where he teaches at the National Intelligence University. He is also an Associate for the consulting firm, Booz Allen Hamilton. He is a former White House Appointee in the US Department of State for nuclear weapons arms control under President George H. W. Bush, a former Lecturer and Residential College Dean at Yale University, and a former career Foreign Service Officer for the US State Department of State. Dr. Van de Velde currently consults with US Cyber Command on US cyber strategy. He has consulted previously on national security affairs with Special Operations Command, the Open Source Academy, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Counter Proliferation Center, the National Counter Terrorism Center, the US Joint Staff, and the US Department of Treasury. Dr. Van de Velde is an Associate Member of the International Institute of Strategic Studies and has held fellowships at the Center for International Security and Arms Control at Stanford University and the US-Japan Program at Harvard University. Dr. Van de Velde received his B.A. from Yale University in 1982 and his Ph.D. in National Security Affairs from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1988."
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I am not yet back in the saddle but could not resists posting the above.
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We just spent about 40 weeks out West where people are different. Their values are different than most who live in large urban areas. Californians are very different. They are at the extreme when it comes to values, life style and are change seekers as are Easterners. Those in the middle, the area where we spent a good of time, the meaty part of America, are unlike the suburbanites on the West and East coast who are, to my thinking, the bread.
I prefer protein to carbohydrates.
Americans with traditional values are being sandwiched in by the extremes and therein, lies many of our nation's problems.
Charles Krauthammer said it better than me when he pointed out the 'left have controlled out culture through various mediums, ie. TV, Hollywood,news and media folks and have been able to do so because of the break up and diminished influence of the family.and decline in education standards among other factors.' See: http://www.staged.com/video?v=Klmb
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Not only is Obama a lousy historian but he is an even worse artist. He has drawn tens of red lines and wasted buckets of paint. (See 1, 1a and 1b below.)
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Dick
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1)The President Against the Historian
Michael Oren’s candid account of Obama’s Mideast policy has won him the right enemies.
By Bret Stephens
Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the United States, has written the smartest and juiciest diplomatic memoir that I’ve read in years, and I’ve read my share. The book, called “Ally,” has the added virtues of being politically relevant and historically important. This has the Obama administration—which doesn’t come out looking too good in Mr. Oren’s account—in an epic snit.
The tantrum began two weeks ago, when Mr. Oren penned an op-edin this newspaper undiplomatically titled “How Obama Abandoned Israel.” The article did not acquit Israel of making mistakes in its relations with the White House, but pointed out that most of those mistakes were bungles of execution. The administration’s slights toward Israel were usually premeditated.
Like, for instance, keeping Jerusalem in the dark about Washington’s back-channel negotiations with Tehran, which is why Israel appears to be spying on the nuclear talks in Switzerland. Or leaking news of secret Israeli military operations against Hezbollah in Syria. Mr. Oren’s op-ed prompted Dan Shapiro, U.S. ambassador in Tel Aviv, to call Mr. Netanyahu and demand he publicly denounce the op-ed. The prime minister demurred on grounds that Mr. Oren, now a member of the Knesset, no longer works for him. The former ambassador, also one of Israel’s most celebrated historians, isn’t even a member of Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party, which makes him hard to typecast as a right-wing apparatchik.
But it’s typical of the administration that no Israeli slight is too minor not to be met with overreaction—and not only because Mr. Obama and his entourage have thin skins. One of the revelations of “Ally” is how eager the administration was to fabricate crises with Israel, apparently on the theory that strained relations would mollify Palestinians and extract concessions from Mr. Netanyahu.
To some extent, it worked: In 2009, Mr. Netanyahu endorsed a Palestinian state, an unprecedented step for a Likud leader, and he later imposed a 10-month moratorium on settlement construction, a step not even Labor Party leaders like Yitzhak Rabin ever took.
But no Israeli concession could ever appease Mr. Obama, who had the habit of demanding heroic political risks from Mr. Netanyahu while expecting heroic deference in return. In 2010, during a visit from Joe Biden, an Israeli functionary approved permits for the housing construction in a neighborhood of Jerusalem that Israel considers an integral part of the municipality but Palestinians consider a settlement.
The administration took the Palestinian side. Hillary Clinton spent 45 minutes berating Mr. Netanyahu over the phone. Deputy Secretary of State Jim Steinberg “summoned” Mr. Oren to Foggy Bottom and read out his list of administration demands. What follows is one of the more memorable scenes in “Ally.”
“Steinberg added his own furious comments—department staffers, I later heard, listened in on our conversation and cheered—about Israel’s insult to the president and the pride of the United States. Then came my turn to respond.
“ ‘Let me get this straight,’ I began. ‘We inadvertently slight the vice president and apologize, and I become the first foreign ambassador summoned by this administration to the State Department. Bashar al-Assad hosts Iranian president Ahmadinejad, who calls for murdering seven million Israelis, but do you summon Syria’s ambassador? No, you send your ambassador back to Damascus.’ ”
“Ally” is filled with such scenes, which helps explain why it infuriates the administration. Truth hurts. President Obama constantly boasts that he’s the best friend Israel has ever had. After reading Mr. Oren’s book, a fairer assessment is that Mr. Obama is a great friend when the decisions are easy—rushing firefighting equipment to Israel during a forest fire—a grudging friend when the decisions are uncomfortable—opposing the Palestinian bid for statehood at the U.N.—and no friend at all when the decisions are hard—stopping Iran from getting a bomb.
Best friends are with you when the decisions are hard.
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Since “Ally” was published, Mr. Oren has been denounced in near-hysterical terms in the media, Israeli and American. In Israel the carping is politics as usual and in the U.S. it’s sucking-up-to-the-president as usual. The nastiest comments came from Leon Wieseltier, the gray eminence of minor magazines, and the most tedious ones came from the Anti-Defamation League, that factory of moral pronouncement. When these are the people yelling at you, you’ve likely done something right.
Mr. Oren has. His memoir is the best contribution yet to a growing literature—from Vali Nasr’s “Dispensable Nation” to Leon Panetta’s “Worthy Fights”—describing how foreign policy is made in the Age of Obama: lofty in its pronouncements and rich in its self-regard, but incompetent in its execution and dismal in its results. Good for Mr. Oren for providing such comprehensive evidence of the facts as he lived them.
1a)
1a)
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| The US State Department report detailing Iran’s continued sponsorship of international terrorism proves that Tehran cannot be trusted to curb its nuclear program, National Infrastructure, Energy and Water Minister Yuval Steinitz said on Saturday. Steinitz was reacting to the annual report just issued by Washington, which determined that terrorist attacks worldwide spiked by more than a third and fatalities soared by 81 percent in 2014. Last year saw Islamic State eclipse al-Qaida as the leading jihadist terrorist group, the State Department said on Friday. Steinitz, however, is more concerned with the report’s findings on Iran. The minister said the report’s conclusions “dealt a death knell” to “the American delusion, according to which an easing of sanctions as part of an interim nuclear treaty would lead to a moderation of its position.” “That’s why the report should serve as a warning sign for anyone who thinks Iran will moderate its behavior after a final-status nuclear treaty,” he said. The State Department report faults Tehran for continuing to fund its proxy organizations throughout the Middle East – namely Hezbollah and Hamas – during 2014, even while it was engaged in talks with the West. Iran also expanded its foreign operations in Africa, Asia and South America, the report finds. Despite facing costly obstacles from the Syrian civil war, Iran continued arming and funding terrorist proxies that target Israel throughout 2014 largely unabated, the report noted. The annual accounting of organized terrorism worldwide asserts that Iran has continued, if not expanded, its operations beyond its historical focus on Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon, to a limited number of operations in Africa, Asia and Latin America, as well as to “various groups throughout the Middle East.” “Iran has historically provided weapons, training, and funding to Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups, including Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC),” the report reads. “These Palestinian terrorist groups have been behind a number of deaths from attacks originating in Gaza and the West Bank.” Much of Iran’s efforts throughout 2014 focused on maintaining its “resistance front” in Syria and Iraq, the report says, through its support for Shia governments and militias. The report notes of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force presence on the ground in both countries. The report makes note of an Israeli naval raid in March 2014 on a cargo ship traversing the Red Sea, the Klos C, off the coast of Sudan. The ship’s cargo included 40 M-302 rockets, 180 mortars, and approximately 400,000 rounds of ammunition hidden within crates of cement labeled “Made in Iran.” “Although Hamas’s ties to Tehran have been strained due to the Syrian civil war, in a November 25 speech, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei highlighted Iran’s military support to ‘Palestinian brothers’ in Gaza and called for the West Bank to be similarly armed,” the report continues. “In December, Hamas deputy leader Moussa Abu Marzouk announced bilateral relations with Iran and Hamas were ‘back on track.’” In the north, Iran continues providing Hezbollah – active in the fight in Syria as well as against the Jewish state from Lebanon – with “hundreds of millions of dollars,” the report states, noting that Tehran is training “thousands of its fighters at camps in Iran.” “Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, head of the IRGC Aerospace Force, stated in November that ‘the IRGC and Hezbollah are a single apparatus jointed together,’ and Lebanese Hezbollah deputy secretary Gen. Naim Qassem boasted that Iran had provided his organization with missiles that have ‘pinpoint accuracy’ in separate November public remarks,” it states. The State Department asserts that, in admitting its arming of Hezbollah, Iran is in open violation of UN Security Council Resolutions 1701 and 1747. The report praises Israel’s response to terrorist threats throughout 2014, which saw war with Hamas in Gaza lasting more than 50 days that summer. “Israel was hit by a record volume of rocket and mortar fire from Gaza and the Sinai in 2014, according to the Israeli government, with more than 4,660 projectiles launched, most during the July-August conflict, at Israeli territory compared to 74 launchings in 2013 and 2,557 in 2012,” it says, referring to Israel as a “committed counterterrorism partner.” “Militants from Gaza also infiltrated Israeli territory using tunnels in six separate attacks and, for the first time, by a sea-borne operation,” it continues. The report praises Egypt for taking aggressive counterterrorism measures against Hamas and its tunnel operations in Sinai. It notes, briefly, that Iranian proliferation of nuclear weapons remains a concern. In that regard, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius is due to meet his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif, on Monday to discuss the final round of talks over Iran’s nuclear program, beginning later in the week, a senior French diplomatic source said on Saturday. The bilateral meeting, on the sidelines of an EU foreign ministers summit in Luxembourg, will be followed by a meeting between Zarif and all the European parties negotiating with Iran. “We will see if we have moved forward or gone backwards,” said the diplomat. “There is still a lot of work to do to get the robust deal that we are hoping for.” He said major powers, which also include the United States, Russia and China, are not thinking about a long-term extension to the talks and are focused on reaching a deal around the June 30 deadline. Iran and the group of six – the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain, and Germany – reached a framework nuclear deal on April 2 in Lausanne. They aim for a final agreement by June 30 under which Iran would restrain its nuclear program in exchange for relief from economic sanctions. France has been sticking to a tougher line than the US in the negotiations. Michael Wilner and Reuters contributed to this report. 1b)The road to ‘entropy on a scale not seen in centuries’
Former military intel chief warns that it begins with “wishful thinking” in the White House
Illustration on Obama’s fantasist thinking on a nuclear Iran by Alexander Hunter/The Washington Times
Lt. Gen Michael T. Flynn (ret.) served 33 years in the U.S. Army. Being named President Obama’s director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2012 was the culmination of his career. He thought his job was to relate facts, not fables. It soon became clear that his superiors didn’t agree.
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen chairs the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa. Ted Deutch is the ranking member. Last week, they invited Gen. Flynn to testify. They – and anyone else concerned about the threats facing America and her allies -- should think hard about what he told them.
Most pressing is the nuclear deal with Iran’s rulers that the president is attempting to conclude by the end of this month. Gen. Flynn warned that it is shaping up as “not a permanent fix but merely a placeholder. The 10-year time frame only makes sense if the administration truly believes the Iranian regime will change its strategic course.” And that, he said, can only be characterized as “wishful thinking.”
Iran’s rulers continue to claim that whatever nuclear research they are conducting -- in facilities buried under mountains and at military installations – is exclusively for generating electricity and other peaceful purposes. But they also are developing missiles – presumably not as a means for keeping air conditioners humming in kindergartens. The missiles they possess today can reach targets throughout most of the Middle East. The missiles they will possess tomorrow, Gen. Flynn predicted, “will include ICBMs capable of attacking the American homeland.”
He is puzzled by the fact that Iran’s missile program has been excluded from the negotiations: “I don’t see how delivery systems (missiles or sophisticated guidance) can be excluded from any ‘deal.’ Reach is as important as force, just as in boxing.”
Expanding on his remarks in written testimony, Gen. Flynn emphasized that Iran’s increasing capabilities should be viewed in light of its intentions. But the White House, he said, has refused to “acknowledge the frequent warnings from our intelligence community, especially defense intelligence, regarding the hegemonic behaviors of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” In other words, Iran’s Supreme Leader and his Islamic Revolutionary Guards clearly mean to extend their theocratic empire throughout Middle East.
Gen. Flynn told lawmakers – more tactfully than I am about to – that President Obama’s policies are failing not just vis-à-vis Iran but also vis-à-vis the Islamic State and al Qaeda. The death toll in Syria since a civil war began there in 2011 and in Iraq since the U.S. withdrawal the same year is over 200,000 with no indication that the carnage will end any time soon. Libya and Yemen are in chaos. Russia, China and North Korea are taking advantage of what they perceive as American fecklessness. One could go on.
Not only isn’t President Obama asking his advisors for an alternative policy, “anyone who proposes one,” Gen. Flynn told Congress, “is immediately exiled from the establishment.”
He knows whereof he speaks. He was – assuming I’ve read the evidence correctly and I’m confident I have -- forced out as military intel chief last year for refusing to toe the administration’s line that the “tide of war” is receding and that the terrorists are “on the run.” Echoing those memes would have been a career-booster but it would have been dishonest at a time when he and other top intelligence officers were well aware that the conflicts initiated by those claiming to fight for the global triumph of Islam are spreading, intensifying and accelerating.
The White House insists that if Iran signs a nuclear agreement and then proceeds to violate it, U.S. intelligence will not be blindsided. As someone who knows what America’s spooks can and cannot do, Gen. Flynn is skeptical. He cited a recent Defense Science Board study concluding that “creative missile and nuclear proliferators” have the upper hand “in the cat and mouse game they are playing with the United States and the international community.”
Not long ago, President Obama was saying that no deal with Iran would be preferable to a bad deal with Iran. Were that proposition still operative, the American side would walk unless Iran agreed to “open up all of its facilities, scientific, military, and current nuclear facilities, for international inspections.”
Iran’s rulers have been saying they will never do that. The most they may permit is “managed access” which lets them decide where inspectors go and when. Would that give them an opportunity to hide what they don’t want inspectors to see? The question answers itself.
The president and his supporters say if we don’t go along with Iran’s terms for an agreement the consequence will be war. Gen. Flynn told Congress that a range of other options should be considered and he suggested key components of some of them. His main point, however, is that “we face a very radicalized element in the likes of Islamic extremism, Sunni and Shia.” That leads him to this tough conclusion: “The administration's refusal to state what we can plainly see is beyond irresponsible.”
He worries that unless there is a shift, the result will be “entropy on a scale not seen in centuries. We would have no way of anticipating risk, much less managing or containing it. Delusions abound these days, but anyone who can argue for an ICBM- or nuclear-capable Iran is more a pyromaniac than pragmatist.”
If Gen. Flynn’s warnings have begun to resonate on Capitol Hill, I would expect a solid majority of members of Congress – Democratic and Republican alike – to vehemently oppose any agreement with Iran based on “wishful thinking.” But perhaps that’s just wishful thinking on my part.
Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and a columnist for the Washington Times.
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