Obama Blows It Again - Intentionally?

Some Tybee Beach Pictures - More to come:

Dagny, Blake and Stella - the cousins!

Tammy, Stella and Daniel!


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Today Obama proved, once again, he is two things - a liar and a fool.

I suspect he intentionally wants to arm Iran and change the Saudi and Israeli dynamics. (See 1 below.)
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Some trivia you might find interesting. (See 2 below.)
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Dick
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1)

The Best Arguments for an Iran Deal

The heroic assumptions, and false premises, of our diplomacy.

By BRET STEPHENS

In formal rhetoric, prolepsis means the anticipation of possible objections to an argument for the sake of answering them. So let’s be proleptic about the Iranian nuclear deal, whose apologists are already trotting out excuses for this historic diplomatic debacle.

The heroic case. Sure, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is an irascible and violent revolutionary bent on imposing a dark ideology on his people and his neighborhood. Much the same could be said of Mao Zedong when Henry Kissinger paid him a visit in 1971—a diplomatic gamble that paid spectacular dividends as China became a de facto U.S. ally in the Cold War and opened up to the world under Deng Xiaoping.

But the hope that Iran is the new China fails a few tests. Mao faced an overwhelming external threat from the Soviet Union. Iran faces no such threat and is winning most of its foreign proxy wars. Beijing ratcheted down tensions with Washington with friendly table-tennis matches. Tehran ratchets them up by locking up American citizens and seizing cargo ships in the Strait of Hormuz. Deng Xiaoping believed that to get rich is glorious. Iranian President Hasan Rouhani, a supposed reformer, spent last Friday marching prominently in the regime’s yearly “Death to America, Death to Israel” parade.

If there is evidence of an Iranian trend toward moderation it behooves proponents of a deal to show it.

The transactional case. OK, so Iran hasn’t really moderated its belligerent behavior, much less its antediluvian worldview. And a deal won’t mean we won’t still have to oppose Iran on other battlefields, whether it’s Yemen or Syria or Gaza. But that doesn’t matter, because a nuclear deal is nothing more than a calculated swap. Iran puts its nuclear ambitions into cold storage for a decade. In exchange, it comes in from the cold economically and diplomatically. Within circumscribed parameters, everyone can be a winner.

But a transaction requires some degree of trust. Since we can’t trust Iran we need an airtight system of monitoring and verification. Will the nuclear deal provide that? John Kerry will swear that it will, but as recently as January Czech officials blocked a covert $61 million purchase by Iran of “dual-use” nuclear technologies. A month before that, the U.S. found evidence that Iran had gone on an illicit “shopping spree” for its plutonium plant in Arak. That’s what we know. What do we not know?

Also, how does a nuclear deal not wind up being Iran’s ultimate hostage in dictating terms for America’s broader Mideast policy? Will the administration risk its precious nuclear deal if Iran threatens to break it every time the two countries are at loggerheads over regional crises in Yemen or Syria? The North Koreans already mastered the art of selling their nuclear compliance for one concession after another—and they still got the bomb.

The defeatist case. All right: So the Iran deal is full of holes. Maybe it won’t work. Got any better ideas? Sanctions weren’t about to stop a determined regime, and we couldn’t have enforced them for much longer. Nobody wants to go to war to stop an Iranian bomb, not the American public and not even the Israelis. And conservatives, of all people, should know that foreign policy often amounts to a choice between evils. The best case for a nuclear deal is that it is the lesser evil.

Then again, serious sanctions were only imposed on Iran in November 2011. They cut the country’s oil exports by half, shut off its banking system from the rest of the world, sent the rial into free fall and caused the inflation rate to soar to 60%. By October 2013 Iran was six months away from a severe balance-of-payments crisis, according to estimates by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. And that was only the first turn of the economic screw: Iran’s permitted oil exports could have been cut further; additional sanctions could have been imposed on the “charitable” foundations controlled by Iran’s political, military and clerical elite. Instead of turning the screw, Mr. Obama relieved the pressure the next month by signing on to the interim agreement now in force.

It’s true that nobody wants war. But a deal that gives Iran the right to enrich unlimited quantities of uranium after a decade or so would leave a future president no option other than war to stop Iran from building dozens of bombs. And a deal that does nothing to stop Iran’s development of ballistic missiles would allow them to put one of those bombs atop one of those missiles.

Good luck. Americans are a lucky people—lucky in our geography, our founders and the immigrants we attract to our shores. So lucky that Bismarck supposedly once said “there is a special providence for drunkards, fools, and the United States of America.”

Maybe we’ll get lucky again. Maybe Iran will change for the better after Mr. Khamenei passes from the scene. Maybe international monitors will succeed with Iran where they failed with North Korea. Maybe John Kerry is the world’s best negotiator, and this deal was the best we could do.

Or maybe we won’t be lucky. Maybe there’s no special providence for nations drunk on hope, led by fools.

1a)

16 reasons nuke deal is an Iranian victory and a Western catastrophe

Has Iran agreed to ‘anywhere, anytime’ inspections, an end to R&D on faster centrifuges, and the dismantling of its key nuclear sites? No, no, and no

Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani on Tuesday unsurprisingly hailed the nuclear agreement struck with US-led world powers, and derided the “failed” efforts of the “warmongering Zionists.” His delight, Iran’s delight, is readily understandable.

The agreement legitimizes Iran’s nuclear program, allows it to retain core nuclear facilities, permits it to continue research in areas that will dramatically speed its breakout to the bomb should it choose to flout the deal, but also enables it to wait out those restrictions and proceed to become a nuclear threshold state with full international legitimacy. Here’s how.

1.  Was the Iranian regime required, as a condition for this deal, to disclose the previous military dimensions of its nuclear program — to come clean on its violations — in order both to ensure effective inspections of all relevant facilities and to shatter the Iranian-dispelled myth that it has never breached its non-proliferation obligations? No. (This failure, arguably the original sin of the Western negotiating approach, is expertly detailed here by Emily B. Landau.) Rather than exposing Iran’s violations, the new deal solemnly asserts that the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which Iran has failed to honor “remains the cornerstone” of ongoing efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. The deal provides for a mechanism “to address past and present issues of concern relating to its nuclear programme,” but Iran has managed to dodge such efforts for years, and the deal inspires little hope of change in that area, blithely anticipating “closing the issue” in the next few months.

2. Has the Iranian regime been required to halt all uranium enrichment, including thousands of centrifuges spinning at its main Natanz enrichment facility? No. The deal specifically legitimizes enrichment under certain eroding limitations.

3. Has the Iranian regime been required to shut down and dismantle its Arak heavy water reactor and plutonium production plant? No. It will convert, not dismantle the facility, under a highly complex process. Even if it honors this clause, its commitment to “no additional heavy water reactors or accumulation of heavy water in Iran” will expire after 15 years.

4. Has the Iranian regime been required to shut down and dismantle the underground uranium enrichment facility it built secretly at Fordow? No. (Convert, not dismantle.)

5. Has the Iranian regime been required to halt its ongoing missile development? No.

6. Has the Iranian regime been required to halt research and development of the faster centrifuges that will enable it to break out to the bomb far more rapidly than is currently the case? No. The deal specifically legitimizes ongoing R&D under certain eroding limitations. It specifically provides, for instance, that Iran will commence testing of the fast “IR-8 on single centrifuge machines and its intermediate cascades” as soon as the deal goes into effect, and will “commence testing of up to 30 IR-6 and IR-8 centrifuges after eight and a half years.”

7. Has the Iranian regime been required to submit to “anywhere, anytime” inspections of any and all facilities suspected of engaging in rogue nuclear-related activity? No. Instead, the deal describes at considerable length a very protracted process of advance warning and “consultation” to resolve concerns.

8. Has the international community established procedures setting out how it will respond to different classes of Iranian violations, to ensure that the international community can act with sufficient speed and efficiency to thwart a breakout to the bomb? No.

9. Has the Iranian regime been required to halt its arming, financing and training of the Hezbollah terrorist army in south Lebanon? No. (This kind of non-nuclear issue was not discussed at the negotiations.)

10. Has the Iranian regime been required to surrender for trial the members of its leadership placed on an Interpol watch list for their alleged involvement in the bombing, by a Hezbollah suicide bomber, of the AMIA Jewish community center offices in Buenos Aires in 1994 that resulted in the deaths of 85 people? No. (This kind of non-nuclear issue was not discussed at the negotiations.)

11. Has the Iranian regime undertaken to close its 80 estimated “cultural centers” in South America from which it allegedly fosters terrorist networks? No. (This kind of non-nuclear issue was not discussed at the negotiations.)

12. Has the Iranian leadership agreed to stop inciting hatred among its people against Israel and the United States and to stop its relentless calls for the annihilation of Israel? No. (This kind of non-nuclear issue was not discussed at the negotiations.)

13. Has the Iranian regime agreed to halt executions, currently running at an average of some three a day, the highest rate for 20 years? No. (This kind of non-nuclear issue was not discussed at the negotiations.)

14. Does the nuclear deal shatter the painstakingly constructed sanctions regime that forced Iran to the negotiating table? Yes.

15. Will the deal usher in a new era of global commercial interaction with Iran, reviving the Iranian economy and releasing financial resources that Iran will use to bolster its military forces and terrorist networks? Yes.

16. Does the nuclear deal further cement Iran’s repressive and ideologically rapacious regime in power? Yes.

No wonder Iran and its allies are celebrating. Nobody else should be.


1b)

With Iran deal in the bag, what's Israel to do now?

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses a joint meeting of the United States Congress in the House chamber at the US Capitol in Washington, DC on Tuesday, March 3, 2015, in a speech warning against the then-looming US-backed deal with Iran.
(Win McNamee/Getty Images/AFP)

If the Iran deal announced Tuesday has any silver lining, from an Israeli perspective, it is that a usually bitterly divided country is joining hands in rejecting it. In unfamiliar unison, both the coalition and opposition denounce the agreement the six world powers struck with the Islamic Republic, lamenting that it will allow it to become a legitimate threshold nuclear state within the foreseeable future.

Even before she learned the details of the deal, MK Tzipi Livni spoke on Tuesday morning of a “dramatic day.”

While everyone in Israel considers this agreement supremely dangerous (though not necessarily an existential threat), politicians and pundits will spend the next few days arguing about whose fault it is and what should be done now that it’s a done deal.

One questions that will undoubtedly arise is whether a different outcome would have been possible had the government acted more wisely. No one denies that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu deserves much credit for bringing the Iranian threat to the world’s attention, and by threatening military action spurred the international community on to erect an unprecedented sanctions regime. But, some argue that his confrontational style in opposing the deal maneuvered Israel into a corner, not giving it any chance to impact the ongoing negotiations.

“It’s on him. It’s his name,” said MK Yair Lapid last week, calling for Netanyahu’s resignation. “His approach led not only the United States but also the other five powers involved in the negotiations — China, Russia, France, Britain and Germany — not to take into account Israel’s concerns over the deal, concerns which are right and justified.” Opposition leader Isaac Herzog echoed these thoughts on Monday.

Labor MK Shelly Yachimovich on Tuesday went as far as stating that the prime minister’s approach to the US vis-a-vis Iran was an “utter failure” that will “yet be taught in history text books.”

One can surely argue about whether the prime minister’s strategy was helpful. Maybe Israel could have slightly improved the terms of the deal had it worked through quiet diplomatic channels rather than constantly scorning the world powers as they negotiated with Iran, as Netanyahu and his men did for the last few months.

But that’s not guaranteed.

“I’m not a fan of prime minister, but the Iranian nuclear program was not a political issue. It’s not sure that if he had acted differently the deal would have been better,” said Yoel Guzansky, who used to worked on the Iranian threat at the National Security Council. “Maybe Israel could have had more influence in the talks, but it’s impossible to say whether that would have led to a better result.”

At the end of the day, both the P5+1 world powers and the Iranians wanted a deal, and thus Israel’s ability to avert the outcome was hamstrung from the outset, explained Guzansky, today a research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.

The Americans are far away from the Middle East, and President Barack Obama was keen on chalking up at least one victory in the region, where everything else he touched failed, he suggested. Tehran also badly wanted an agreement badly, as they’re increasingly suffering from the sanctions and can now look forward to a legitimate nuclear program.

Officials wait for a meeting with diplomats from the P5+1 powers, the EU and Iran, Hotel March 31, 2015 in Lausanne.
(AFP/Brendan Smialowski/Pool)

By vocally opposing the deal, Israel made plain that it is not bound by the agreement and thus maintains the right to act militarily against Iran’s nuclear facilities, former national security advisor Yaakov Amidror suggested Tuesday. In hindsight it’s always easy to say a different policy would have been smarter, he told Army Radio, “but it’s impossible to verify such arguments and therefore they can’t be taken seriously.”

Likud voters occasionally call Netanyahu a magician (for winning election after election) but preventing this deal might have been really impossible.

“Even if Israeli statecraft in everything relating to Iran had been as good as human minds can make it, I have doubts whether it would have made the difference,” Yehezkel Dror, a former adviser to several Israeli prime ministers, told The Times of Israel a few months ago, as it became clear that Iran and the P5+1 would eventually sign a deal establishing Iran as a nuclear threshold state. “I don’t think Israel had the power to change this policy. Even if it had behaved wisely, which it did not.”
Now what?

But now it’s more important to look ahead. What can Israel do at this stage? Despite assurances from Jerusalem that it will do whatever is necessary to protect itself, it is abundantly clear to all that a preemptive military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities is out of the question (unless Iran blatantly violates the agreement and dashes toward the bomb before the current agreement elapses).

Once Jerusalem realizes that it’s impossible to avert the evil decree of Tuesday’s nuclear deal, maybe it’s time for the government to change tack and ask the Americans for a handsome compensation package. Washington went to great lengths to reassure the Gulf States, making generous promises. Israel would be well-advised to likewise appeal to the administration’s largesse and try to make the best of a bad situation. It could ask for additional F-35s and Iron Dome batteries, for specific security guarantees or an increase to the Washington’s annual defense payments.

Before the agreement was finalized, officials in Jerusalem didn’t want to discuss such requests, insisting to fight the prospective deal to the bitter end. It stands to reason that, at least initially, Netanyahu will not publicly talk about compensations. Rather, he will attack the agreement with everything his verbal arsenal has to offer. His next move will likely be to try to influence American lawmakers, who can still kill the deal.

The deal announced in Vienna is now headed for scrutiny by the US Congress, which fought hard for the right to review the agreement. But it currently appears highly unlikely that the American lawmakers would overturn it. Even if the Republican-controlled Congress were to pass legislation seeking to tank the deal, the president will use his veto.

Despite Obama’s lame duck status and the assumption that, in the fight for the presidential nomination, many Democrats will want to prove their pro-Israel credentials, very few analysts believe that a two-thirds majority against the deal is realistic. It would need 13 Democratic senators voting against their own president — a rather outlandish scenario.

And yet, some Israeli pundits believe that Netanyahu will now launch a “world war” in Congress. After his controversial March 3 speech there nobody can claim that he shies away from rabble-rousing at the Hill. “Israel certainly is expected to give its opinion to all the branches of the US government that have a role under the US Constitution on foreign affairs,” said Foreign Ministry director-general Dore Gold, emphatically including Congress.

But again, it is unclear whether openly taking sides in a Republican-Democratic standoff on Capitol Hill would be the smartest course of action.

“The prime minister will come out and object to this deal. That’s fine. But I would encourage restraint,” said Ilan Goldenberg, who directs the Middle East Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. “I would encourage him not go for a full-out campaign in Congress — because he’s going to lose. All he’d do is actually make it worse.”

As the fight over the Iran deal gets political, Democrats will be less inclined to oppose the president, explained Goldenberg, a former senior staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee covering Middle East issues. “The more the question becomes — ‘Do you trust Obama or do you support Netanyahu and the Republicans?’ — the less likely the Democrats are to vote against the deal.”

Rather than confrontation, the Israeli prime minister should seek to make amends with the administration and start a serious dialogue about what Washington and Jerusalem can do together to counter Iran’s aggressive actions in the region and to ensure Tehran does not violate the nuclear agreement, Goldenberg suggested.

“The biggest strategic mistake Netanyahu can make is to walk away for the next 18 months and wait for next president,” he said. “I don’t think Israel can afford that. If he does that, he’s only going to further widen the partisanship and turn Israel into a political wedge issue.”

Instead of hoping for Congress to shoot down the deal, Netanyahu should encourage it to pass legislation that would support the agreement’s vigorous implementation, Goldenberg continued. The Hill has several tools at its disposal: mechanisms to ensure sanctions snap back automatically if Iran violates the deal, more money for international inspectors, the creation of a permanent board with a congressional mandate to oversee the arms control agreement, and so on.

Other experts say Israel could aim even higher in its demands of the Americans. Jerusalem should press the administration and Congress “for the most explicit, clearest possible statements and actions [asserting] that the US is ready to destroy Iran’s nuclear program if Iran is close to developing fissile capability,” said James Jeffrey, a former senior US official focusing on Iran. “That’s the most essential thing in this entire debate.”

Jeffrey, who served as deputy national security adviser in the George W. Bush administration and today is a fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, made plain that he was not merely talking about security guarantees. Rather, he is advocating “a security threat,” which should be made plain that the US “will act if Iran develops, or is about to develop enough fissile material to make one or more bombs.”

Technically, the administration makes such threats all time, he noted. “The problem is that nobody believes them because they’re backed up by nothing … other than constant emphasis on how military force doesn’t accomplish anything and that striking Iran is not the solution. So they undercut their own threat.”

Here, again, Congress can be useful, Jeffrey suggested. It could authorize the use of military force or pass a joint resolution declaring that the policy of the United States is to do whatever is needed to keep nuclear weapons out of Iran’s reach.

At the end of the day, he added, all this brouhaha is about preventing Tehran from getting the bomb, and it remains to be seen how this is going to play out.

“Nobody can judge either President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu until we see whether Iran actually moves to develop a nuclear weapon, develops a nuclear weapons or uses its almost-status to extend its power,” he said. “That is, the jury is still out on all of this.”

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2)- Subject: Things about America you may not know !

The following are 35 strange facts about America that most Americans would be shocked to learn…

 

#1   The amount of cement that China used from 2011 to 2013 was greater than the total amount of cement that the  United States used during the entire 20th century.

#2   In more than half of all U.S. states, the highest paid public employee in the state is a football coach.

#3   It costs the U.S. government 1.8 cents  to mint a penny and  9.4 cents  to mint a nickel.

#4   Almost half of all Americans ( 47 percent) do not put a single penny out of their paychecks into savings.

#5   Apple has more money than the U.S. Treasury?

#6   The state of Alaska is 429 times larger  than the state of Rhode Island is. 

     But Rhode Island has a   significantly larger population  than Alaska does.

#7   Alaska has a longer coastline than all of the other 49 U.S. states   put together.

#8   The city of Juneau, Alaska is about 3,000 square miles  in size. 

      It is actually larger than the entire state of Delaware.

#9   When LBJ’s “War on Poverty” began, less than 10 percent of all U.S. children were growing up in

      single parent households. Today, that number has skyrocketed to 33 percent.

#10   In 1950, less than 5 percent  of all babies in America were born to unmarried parents. 

      Today, that number  is over 40 percent.

#11   The poverty rate for households that are led by a married couple is 6.8 percent.

       For households that are led by a female single parent, the poverty rate is 37.1 percent.

#12   In 2013, women earned 60 percent of all bachelor’s degrees that were awarded that year in the United States.

#13   According to the CDC,  34.6 percent  of all men in the U.S. are obese at this point.

#14   The average supermarket in the United States wastes about 3,000 pounds of food  each year. Meanwhile,

       approximately 20 percent of the garbage that goes into our landfills is food.

#15   Right now, more than 200 million people  around the planet are officially considered to be unemployed. 

#16   There is a city in Bangladesh called Dhaka where workers are paid just one dollar for every 1,000 bricks that they carry. 

       Meanwhile, the “inactivity rate” for men in their prime working years in the United States is hovering  near record high levels.

#17   According to one recent survey, 81 percent of Russians now have a negative view of the United States. 

      That is much higher than at the end of the Cold War era.

#18   Montana has three times as many cows as it does people.

#19   The grizzly bear is the official state animal of California.

        But no grizzly bears have been seen there since 1922.

#20   One recent survey discovered that “ a steady job” is the number one thing that American women are looking for in a husband, 

       a discovered that 75 percent  of women would have a serious problem dating an unemployed man.

#21   According to a study conducted by economist Carl Benedikt Frey and engineer Michael Osborne, 47 percent  of the jobs in the

      United States could soon be lost to computers, robots and other forms of technology.

#22   The only place in the United States where coffee is grown commercially is in Hawaii.

#23   The original name of the city of Atlanta was “Terminus“.

#24   The state with the most millionaires per capita is Maryland.

#25   There are more than  4 million adult websites  on the Internet, and they get more traffic than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined.

#26    86 percent of men include “having children” in their definition of success. 

        For women, that number is only 73 percent.

#27   One survey of 50-year-old men in the U.S. found that only 12 percent  of them said that they were “very happy”.

#28   The United States has 845  motor vehicles for every 1,000 people. 

       Japan only has 593 for every 1,000 people, and Germany only has 540 for every 1,000 people.

#29   The average American spends more than 10 hours a day  using an electronic device.

#30    48 percent  of all Americans do not have any emergency supplies in their homes whatsoever.

#31   There are three towns in the United States that have the name “ Santa Claus“.

#32   There is actually a town in Michigan called “ Hell“.

#33   There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels  in your body.

        If they were stretched out in a single line, they could go around the planet more than twice.

  #34 If you have no debt and also have 10 dollars in your wallet that you are wealthier

        than 25 percent of all Americans?

 

#35 By the time an American child reaches the age of 18, that child will have seen approximately 40,000 murders  on television?

 

Once upon a time we were the most loved and most respected nation on the entire planet, but those days are gone.

We have wrecked our economy, we have lost our values and we have fumbled away our future. 

If we are ever going to change course as a nation, we need to come to grips with just how far we have fallen.

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